- This week on "Central Texas Gardener," Professor, Entomologist, Ecologist, and Author, Doug Tallamy, explains how we can help bring nature home.

Architects Richie and Nkiru Gelles applied muscle and imagination to turn their bare backyard into a lively habitat.

Daphne Richards highlights your garden photos, and Andrea DeLong-Amaya picked spring wildflowers to plant this fall.

So, let's get growing right here, right now.

- [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden: supporting our love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Wanna know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, HEB has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by HEB trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(bright tranquil upbeat music) - Architects Richie and Nkiru Gelles applied muscle, imagination, and patience to turn their bare backyard into a lively habitat.

- Each year, we would like reconquer a certain section of our garden, and then suddenly, "Okay, we're cultivating this now."

I'm Richie Gelles.

- And I'm Nkiru Gelles.

- We bought our house, this house, in 2017, and it was a completely bare space, except for the trees.

- And neither of us had a previous experience tending to something that was so big, and wanted to create something that was a place for our boys to play.

And, ultimately, we just worked on it section by section.

I was going to Home Depot and getting very low cost cardboard sheets, and covering over a large areas of the weeds to just suppress their growth.

And anytime we'd get deliveries, we'd bring the cardboard out and just cover the ground.

- [Richie] We were at home during the pandemic and we needed space.

- I found a company called Rock and Dirt, and I asked them for the smallest limestone rocks that they could deliver.

Wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, we, you know, wheeled it around to the back and shoveled.

(Nkiru chuckles) - [Richie] It was tons of weight that we moved from the front to the back, and not only the gravel, but all of the limestone stones, we inherited.

And the paths helped define areas that could make it more manageable for us to like, "Okay, we can plan out the planting here, we can weed this bed."

- We are both architects, you know, before everything else.

We both studied architecture, we both adore architecture, but we also really enjoy gardening.

And so, with all the planting, we've always been aware of creating a profile, which I think is a sort of an architectural move, I guess, where we are careful to think about what's gonna be high in the middle, what's gonna be low around the edges, but then also the textures of the plants, the shapes of the leaves, if they're sharp and pointy, or rounded and soft, and always trying to create a very frothy feeling that you can not really see the end of, you know, it sort of curves around, and you're not quite sure what's at the back of it.

- My dad and my grandfather were great vegetable gardeners.

They always had amazing vegetable gardens, but I didn't really understand perennial gardening until we started this one here.

And Nkiru lived in the UK for quite a while and I think that was, you know, a big impact on how you've approached gardening.

You know, in the UK you see so many, I think there's so much more diversity in the gardens.

And even, interestingly, when we met, the language itself is different.

So when we met, we would speak about garden, like, she would always say, "Oh, in the back garden" or "The front garden," the same way we would say yard, right, in American English.

It's like the default... - Yeah, we never use yard.

- The default in England is to say garden.

- Garden.

- So you're already thinking in your head, "This is like a space I should be doing something in," whereas yard is basically a unit of measure.

It's like, I feel like we've made the land into a commodity, so much so we're literally referring to it as a unit of measure that can just be sold interchangeably.

What we've tried to do conceptually is we have formal aspects, I think, of English cottage garden style, but none of those plants.

So we've adopted the native and adapted palette of the plants that grow well in central Texas.

And that's something we learned partially the hard way.

We had so many, in the beginning when we tried to grow things, we had a lot of plants just die on us, because they're not adapted, they're not meant to grow here.

- And also low water needs was very important to us.

We didn't wanna plant anything that would just use up too much water.

The previous owner had cut down a tree and stacked the cuts of the tree trunk, and we put them around the garden to just naturally degrade, and they've been a great spot for bugs and, you know, other creatures to come into the garden.

- Another really prominent aspect of the garden is we have hackberry trees all along the fence lines on all sides.

Hackberry are often maligned here in Austin, but, you know, they are a native tree, and they do provide a lot of habitat, and also- - Great for birds.

- Food for the birds.

And the other thing they do is they drop a lot of wood, as they're famous for it.

And we have tried to repurpose that throughout the garden.

- [Nkiru] Following the winter storm, we had a lot of dead wood in our garden.

And that's when we had the idea to build the arbor- - Yeah.

- With that wood.

So all of the wood in the arbor is from that year.

- Yes.

- The year of the great winter storm where all the icicles were hanging from the branches.

- A lot of the time was spent just collecting the right pieces.

You know, one thing about hackberry that is annoying is the branches tend to be pretty twisty.

And so, finding ones that were straight enough, especially for the main posts, was a challenge.

And then, one weekend, I just constructed it and put it up there, and we were looking for a place for our crossvine- - Yeah.

- Which is one of my favorite plants in Austin, I love it, it does so amazingly well here with, like, essentially no upkeep.

And every spring it explodes in this tangerine flowers.

- [Nkiru] Yes.

- It's such a classic image of English gardens, you'd have like an arbor with the roses, And I feel like we were able to do that with a native plant.

