Native Meadows with Paula Whyman

Many of us have cherished the romantic notion of planting a native wildflower meadow. In this episode, author Paula Whyman discusses the more complicated reality of restoring native meadows on her 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, and what her book Bad Naturalist teaches us about persistence, mistakes, and small wins. Join Paula, Lisa and Pam for a lively conversation about battling ecologically harmful plants and encouraging native favorites.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Speaker 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to Pollinator Confidential, a podcast featuring the untold stories of native plants and the pollinators who love them.

Speaker 2 0:17

I'm Lisa Schneider. And I'm Pam Ford, and we are Penn State Extension Master Gardeners from the Snetsinger Butterfly Garden Habitat that's located in Tudek Park State College, Pennsylvania. We're all about the stories, tales of those fascinating interactions between plants, pollinators, and people.

What A Meadow Really Is

Speaker 0:38

Well, Pam, we've been on a bit of a hiatus, haven't we? It's been a minute. But we were both so inspired by a book that we read recently that we had to let you know about it. It's called Bad Naturalist, One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop. And we'll be speaking to that one woman today. Paula Whyman is an award-winning author, and her latest book, Bad Naturalist, is a finalist for the Philip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award selected by the Southern Environmental Law Center. And I noticed an endorsement from Douglas Tallamy on the cover, which is possibly even more impressive to us. That's very impressive. As far as we're concerned, that's it. And as you'll learn, she has many stories to share about her quest to encourage native plants and battle the ecologically harmful ones on a scale that most of us can only imagine. And we are so excited that she's agreed to join us today. Paula, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. All right, so let's jump right in. For the listeners who haven't yet read your book, Paula, could you give us the Cliff Notes version?

Speaker 1 1:57

Sure, Bad Naturalist is a memoir about my attempts to restore native meadows on a 200-acre mountaintop in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. It's about the many obstacles I encounter, the many mistakes I made, and the failures and fortunately some successes, and the discoveries I made along the way.

Speaker 2 2:26

Over the years, we have had so many property owners who've come up to us and say, I want to start a native meadow.. we want to be encouraging, but at the same time, we want to be realistic about the challenges, as there are many. and despite the many benefits, as you have stated in your book, it's not a set it and forget it type of project. It's ongoing, it takes planning and preparation and ongoing attention and maintenance. I think that's why the book resonated so much with me, I was nodding my head through the whole book. because the journey that you go through and in in trying restore this kind of land, it's it's something that's not mentioned, the the journey part. It's like you do step A through G and then you have a meadow. So that's why it was so wonderful. So we've all had a dream about creating this kind of habitat, but I think it would be helpful if you could tell us what you discovered about what is a meadow. What is the definition?

Speaker 1 3:44

Oh, that's a well, I suppose technically a meadow is a combination of grasses and forbs and and maybe maybe even some woody, some small woody stuff. When I think of a a native meadow, I'm I'm aiming for 80-20 or 75-25 as far as balance of native plants and non-native plants. It's probably not realistic to think about it as 100% native. I just don't think I can get there in today's world. But people will define it differently depending on what their what their goals are. Some people might want to see uh I suppose technically, if it's primarily grasses, then it's a grassland. If it's primarily forbs, then it's probably a meadow. and that's kind of how I I think of it. I don't have grazing animals so I'm not thinking about it as a hay field, although it once was. but some people might look at an old hay field and think of that as a meadow.

Why Baselines Fail In Nature

Speaker 4:54

So when when you were starting your work, you had to make a choice about what point in time did you want to take the land back to, or its its baseline condition, which is, I think, a thorny, a very thorny question for many of us. I mean, how do you choose? And is there a right answer? Um, you know, what what are we aiming for? How did how did you choose?

Speaker 1 5:18

Well, that's a great question. And the way I came to understand it, a lot of people think of the baseline condition of a place as uh their earliest memory of that place. In the earliest memories of the South, for instance, a lot of people have memories of the South as closed canopy forest everywhere there wasn't agriculture or development, but really the south was prairie, lots of prairie in the places that are now closed canopy forest. And the reason for that is agricultural history, we had grasslands hundreds of years ago, and we narratives left by explorers who talked about those grasslands and the height of the plants and everything. and then when European farming methods came in and they plowed that land over and over again, it changed the soil, it changed the plant composition, and then hard economic times came and some farmers had to abandon that land, and that changed land couldn't go back to grassland or prairie on its own. So it started succeeding to closed canopy forest. But, many people who are alive today, that's how they remember it. So when I remember my childhood home, I remember, you know, the mimosa tree next to the house.

