University Place

Welcome, everybody, again, to Garden Expo. I'm happy to see you all here. My name is Ben Futa. I'm the Director of the Allen Centennial Garden here at UW Madison, and for those of you who aren't familiar with the garden, we'll look at us a little bit later, but we're two and 1/2 acres on the UW campus, and we're open year-round with free admission, so get out and support your local public garden and come see us sometime. So today we're here to talk about this concept of the ecological garden, and I will sort of preface all of this by saying this isn't necessarily going to be a recipe book. What I want you to try and do through the next half hour, 40 minutes or so is I'm gonna give you examples for ways to see your garden differently and sort of success stories from other gardens and garden design about how, what it means to be an ecological garden and how that looks because there's no simple recipe for how this comes together. I'm not going to preach about native plants. I'm not going to preach about water conservation. I'm not going to preach about pollinators. I'm talking about all of them and I'm talking about them all working together. The solution to an ecological garden is not just one of those pieces, it's all of those pieces. So the first thing to sort of preface again is that the concept of the ecological garden is a little new in our consumer culture, especially as gardeners. For years we've been told to dump chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides on our yards and we've been told the prim, proper manicured lawn is the sort of ideal that we should all maintain. But interestingly, just recently in The New York Times, Adrian Higgins, who is their gardening columnist wrote a wonderful piece about, again, this idea of the ecological garden. And again, we're talking about the idea here. This is a mindset, this is a way of thinking, and that's what I want to try and, again, this is a primer. This certainly is not a, there could be volume, there are volumes written about this concepts. But what I want you to do today is to think about the bigger picture here. But it's interesting that the New York Times picked up on this. They said, "We've entered this "age of environmental gardening." This is something that's relatively new for our gardening culture, especially here in America. And if it's hit the New York Times, it's certainly hit mainstream. Another interesting thing to point out, also relatively new in the news here, is this piece from University of Delaware. They formed a partnership with Mt. Cuba Center, and Mt. Cuba Center is a garden on the east coast that specializes in native plant materials. They champion native plants specifically, but they've embarked on a partnership research together to actually look into consumer culture and consumer behavior and look at how do we market eco-friendly plants. You know, organic, and it's still a hot word to say this plant is organic or these vegetables are organic, but what they're finding is that when a plant is branded eco-friendly or friendly to pollinators, they sell better than they do if they are, don't have that branding. So this eco branding is also becoming sort of a, it's trendy right now. My arguments throughout all of this is that this shouldn't be trendy. It's trendy because it's something we're all waking up to, but in a few years, it's just going to be the way we do business. There's not going to be anymore me trying to convince you that this is something to think about. We'll all just be doing it because it's what we should be doing as good stewards of our Earth. So to get into this a little bit, first we need to understand what exactly is ecology? Ecology is not horticulture. Horticulture, specifically, gardening, is the art and science of cultivating plant material. We are focused, typically, on our plants, and as gardeners, we think about everything from soil, water, air, light. We consider these things. We consider pests and diseases in our gardens, but, and a lot of us are working, we're working with ecology. We're working with living, breathing systems that have a lot of other processes rolling in place long before we got there and long after we're gone. These processes will be taken place. But ecology specifically has to do with relationships, and that's one thing that I'm gonna emphasize throughout this afternoon or this morning, I should say, is this idea of relationships, and specifically between organisms and their environments. So in our case, if we're looking at the garden, the environment is our garden, but the environment is also our community, our city, our region, our continent and our planet. All of those are different levels of environments that we impact on some, either small scale, or some very large scale, and often times, when I hear people talk about sustainability in their landscapes or, you know, ecological sensitive landscaping, there has a tendency to be a little, a bit of a Doomsday message with that, and while I understand there's a maybe little shock value to that, at the same time, it can render us feeling a little hopeless. Or "What can we do, as