If you put them in the right location with the right conditions, they will reward you tremendously, like without very little upkeep.

The wattle fence kind of arose out of the same concept as the arbor, and this idea also, I think of making a sense of place.

The hardest part about the wattle fence is just collecting the right material.

And then once you get it, it's quite fun actually to put in the stakes and then start weaving.

It belongs to the land here, like these trees, it's surrounding us, it fits into this context.

We complain about the weather and how hot it gets in the summer, and it is challenging.

It can be difficult, and it's sad to see the plants not doing well, because it's so hot, and having the vegetable beds not pre-producing anything because it's too hot for any fruit to set.

But, I do think that there's a positive way to look at it, which is this climate and this environment for growing is quite challenging, but it's created a very kind of distinctive palette of plants.

Our boys find it quite engaging, like they will climb into the Mexican buckeye, and just love shaking the seeds off, and like running through the garden, having sword fights, I mean, or Nerf battles.

Like, imagine, we have so much cover and things like, compared to an empty flat space, like there's so much kind of- - Places to get lost.

- Cover in interesting places, and places to get lost, which is something that we have always been interested in.

- And we want more bugs and, you know, we don't use any pesticides to try to avoid, you know, disrupting any of the small creatures.

Even though the mosquitoes are a pain, but we don't go around and spray, and, you know, try to get rid of them that way.

And because of that, we've been seeing, you know, lizards live in the garden, and that's great, I love that my sons can see the lizards, you know, and we've had rabbits, we've had bunny rabbits coming from the back corner.

- I think you underestimate the impact you can have, like, in your property.

Like, this, for us, it's not a huge area, but for the insects, it is a huge area, like, the impact is immense.

And, like, even just in these years where our gardens really started to grow into itself, we have so many fireflies this time of year at night, and you look at the neighbor's yards, and they might not have any, and like they're clustered around here, because we've created habitat, even if it's not a flowering plant, but just one that grows in the understory, it provides habitat.

One thing we've done in this garden, which kind of became by accident, it wasn't all intentional, but we had so much to manage, is we have enough space to allow things to decay in place.

- Mm-hmm.

- [Richie] And one of those things is the leaves.

We have lots of leaf litter.

- In that line of thinking, our compost heap has been an incredible help.

So we take all the fruits and vegetables from the kitchen, we put it in a compost, we put those on the vegetable beds, then we get the vegetables and bring them in, and then whatever's left over goes back into the compost.

So it's just sort of sustaining.

We are very happy that the boys, they get to see a change.

You know, if your garden's the same, it's the same all the time.

But with this, it always feels and looks different.

And I'm happy they can experience that change from winter to summer to spring, and observe what is different that I think is beneficial for them.

- The journey we make from plant passion to holistic connections is the most important one we make as gardeners.

And to help us on our way is Doug Tallamy, Professor, Entomologist, Ecologist, and Author.

He joins us today from Pennsylvania via Zoom.

Well, Doug, thank you so much for being on "Central Texas Gardener" today.

We are absolutely over the moon to have you here.

- I'm very happy to be here, thanks for the invitation.

- So, Doug, I just wanna talk about, you're an Entomologist, an Ecologist, and a Conservationist, what was the sort of springboard that led you down the road to exploring the connection between animals and plants?

- Well, I was born loving nature and that took me on that educational route.

I was a bio major in college, Entomology in graduate school, and we studied plant-insect interactions a lot, it was a very common theme in the '70s.

In the year 2000, my wife and I moved into our current property.

It was a farm that had been broken up into 10 acre lots, and it was thoroughly invaded with non-native plants, and I mean thoroughly, you couldn't even walk through it, we had to make trails.

That was my first real introduction to the invasive species problem.

And the first thing I noticed is that our local insects are not eating them, which means there are very few local insects, and that means there's very few local birds.

And it really hammered home the connection between plants and the health of the local food web.

So it was the act of moving into that property that actually turned my research direction around.

I was studying how cucumber beetles choose their mates.

(John chuckles) Nobody knows nothing about that.

But, (chuckles) restoring functional food webs where we humans live, work, play, worship, that's become the focus for the last 25 years.

And the average homeowner who owns 78% of the country, it's private landowners.

Got 135 million acres of residential landscapes, 44 million acres of lawn.

We are not landscaping in ways that preserve the biodiversity that we need to run the ecosystems that support us.

But nobody was talking about that.

And that was the impetus, the fact that we really can turn this around if we choose the right plants for our landscapes.

But about 80% of the plants in our landscapes are non-native, many of them have escaped and become really serious invasive plants.

I wanted to get that message out.

So that that was it, it was the urgency of convincing private landowners that they're the future of conservation, they really can turn this around just by focusing on their own properties.

- Biodiversity, it's sort of one of those catchphrases now, kinda like green or sustainable.

But what really is the significance of biodiversity?

What what does it mean?

- Biodiversity is all the species on the planet, both the plants and the animals.