Speaker 6:54

I loved mimosas when I was a little kid, those little pink powder puffs.

Speaker 1 7:00

my mother's roses growing in the backyard, you know, things that maybe didn't belong there. and the woods next door. But I don't know what it was like before the house was there. And this is a long way of saying I decided that baseline condition was not the right way for me to look at it, because it implies sort of like the word restoration implies, it implies going backward. And there is no baseline, there is no condition that I can go backward to. You know, I'm not going back to the ice age. I can't go back to before this mountaintop was farmed because the plant composition was different. We have far introduced plants now that cause ecological than we had then. And the soil is different and the climate is different, and each agricultural treatment of the land, first it was orchard for 150 years, then it was cattle pasture for 40 or 40 or 50 years. Each of those successive agricultural treatments changed the land and changed the plant composition, changed the soil, so that I'm left with the combination of plants and creatures from those endeavors. And I've got the orchard grasses from when it was an orchard, I've got hay grasses from when it was a cattle pasture, and I've got the invasive plants that were intentionally introduced, like autumn olive and multiflora rows that were planted as hedgerows or windbreaks. And I've got the ones that were brought in by accident, like the Ailanthus, which probably, you , it was brought in on purpose in Philadelphia many years ago.

Speaker 9:10

Pennsylvania has a lot to answer for, really, when you start looking at the history.

Speaker 1 9:16

Yeah, spotted lantern flies. Although those were not on purpose, I guess.. so the combination of those plants, plus the native plants that are energetic enough to make it up, you know, to grow amid all of that other stuff and succeed and be healthy and and multiply. Uh that's the combination I have to work with. So I can't go backward. I can only go forward and encourage the mountaintop to um a direction that will be more supportive of the local ecosystem.

Speaker 10:03

That's a great way to look at it. That's a good way for all of us to look at it, really.

Unintended Consequences Of Disturbance

Speaker 2 10:07

so when we read the book, something that we related to, and you said this at the beginning of the book: What if I find I've gone about it all wrong, that I have somehow ruined what I'm trying to save? Now, if we haven't said this out loud, we've certainly thought this. Because whenever you're dealing with the complexity of an ecosystem, you're always questioning yourself. we love the name you gave your property in the process, unintended consequences. that really is it in a nutshell. And we we've all have stories about decisions we've made that leads to outcomes that we were not expecting at all. So can you share one of those unintended consequence stories that happened to you? Sure.

Speaker 3 11:08

Yeah, because I got advice from so many wonderful, knowledgeable people. But then I had to decide. I had to decide what to do where, and each spot on the mountaintop is a little bit different. so there was a place that I talk about in the book where that was kind of overrun with autumn and they were pretty large by the time I got there. And we had thought, okay, it was a very large area to try to go around and treat them individually, you know, with herbicide. it was very steep and hard to access. And the the guy who does our bush hogging was very gung-ho about he's like, let me just let me just I'll I'll let me use my forest mulcher, you know, let me use my forestry mulcher. there's gonna be nothing left. I'm gonna take them all.

Speaker 12:13

Those guys live to use that machinery.

Speaker 1 12:20

They really do. So I let him do that. And uh it was a little bit afterwards, like the the hillside was just decimated. I mean, it was basically covered with shredded mulch, and he had indeed destroyed the the root balls, everything. There was nothing left of them that I could see. And it was the first time that I could even really access and walk around on that slope. it gave me a bit of a sick feeling. I was worried about what was going to grow. And initially, native plants grew. And this had been one of the big pieces of advice I got from an NRDC wildlife biologist, and among others, who said, we can tell from the native plants that are growing here that you have native plants in the seed bank. They just need space, you know, ability to express themselves. If you get this other stuff out of the way, the thatch, the invasive, dense invasive plants, and so on. Um, so that's what I was trying to do there. And that was a big mistake because first the in the native plants came up and they were amazing. There was milkweed, there was goldenrod, there was tick tree foil, there were all kinds of things. And I was really happy. And so then I could go about my merry way on the other end of the mountain. It's like problem solved, I'm gonna move on. Yeah, it's never that's never the case. And and I came back some weeks later and found that it had been overwhelmed by an invasive vine that I had not seen on the property before. So that was very upsetting. It was a dark day. And I really thought, okay, it's clear I'm making things worse. I really don't know what I'm doing. how am I ever going to get past this? And I will tell you that after that, I am very averse to forestry mulching anywhere because uh it is a new disturbance and it's a pretty extreme disturbance. However, against my better judgment, I allowed it to happen in another spot, a much smaller area where we were trying to control succession. And again, I just thought we should just go in and cut down these saplings and not do this thing that, you know, I lost that argument. So it was a small area, but sure enough, because everywhere around our fields we have these mowed paths so that we can access, you know, things. And all along those mowed paths, stiltgrass, okay? you know, it's too much to weed. I weed it when it gets into a new area because then I can stop the mowers, you know, will blow the seed from one side to the other. But as long as you have a lot of big structure in the field, the stiltgrass has trouble those areas. by the way, most people think of stiltgrass as a shade plant. Well, I have it in bright sunlight here. Nothing really dissuades it here. But this little area that was um next to the woods where we were trying to keep succession out of the meadow. There were it was next to a big, a big grove of milkweed. Okay, that grove is still there, it's fine. But but when these trees were taken out, same thing happened. Native plants came in, and then this stilt grass, just like all throughout. It was probably already there a little bit, you know, but now it's everywhere in that section of field. So I think at least it wasn't a larger area. I will stand firm next time about forestry mulching.