a gardener, "in our own backyard, to make a difference?" And I would argue that anything makes a difference. Every little bit of anything that we can do can be incredibly impactful, and gardeners in particular, as we are, we maintain biodiversity in our backyards. We support pollinators. We do these wonderful things in our own backyards, and the more people that do that, it suddenly hits a tipping point and we've had incredible impact. So I want you to think about that. This is, again, start to think about the role your landscape can play in the environment of beyond not just your backyard. Again, we're emphasizing relationships. That is the one word that I want you to really think about as we go through this and how everything talks to each other within your garden. So in practice, if we're actually looking at what the ecological gardening means, we now know that ecology looks at relationships. If we're looking at ecological gardening, this involves recognizing and harnessing natural systems and synergies in garden design and maintenance. There's a lot of words in here. So I'd like to pull a few out in particular, and the first couple being that recognizing and harnessing. So we'll move into some examples here in just a few moments, but through those examples, I hope you'll start to see that these systems are all around us and they work in many different ways, and the first step is recognizing that they exist. It's not simply an A causes B therefore fix A. It's A causes B leads to C and then sometimes C leads back to A, and then D might lead to F. It's a very complex system out there. There's a lot of moving parts. We're never going to be able to understand every intimate detail, but we can do better at opening our eyes and paying attention and observing what's happening around us. The second piece of that is the harnessing. Now there's, of course, the history of our humanity has been this idea of harnessing and taming nature. And I would argue that we've come past that. There's an interesting book out, very recently published called Planting in a Post-Wild World, and I'll reference that later, but the author is Thomas Rainer, and he talks a lot about, we live in this developed society anymore. We can no longer necessarily say we must restore environments, we must conserve environments. Because we've transformed our environments so dramatically, we can no longer just simply try to isolate things. There are too many moving pieces now, and so the other piece to this, though, is that ecology and nature have a lot of great systems for us. They have to purify our air, our water. If we like to eat, plants are quite important for us. So we need to learn how to harness those systems in our own garden, make those work for us, rather than trying to battle against them. And then the second piece to this is natural systems and synergy, this same topic. Again, these processes have been in place for a long time. Nature has figured out ways to keep itself in balance. How do we play into that? How do we make our garden a part of that bigger narrative? And then finally, garden design and maintenance. So, it's all in planning. I say that a lot in any level of horticulture and design, but everything needs to start out with a little bit of planning and a little bit of forethought. Personally, I'm also a fan of experimentation. We're all gardeners. We all like to experiment to see what lives from one year to the next. Can I push this into the shade, and will it do alright? We're natural experimenters. We're natural. We are trained to fail, and it's okay because we'll plant another one next year, and it'll be just fine. But again, planning is critical, and also considering our maintenance. I would argue that ecological gardening can help reduce our maintenance, and when we have less maintenance in the garden, we have more time to enjoy the garden. Part of gardening and the joy of gardening is, of course, in the doing and in the maintaining, but I would also argue there's something very nice to sitting back in the morning with a cup of coffee or tea and just observing and enjoying and not being sort of caught up on the weeds and the work that needs to be done. So now we're gonna look at a few of these examples and what they look like and how this concept of the ecological garden has been translated on multiple levels in multiple scales, and this first image, actually, on sort of this header is an image from Chanticleer, which is a public garden located out east in Pennsylvania. Chanticleer, I would argue, is sort of one of the granddaddies of public gardens in America. They do horticulture exceptionally well. It is a very artful garden. They are full of incredibly talented and creative designers, and this particular image is an area, it's a very constructed meadow. A quick glance, it might look like a very natural landscape. It has sort of those free-flowing, and like a natural feeling elements, but the flowers blooming in there are annual plants that have been plugged into the lawn. This is a lawn that they let grow long, and they've sort of created this matrix of interest and intrigue beyond just