Nature is Complicated!

One of my new volunteer assignments at NRT is designing a bird "garden" as part of our overall plan to make Sheep Pasture even more bird friendly. The idea originally was to drop a garden in at the base of the old mansion's foundation, but a true bird garden needs shrubs and trees which would obscure the foundation's rock wall which has become a photo opportunity for visitors and a teaching tool for junior geologists. Then there is that "permaculture" word that I keep dropping into blogs. Permaculture is a development of the wildlife garden movement that aims to combine ecological principals with horticulture. Wildlife gardens can be as simple as adding plants that attract butterflies, beneficial insects, birds, or mammals to a normal garden or as complex as a design to mimic and improve the natural environment. Interestingly, many of the plantings put in by Olmsted served this function and making a designed landscape look more natural than nature was a big part of his work. Today, with an increased knowledge of what makes an environment work, it can be hard to know where the natural environment leaves off and the designed one begins. Permaculture aims to go one step beyond complex wildlife gardens by providing food for both animals and humans. My grandmother had a huge blueberry patch at her house in Scituate. If we were quick enough, it provided more blueberries than we could ever use and supported birds and small mammals as well (luckily no bears in Scituate!).

So what I'd like to do is develop the bird garden along permacultural lines. I aim to "develop" a large acreage surrounding the foundation, essentially the whole area originally designed by Olmsted as an enriched natural environment. This will involve designing with nature instead of always fighting it. To give an example, Peg Hoffman and I spent some time last summer cutting Winged Euonymus out of the edges of a small grove we use for education around now. This plant is an invasive non-native, but it also provides berries and excellent cover for birds. The grove needed to be opened up-it's a relatively pretty vista and other native edge species like hazelnut and grape will now have a chance to grow well. Near the foundation is a rock formation completely surrounded by Euonymus. It would be completely detrimental to our bird restoration program to remove this patch because it provides cover and some winter food for a species of sparrows we are trying to promote. See, nature is complex!

Obviously, to work on a large scale like this I'll need help. More on this later, but what I'm thinking about is a crew of folks who are interested in permaculture to provide food for themselves. The bird garden would be a sort of proof of concept. If we could get enough people involved, perhaps we could trade volunteer labor for a lease on a couple of acres of land to turn into a garden that would provide a CSA for participants while benefiting nature. And yes, you can have tomatoes in a permaculture garden.

If you see Maggie and me wandering around the foundation area, know that the first principle of permaculture is "observe." Sort of like the old adage "Measure twice, cut once."