Speaker 2 16:37

It was so comforting to read someone else's journey, the constant decision making. Yeah, am I doing the right thing?

Speaker 16:48

Because it's never, it's just not black and white. Everybody wants to hear black and white, but we know that that doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 16:57

You had used this term a few times, and I chuckled because I say it all the time. It depends.

Speaker 17:06

Nobody wants to hear that. But it's so true. But you persisted, and you have persisted, which is the most important thing, everybody. Yes, we must persist.

Speaker 2 17:25

It's wins, like you said. The wins make a difference.

Speaker 1 17:31

Exactly. I mean that that you know, so the forestry mulching was a problem, but it'll it's going to be solved, and it's it's a small it's not gonna be a huge problem. Um, and and yes, there are wins,like last spring around this time, I had this little section of meadow where I was seeing a lot of autumn olives coming up, a totally different part of the m, but there were about three dozen of them growing in this little field, and I they were from like three to five feet tall. They were young. and I took my big weed wrench out there after a rainy day, and I pulled all of them, like I didn't stop until I had pulled all of them up because that's how I am. I can't help it. And then I was very sore afterwards.

Speaker 18:26

We were just talking about that a little while ago.

Speaker 1 18:30

That weed wrench that, you know, only weighs about a thousand pounds.

Speaker 18:35

I am in awe of, just as an aside, how how you tote that up and down a mountain. I have one and I would not be dragging it up and down a

Speaker 1 18:46

I have a side by side now, at least I can take it to the part of the mountain that I where I want to use it instead of carrying it. But I pulled those three dozen autumn olives, and by early that summer, last summer, that field looked like this lovely native meadow. No autumn olives growing, wonderful, didn't get shaded out, tons of pollinators in there, tons of um bee flies, bees, um butterflies, you know, everything. So that was really that was really great success. Small but mighty.

How To Kill Tree Of Heaven

Small Wins And Hard Labor

Speaker 2 19:29

Well, one thing that really resonated with me is when you talked about, like at the beginning, when you're just starting to understand the property. of course, when I when I started this, there were no identification apps and Douglas Tallamy's book hadn't come out yet. And trying to figure out what is what, invasive versus native, it it's very daunting right from the beginning because you're trying to understand it before you can come up with a plan. Um, so one one of the plants we're very familiar with in Pennsylvania Ailanthus, um, or the the tree of Hell. And it because it's a host plan for the spotted lantern fly. And it was first brought to the US through Philadelphia, of course. There's a lot of different ways, recommendations for controlling it, a lot of ways that do not work that make it tougher in the long run. Can you tell us what you learned about controlling the tree of heaven?