long grass. Now again, these are annuals. They aren't necessarily native, but it adds a new dimension to their lawn. And it's still food for pollinators. It's more habitat for local wildlife, and everything from rabbits to snakes to field mice. You know, we might kind of cringe and go, "Ooh, I don't want to see that in the garden." But the reality is, having those creatures in the garden is a sign of a very healthy landscape. It means that things are in balance. It means that everybody else is happy, and when we have that wildlife, when we have those extra things, they're telling us something. They're telling us we're doing something right because they're also happy. So the first example I'd like to look at is an individual plant. We're starting with one plant, and it's Bronze Fennel. Does anybody know Bronze Fennel, familiar with this plant? Okay, excellent. It's an herb. It is an edible plant. You know, depending on how you want to use it, Anise is the common name of this as well. When those seed heads dry, you can take those seeds, you can use them in cooking and flavoring and seasonings. But the other piece of this plant, not only is it strikingly beautiful and gorgeous, when it emerges in Spring, it's these plumes of sort of feathery deep purple black leaves. They're absolutely gorgeous. A very durable perennial, has great big tap fruits. Once it's in, it is in for a while. I have mine back in Indiana planted in clay. They bust right through it, and in fact, they're happier in clay than they are in sand, I've seen. So they are pretty adaptable plants, first of all. But their other benefit is that they are also one of the main host plants for swallowtail butterflies. We talk a lot about monarchs. Monarchs are sort of the poster child of butterfly conservation, and you know, we should plant milkweeds, and we should do these things, and we should create habitats for monarchs. That's well and good, but monarchs aren't the only butterfly out there, and they certainly aren't the only pollinator out there. So this plant plays host specifically to the larvae of this butterfly. You will not see the adults around this very much, but probably in midsummer, about the time it's coming into bloom, these plants could be covered in little orange, they look very similar to monarch caterpillars, big, fat things the size of your pinky that are ringed and white and orange and green, and they just munch away to their heart's content. And you may think, "Oh, this is destroying the plant." There's plenty of the plant to go around. The plant will never miss those leaves. You're supporting that wonderful pollinator. You're supporting another part of its lifecycle, not attracting the adults, but you are, you're seeing it through its whole cycle of life, and then an added benefit is that when these flowers bloom, that sort of chartreusey yellow umbel shape, wasps and flies love these flowers. You may think, "Wasps and flies. "Why would I want, I want hummingbirds and butterflies. "Those are prettier." But this plant will attract a lot of parasitic wasps that like to eat things like aphids that we don't want in our gardens. This plant attracts beneficial predators to our space. It's beautiful, it smells wonderful if you like the smell of anise. Personally, I do. It's a stately plant so it has aesthetic value to us. The only downside is if you are having this in a fairly highly cultivated setting, deadheaded. When it goes to seed, it can be quite aggressive, but only where there's bare soil where it can establish. If it's in an established healthy happy garden landscape, it should be relatively fine. So this is just one plant, that looking at just one plant has all of these things interacting with it. From a traditional horticultural perspective, we may look at this simply as we want a plant that's purple and tall and has these flowers. Just the look and the aesthetic, but there's so many other layers to this plant, and there's so many other layers to what's happening here that there's really a lot going on. Going into a slightly larger scale is this idea of adding layers to other elements of your landscape that are otherwise fairly sterile. Unfortunately, I think we are going to be living with lawns for quite a while. Personally, I am an advocate for phasing out the lawn or looking at alternative lawns simply because they're such a relatively sterile landscape. Now, you know, we have new trends in technologies today where we can adopt organic lawn maintenance and treatments. We don't need to use pesticides and chemicals, but the reality is, when you mow something to two to three inches tall, there's a very low level of biodiversity that can be supported in it. Another great example. I'm from Indiana. I keep saying back home in Indiana. I moved here a few months ago for reference. But our neighbors next door used to have this wonderful tall field, never was mown. Every year, the fireflies were just thick in that field. Every summer in July, it would just glow and sparkle. And then they sold the property to some new folks, and they came in and they've been mowing it ever since to, you know, lawn height. We