Speaker 3 20:37

Um one thing that worked for me was a method known as hack and squirt. Yes. Um, you're you should never girdle it all the way around because that sends the message that it's threatened and it will send up rootlings and send out suckers 50 feet away and all of that. It has all these great ways of reproducing it has to do that to get around its predators in its home area. Like pretty much all plants come up with various ways of reproducing in order to defeat predators and so that they can continue. But when you are have a plant in a place where it has no predators, which is the case with these introduced there's nothing to stop them, and that gives them a great advantage over native plants and to the detriment of native wildlife and so on. the ailanthus has these various methods. In addition to being allelopathic, it it emits all of these noxious chemicals into the soil that repel and possibly kill other plants. And so cutting it is very risky. So when you do this hack and squirt , you don't cut it all the way around, you leave it intact. But you make these little notches periodically in a sort of circle and then you put the herbicide into those little openings. I was just talking with someone the other day who said they like to come back a couple of weeks later and do another row of cuts that. because often with the bigger trees, it two tries to actually kill them. And I mean, what we did before was we did it like basically two years in a row. We had to treat them before the larger trees. And one of them I just realized it has new root links coming up, even though it appeared to be dead for the past two years. One of these giant parent is sprouting new root links.

Speaker 22:58

and timing is important too, yes?

Speaker 1 23:04

Yes, uh, you want to treat it around here in July or August . And just try to fight your way past the bramble into one of the fields here at that time. Everything is so dense you're gonna walk out full of ticks and thorns and all of that. But you can do it in the fall. That might be a little easier. you don't want to do it in the spring because the sap is rising and and the herbicide isn't going to be taken up. the other thing we tried was basal bark treatments, which is like brushing the outside, so there's no cutting involved in that. And I did have someone say they prefer that over doing any kind of cutting of ailanthus. I found basal bark was, you know, mixed success, and maybe it was that time of year. It's also, I think, a lot more materials that you need are more expensive. So late summer, we're gonna try hack and squirt again on, some of the saplings and and large trees.

Biocontrol Hopes And Worries

Speaker 24:34

Yeah, great. And you know, speaking of the invasives, we we are gonna get to the good stuff, folks. But uh I just in your most recent blog post, you were talking earlier about unintended consequences, and you had talked garlic mustard, which again we're extremely familiar with here in this area, big problem for us. And can you tell us about the weevils?

Speaker 1 25:07

Oh, yeah. I had read recently that there is a weevil that's being studied that is supposed to be able to arrest the growth or kill garlic mustard. And I was really excited about that. But that's that's all I know so far. I don't know that it's been released yet, or maybe only in certain experimental uh, you know, controlled situations. But um yeah, I'd be I'd be very interested in the follow-up with that.

Speaker 25:38

Yeah, was a news flash to me. I didn't know. And again, we don't how's that all gonna play out? That it's not just as simple as setting it loose and all our problems are over, right?

Speaker 1 25:52

Well, there was a weevil that was released some years ago to eat the mile a minute vine, and as far as I can it limited at all by the predation of this weevil. I see holes in it, but it doesn't kill it, doesn't stop it from growing. So that wasn't that great. there was a fungus that's been studied that's supposed to attack ailanthus and supposed to be pretty successful in killing that was a study I did not volunteer to participate in I want them to first be sure that it won't attack anything else.

Speaker 2 26:32

And it it's so important to talk about when when you go out and you're monitoring your most of the time are very amazing observations and and that's what keeps people going. That's where the excitement is. We call it the joy of discovery. it comes naturally to children, uh, and we sort of have to Remember what it's like to to discover an interesting insect a plant that we've never seen before.

Speaker 27:11

Which then sends you down a rabbit hole trying to learn more about whatever it is, and and it just keeps going. But it's it's a great way to spend your I mean what could be better?

Future Stewardship And Conservation Plans

Speaker 2 27:22

What could be better? So uh a question that when I got to the end of your book that immediately popped up is what is next? Do you have a long-range plan for the future when you might not be able to manage the land yourself? I think of this, I think of this for myself and the property I have all the time. And I was curious if you had a plan.

Speaker 1 27:51

that's a great question. It's something that that I think about a lot. I have two kids in their 20s who have different careers and they're in different cities, and they love this place, but I can't expect them to want to live on it and care for it every day. It's not realistic. I invite scientific research here. We had a pilot bat study by Virginia Working Landscapes, which is part of the this past summer we found out we have at least eight species of bat and one of one of them is endangered, the tri-colored bat, and a couple of them are threatened, and we have some of the um cave-dwelling bats also, which was kind of a surprise . They suffer from white nose syndrome. And so so that was pretty exciting. we also have two kestrel boxes here, courtesy of the Grassland Bird Initiative, which is a collaboration among different um nonprofit groups that uh it's trying to bring back grassland birds that are in decline. And the kestrel is a small raptor, it's one of the one of the birds that that's uh been in decline in Virginia. So I'm hoping that this spring maybe we'll see some kestrel activity. I have seen occasional kestrels here before, but nothing nesting yet. So I like that this is a place where research can happen. And that's made me whether a research institute or organization of some type might be interested in taking on the land. So many possibilities. It is under a conservation easement, there's no development that will happen here.