don't have fireflies anymore. They're gone. We removed that habitat from them, and that's what we do when we have lawns. Again, it is green space. It does allow for a little rain water to percolate. But we're off-setting a balance someplace. Wildlife really likes that sort of fuzzy area at the ground plain, that sort of meadowy look, and one way to achieve that is by introducing this, what I call a bulb lawn or bulb meadow. And this is this concept of interplanting flowering bulbs with your lawn, and we're very lucky here to have a couple great local examples. This is from Olbrich Botanical Garden. They have a wonderful bulb meadow that blooms from probably March all the way through I'd say early June. They mow it down a couple of times and then they have a few Fall blooming flowers that come in as well, some surprise lilies and some Colchicum as well. The Allen Centennial Garden also installed a bulb lawn just this past Fall. So we haven't seen it yet in flower, but we will this first, this coming Spring. What I want you to take away from this is this idea of seeing additional layers. What do we do when we put flower bulbs in the lawn? Number one is the aesthetic. Of course it's prettier. It's gorgeous, and you can have, you can start mowing your lawn at the regular time. You can start mowing it later. It's less work, it's less maintenance. It's better for the ecology of your lawn and your yard. But also, look at all those flowers that are blooming in a place that they never would be normally be blooming. We're providing food for pollinators in a place and time of year when they, they're just coming out of hibernation. They are hungry. They want to find something to eat, and we're providing that, and we're getting the beneficial beauty out of it at the same time. There's a high up-front cost to install these, but once they're installed, they just naturalize and get better over time. It's like a good wine. Another good concept in terms of garden maintenance is this idea that brown has an ecology, and I like to say that brown is a color too. Brown is not just this drab single color. It is an array and diversity of colors, and when you really start to look at a very late Fall garden, everything from, you know, brown becomes sand and taupe and terra cotta and sepia and black and silver. There's a whole palette we can work with for this time of year that we've never worked with before. So not only is this idea of leaving plants up over the Winter and late Fall beautiful, but it provides homes for overwintering insects, things like praying mantis like to build their chrysalises on sort of hardy durable perennial stems or small woody stems, and when we whack that all to the ground in November, December, we're removing that from them. Praying mantis help to keep those nasty, again, things like aphids under control in our garden, and when we take that away from them, we're taking away the benefits that we get at the same time. Another thing to consider with brown is that weeds, the only reason we have weeds or I should say early colonizing annuals are that there is, again, weeds are plants that have not discovered their benefit yet. Well, weeds are nature's way of repairing damaged soil. Nature sees exposed soil as a problem. It needs to be filled. Otherwise, it's going to wash away or blow away. So nature wants to fill that void. Nature bores a vacuum. It wants to fill it as quickly as possible. When we have weeds, we have bare soil. Leaving perennials and other plants up over the Winter help to shade the soil's surface, reduces the number of Spring annuals that come into your garden. Again, and it's beautiful at the same time. There's a whole ecology to this concept of embracing the late Winter garden and the late season garden, and again, it's less work for us. This time of year, we're ready to just, I'm ready to hibernate. I'm ready to sit back and just think about next year's garden. I don't want to be out necessarily working at this point. But if we can learn to embrace this beauty of decay and death and embrace it as a natural course of life, it opens a whole new world for us in the garden. Another really interesting new technique that's being developed right now is this idea of a tapestry lawn. So this is some work being done at the University of Reading in the UK. Most of these plants are native to the UK. These are not North American natives, but they are doing trials with North America native plants. And the idea is, again, I had mentioned just a bit ago that lawns are typically very sterile, very mono-culture, very sort of one-sided environment. Look at this lawn. There's 15-20 species of plants here, and it's the same relative height as our lawns, and there are so much more color and richness and depth to this. It gets mown maybe once or twice a year, and in the meantime, every time you mow it, it pushes in a new round of flowers, so you have flower and intrigue all year. They've been doing pollinator studies on these gardens as well to see how pollinators have reacted and responded to these, and of course, the diversity and density of pollinators has increased tremendously with these lawns compared to traditional turf. Again, there's a great mixture of plants in here. They mixed, we want them to mix together, but we also have to remember that this is still a garden. It still requires a little, it's not something we can put in and let go. We have to control weeds a little bit. We have to do a little maintenance. We have to do a little tending, but generally, it's a fairly low-maintenance landscape. We're not burning the mower fumes every week, week and 1/2. We're not putting down fertilizer. These plants have tapered. They're well-adapted to our conditions, and they support our local pollinators, and they're beautiful doing it. And we still get to maintain the aesthetic of a lawn. Lots of wins in a concept like this, but again, we're starting to see all these layers come out of all of these different concepts. Again, a wonderful example here at home for us in Madison. The gravel garden at the entry to Olbrich Botanical Gardens. I'm in love with this space. It has been beautiful every, I've been to Olbrich probably once a month since I've moved here, and not once had it looked drab or boring. It has always had something going on. It's always had color. There's an incredible diversity of plants in here, but not only is it pretty, it's a pretty garden, but the maintenance involved in this gravel garden is tremendously low. So the concept of a gravel garden, as you sort of take away the top few inches of soil, these plants that are xeric, in other words, tolerant of drought, are sort of placed on the soil surface and then mulched very heavily with gravel. Say, two to four inches somewhere in there. Depending on the type of garden, again, there could be a whole presentation specifically on gravel gardens. So I went go into too much detail, but if you want to learn more about this, visit Olbrich. See what they're doing. We have a gravel garden at the Allen Centennial Garden as well, but the idea is, this garden, you whack everything back in Spring. The most critical piece is you remove the plant material because when plant material decomposes, it creates compose, creates soil, creates moments for weeds to occur. In a gravel garden, the air pockets between the gravel are too large for weeds to gain a foothold, but the plants that you've placed in are growing into the ground below that gravel layer of mulch, and then the first year, you usually have to water more heavily, but after that first year, it's very drought-resistant, very low maintenance, and again, you just sort of watch it and it does its thing. Most critical is to keep soil and again other debris out of the gravel itself. Anywhere that soil washes in, anywhere that plant debris decays overtime, you will almost instantly have weeds. So this does need to be manicured in Spring, but other than that, it does its own. It's on auto-pilot. It does a wonderful job. Looking at another botanical garden, this is the Lurie Garden in Chicago's Millennium Park. Lurie is just over 10 years old, and it's a two 1/2 acre garden, same size as the Allen Centennial. But it is located at the heart of downtown, as you can see here, and it's in Millennium Park. Very highly trafficked, very high public space, and this garden is being maintained and has been maintained according to ecological principles for quite some time. So a lot of people visit Lurie and think, "Oh, this is a prairie recreation. "It looks very natural." It's totally the opposite. It is a very, very manicured, very purposeful landscape, very tended, tamed nature, if you will. It's actually a large green roof over a parking garage below. So not only are we reducing rain water run-up, we are providing homes for migrating birds. We are providing habitat for pollinators. We're doing something beautiful in the city, and we get to teach people about the benefits of perennials. Lurie also embraces this concept that brown is a color too, the ecology of brown. All of the plant material stays up all-year-round, and in the Spring, they come through with a mulching mower In half a day, they cut the garden back and it's done. And it's a beautiful thing to watch. Instead of taking a month to cut this back, it's done in, again, half a day. All of that material is left in place, and it's left to decompose naturally. These plants are used to that. These are a lot of prairie plants. These are a lot of perennials. Herbaceous perennials want that debris from previous years to be around them. They don't want to be, bark mulch is a very unnatural thing for plants. No plant evolved to grow in bark mulch. Bark mulch inhibits water percolation. It inhibits gas exchange. Yes, it does eventually break down and feed our soil with compost, but it's usually, it changes our pH a little bit. Leaving the plant material from previous seasons in place, that's what the plants are used to. That's what they expect. That returns the nutrients right to where they came from, rather than strip-minding the land by hauling away all of these stored nutrients in the plant stock, we're putting them right where they were. And this is something being done in a very high-profile, very public space. So