Speaker 2 29:51

Well, that's great. just watching that every day. It that's very exciting.

Speaker 1 30:01

It really is exciting when you were talking about the successes and the discoveries -- there was a field that we burned a couple of years ago, and, it was March when we burned it, and that early that fall, I was walking with a friend and she spotted a an orchid in this burned , an orchid called ladies' tresses, which is tiny, a tiny,, four inches? Yeah. And and with these tiny little flowers that look like perfect little orchid flowers. the fact that she was able to spot that in this field where so much was growing, and and after the burn, a lot of native plants grew. we also had non-native plants there, but it was a lot of native plants. And last summer, so, almost a year later, the Virginia Working Landscapes came back and did plant surveys on the mountain. They renewed the surveys that they had done five years ago, and they found that field was still 80% native, even though it hadn't been burned um for a couple of years, and they found more of those orchids. So that was exciting.

Monarchs Return And Meadow Joy

Speaker 31:24

That's incredible. Very So we have we have talked a good bit about battling the bad guys, right? so let's let's let's wind up on a positive note. And how about you tell us what's your what's your one of your favorite natives that you've been so excited to see make a comeback?

Speaker 1 31:46

Oh, okay. Well, this is a very common one, but I'm gonna mention the monarch ,milkweed has been one of the dominant plants here since the beginning, but it sort of waxes and wanes. And some there aren't as many. And I got kind of concerned about it a couple of years ago, and then we we did some judicious bush in some various areas, and I saw it making a comeback, and that field that I mentioned where I pulled up the autumn olives, there and a field right next to it, we have goldenrod and aster all over the place, but particularly in those two fields, we had all this daisy fleabane, which is an aster. And I'm just mentioning this in combination because these are monarch-friendly plants. Of course, the monarch lays its eggs on the milkweed and it needs the nectar from asters and goldenrods. And this fall there was so much monarch activity. I'd never seen this much monarch activity here before. I was walking down our little uh our little road past the fields that I was talking about. They were lined with daisy flea bane, which I never planted any of this. And very bushy plants were covered with monarch butterflies. It was like we had become a stop on the migration route. What month was this? I believe it was late September, early October. Oh, so prime time, yeah. so I had not seen anything like that here. Of course, I'd seen monarchs here, but not so many all at once. And it was very heartening to see that.

Start Small And Learn What’s There

Speaker 2 33:43

You've become a pit stop along the way. Yay, that's fantastic. Someone who's starting this, no matter if they have a small area or a large area, what would you tell them to keep in mind?

Speaker 1 33:56

Well, first of all, you absolutely don't need 200 acres, and I'd recommend against it. all you need is a pot for a plant or a window box,, a little spot, a little corner of your yard where nothing much is happening. But the first thing I would do is the first thing I did do, which was wander around and try to figure out what's already there. What didn't you plant? What are the things that you didn't plant that are coming up, things that you don't recognize, try to identify them and see are are they desirable or undesirable? Is there something there you want to encourage? And and then if you do plant something or encourage something, I think it's very motivating to make it something if you have an affinity for birds or butterflies or moths or focus on a plant that will attract what you want to see in your yard. And then when you plant that and you see it grow and you see those creatures come to it, you'll know that you made that happen.

Speaker 2 35:06

Intended consequences, yes, intentional consequences. Exactly.

Speaker 1 35:10

It wouldn't have happened if you hadn't done it, and I think that's a very hopeful act. Very hopeful. so start start small.

Speaker 35:22

Yes, start are very good words to live . Well, Paula, thank you so much for speaking with us today. And I'm sure all our listeners join us in admiration of your persistence in pursuing grants and learning new things, keeping detailed notes throughout the process and sheer hard labor dragging that weed wrench around, and for shining a very entertaining light on the challenges we all face on any scale when we want to encourage native plants and wildlife. So thank you for taking the time. It's been so much fun to talk with you. And listeners, thank you for joining us. And listen, you will want to get this book, and then you'll also want to subscribe to Paula's newsletter so you can find out what's going on at that farm and see lovely pictures and always a nice doggy update, which I appreciate. And you can do both of those things at paulawhyman.com, and we'll include this in the transcript of the show. And I know that once you take a look, you will be inspired and energized for the start of another gardening season. And be sure to join us next time for more pollinator confidential.