part of this is education as well, showing people what an ecological garden can look like and how it can function. But Lurie is doing that in an exceptional way. Again, they've embraced other mechanisms as well. They have a small prairie section, and they burned segments of it to help rejuvenate the plant material in the ground cover. They do very, again, it's a very interesting concept of maintenance there. They don't use any pesticides or chemicals if they can help it. Everything is hand-weeded, hand-maintained. They have a wonderful crew of volunteers and interns, and that's how it gets done. Another garden that if you're not familiar with this garden and you are ever traveling, please put this on your list. This is the High Line in New York City, and if you haven't heard of the High Line, it's a wonderful, wonderful poster child for how to rejuvenate our public spaces, and especially our most abject urban spaces. This is an elevated rail line. If you're familiar with the L in Chicago, it was similar to this. It was a freight line that ran through, sort of ran right through a major area of New York, and it had been abandoned for many years. And a group came in that said, "You know, we're gonna make something of this. "This is a special space up here, and people "should be able to enjoy it." Look at the number of people up there. They have umbrellas. Obviously it's raining, and they're still embracing plants in a public space. But the takeaway message from the High Line, besides from all of its wonderful benefits, and it is managed organically and sustainably just as well, right plant in the right place. A lot of time I think gardeners say, "I really want this plant and I'm gonna do "everything I can to make it grow here." I gave up on that a long time ago. Yes, there are some plants I say, "I really wish I could grow that Japanese maple." But I know it's going to freeze. I know I'm gonna have to replace it. I know I'm gonna have to insulate it. That's more work. It's not adapted to be here. It doesn't want to be here. I don't want to put that much work into it. I want to enjoy the garden. I want to step back and be able to immerse myself in the garden more than finessing those types of things. That's a personal preference. If you want to do that, I'm not saying don't. Please do it. We need passionate and wonderful plant connoisseurs, but what the High Line demonstrates is you need to choose the right plants for the right system. You can see, there's no soil under there. They're working with 18 inches of soil at any given point. It's one big green roof, so these plants need to be durable. They need to be drought-resistant, and also, where the High Line runs between buildings, you have micro-climates, you have shade, or you have a rain shadow, and suddenly, the climate changes dramatically from, you know, in the course of 10 feet, and we know this, again, as gardeners, on the north side of our house to the south side of our house, it's a completely different growing condition. But the High Line is three miles of micro-climates. Every hundred feet or so, it changes, and when they put this planting design together, they walked the High Line first and saw what was growing there, and they mimicked that when they did the actual design planting schemes. Again, these plantings are designed. They're very manicured, very maintained. They don't look it, but they're very intentional and very purposeful. But they were inspired by what was there first. They took cues from what nature was telling them would work well, and that's what they put there. And again, the plants thrive, and the plants do wonderful because we listened to what wanted to grow there in the first place. Bringing it back home again for a little bit to the Allen Centennial Garden, this is our pond within the Allen Centennial Garden, and we're looking across it to our Biofilter, which is that area of wetland-immersed plants riding through there. This is a new feature for us. This year was its first full growing season in the garden, 2015, and again, I've only been here since May as a director of the garden, so I was not part of its installation. I haven't even seen the garden through technically of full growing season yet. But what I've noticed in Spring, in May, this was covered in tadpoles. It was black. This little shallow area, the rest of the pond is probably four, fiveish feet deep. But this little area of the Biofilter, a haven. We had dragonfly larvae, we had, again, tadpoles and frogs. Our koi fish were spawning in this area of the pond. They'd never done that before because it's the habitat that these creatures wanted. And yes you may say, "Oh, that's great. "I really don't care about wildlife. "You know, I could give a bigger, I don't care." But what we realized later in the season, we didn't have a single bite of slug damage on any plant in the garden, and no pesticides or chemicals were put down. But what we did find was every time we moved a pile of leaves, every time we picked up a hose, there were three or four little toads hanging under there because they had a place to breed and spawn in the Spring, and then they found homes throughout the entire garden and slugs, oh, I'm sorry, toads and frogs favorite food? Slugs. A lot of us try to encourage slugs in our garden. We put little pots and places for them to hide and sort of be moist and comfortable, but what they really need is a place to breed. If we don't have just a little bit of that water source, they're not gonna do well, and we didn't have a mosquito problem because we have fish, and those tadpoles, well, guess what they eat? Guess what the dragonfly larvae eat? The mosquito larvae. We had almost no mosquitoes in the garden this year because our pond was more in balance. We have encouraged these natural processes and these natural systems that evolved to do this to come in anyway, and as an added benefit to this, we don't have to purify water anymore. The plants purify our water for us. We used to use a pool filter, those big sort of sinister-looking things filled with sand and chlorine, not chlorine for the plant, just other nasty things that were labor-intensive and ugly. Now we just force some water through the plant roots and it cleans itself. It's beautiful, clear, wonderful water, and you can tell when the Biofilter stops working, if it breaks or trips because within 24 hours, the pond is murky again. But you turn that on, and within 12 hours, it clears up instantly. Those plants do a beautiful job at cleaning water. That's what they evolved to do, and that's what we're letting them do. Again, this is a sort of trial and, you know, this is something that's been done in other places. They do eco swimming pools in a similar fashion now. Rather than having high-energy, high-maintenance swimming pools, they install these eco pools. This is a similar type of application, but you can adapt this into your own landscape. You don't need a pond the size of ours. Something the size of this table, three by six, would do just fine, but you need a shallow area for those creatures to be able to enter the pond easily and without sort of being impacted by anything else, and they need those shallow waters to breathe, but also a little deeper waters to hide from predators, and we now have that at the garden here. It is no longer a pit. We have that gradient, and again, our wildlife in the garden has reacted tremendously and, again, we have hosta, we have hollyhocks, we have things that slugs would love to devour. Not one bite out of any of them this year, and my hypothesis is it's because of this. Another area we installed this Spring at the garden is this new Iris meadow. So Iris is a very popular garden plant. Of course, we love them in Spring. They're sort of garden divas when they bloom. They have a very strong presence, and an iris garden has been a part of the Allen Centennial Garden for quite sometime. But it needed a little help, it needed a little TLC. And so we came in and we installed this meadow, and primarily, it's a mixture of grasses and a few flowering plants, not necessarily native. Very few natives, actually, but this idea is that we wanted to create a strong matrix of plant material to reduce, again, we don't want any bare soil. We don't want weeds, and we also want to emphasize that the iris foliage, those big, beautiful, broad sword-like leaves that are just absolutely stunning when the light hits them in the morning or late afternoon. Because iris only bloom for two,maybe three weeks, and if we tried to build a garden around just that bloom time, it'd be a really boring rest of the year. So we're trying to show off what iris do throughout the rest of the season, and while ecologically, how this benefits wildlife, maybe not necessarily. You know, they may like this meadow a little bit, but it's this idea of seeing the whole lifecycle of your plants. Seeing something like an iris and saying, "I don't need to hide that after it's done blooming. "I can make it shine. "I can make it sing." It can still be a feature within the garden, and also with this, we've also included a bulb meadow as well. Now this bulb meadow was installed at the same time as most of the perennials went into is very easy to plant, but come Spring, starting probably late March through end of April, when the iris just begin to bloom, it's going to be covered in bulbs, and again, not only will it be beautiful, we're supporting our pollinators at the same time. We're adding another layer to the designed experience, and again, it's hopefully, it'll be beautiful. It'll be just aesthetically pleasing and people enjoy visiting the garden and seeing the potential of something like an iris, a very common garden variety plant used in maybe an atypical fashion, hopefully. So those are, hopefully, a few examples, again, to get you thinking. Again, it wasn't necessarily a recipe book. There were a few, hopefully, takeaways that you can gain from this, but I encourage, again, this is a huge subject. This is a lot to think about, and these few resources are wonderful tools that are out there. These are my top picks for thinking about some of the things that we've talked about today in more depth. So that is what we have, and thank you for your time. (applause)