The importance of it in terms of humans is that it is biodiversity, it is the species of plants and animals in the ecosystems around us that make those ecosystems function.

That's important because they're producing the life support, they're producing all the things that keep us alive on this planet.

And the more species you have in an ecosystem, the more productive it is.

The fewer species you have, the less productive it is.

And if you get to a certain point where you don't have enough species to make that ecosystem run, you got ecosystem collapse.

- And you had a quote early on in your latest book from I believe it was Edwin Teale, where you say "We cannot make the world uninhabitable for other forms of life, and have it habitable for ourselves."

What are some of the biggest threats to biodiversity, that you've...

I know that's probably a really big question, but if you could just sort of boil it down, what do you feel are those biggest threats?

- We are the biggest threat, 'cause we're taking away the natural systems that support it and replacing them with unnatural systems.

I mentioned lawn, 44 million acres of lawn.

There are four things that every landscape needs to accomplish if we're gonna be sustainable.

One is support pollinators, manage the watershed in which it lies, sequester carbon, and support a viable food web.

One does none of those things.

So that's a huge threat right there.

We misuse and we overuse pesticides, light pollution is causing insect decline around the globe.

So we're doing all kinds of things without recognizing their impact on local species and thus ecosystem function.

- There are some species that are superheroes, right, these keystone species.

What is a keystone species?

- Well, if you remember the Roman arch, the keystone is the stone in the middle of that arch.

And if you take that stone out, the whole arch collapses.

That's the role of a keystone species.

If you take it out of your ecosystem, the ecosystem collapses.

I usually talk about keystone plants in terms of their roles in food webs.

- [John] Mm-hmm.

- And so, 14% of our native plants are supporting 90% of the caterpillars that are out there.

And the caterpillars are the most important part of our insect-based food web, because they're transferring more energy from plants to other animals than any other type of plant eater.

So we absolutely need the plants that support the caterpillars in our terrestrial ecosystems.

Oak's number one keystone plant in 84% of the counties in which they occur.

Across the country, they support about a thousand species of caterpillars, compared to let's say crepe myrtle supports what, one or two?

Not gonna cut the mustard.

So we've gotta choose the most powerful plants in terms of getting the energy from plants to other animals.

Remember, it's plants that are capturing energy from the sun and turning it into the food that all animals depend on.

Well, if you don't get that food to the animals, you don't have any animals, and when we choose plants from other continents, they're very poor at sharing that energy.

So that's why we need to focus on native plants.

- There's a lot of questions we get from folks about the native plant versus a cultivar versus a non-native, and then, of course, you throw into the mix now there are these native vars, so to speak, that people are developing.

What's your take on that?

- Well, and a cultivar/native var is just a genetic variant of a straight species.

So the question is, are they as good as the straight species in terms of supporting ecosystems, supporting wildlife?

And the answer is, it depends on what the genetic change was that created that cultivar.

We've done studies looking at six different cultivar traits, like, if you take a tall plant and you make it short, or if you enhance- - Right.

- The very size and so on.

And the only trait that actually reduced insect use consistently was taking a green leaf and making it red or purple.

- Hmm.

- Unfortunately those are very popular cultivars, but we can say with a lot of confidence that you should avoid red leaf cultivars if you wanna help biodiversity.

If you have a flower and you make it a double flower, what you've done is turn the reproductive parts of that flower into petals.

It's very beautiful, but it doesn't supply any pollen or nectar.

So, again, it depends on what that change was.

There are cultivars that are just as productive as the straight species.

So, unfortunately, we kind of have to test them all to see which ones are functioning and which ones aren't.

- Let's talk about your new book, which is really phenomenal, "How Can I Help?

Saving Nature with Your Yard," which is packed with 499 questions.

I'm not sure why you couldn't get 500 in there.

- Well, these are real questions I get on email.

- Okay.

- Every single day, I get questions on email.

And they're typically from people who have already read my other books, they've heard my talks, and they're still really good questions.

Why is it 499 questions?

It actually was much larger than that.

(John chuckles) I think our press said, "Those are too big," and they started tossing 'em here and there, and then it turned out to be 499.

- One of the big takeaways, especially in that last chapter is, is you note that, you know, if you're getting into this and you're wanting to do something positive, it can feel extremely overwhelming for the person that's just starting to dip their toes in.

What is the best way to start in your opinion?

- Slowly, so that it doesn't feel overwhelming.

This is a process.

The most important part of that process is recognizing that it's important and changing the goals of your landscape.

Once you've made that mental decision, then you can pick at it here and there.

So if you want to actually reduce the area you have in lawn, plant a tree.

I'm talking you have to be in an area where trees want to be- - Right.

- But plant a tree, put a bed around it, and all of a sudden you have less lawn.

Plant one tree a year, in 10 years, you've got 10 new trees in your yard and a lot less lawn.

Maybe you're gonna add a pollinator garden, a pocket prairie, but make these decisions carefully, and, you know, I'll give a talk and I hear people say, "I'm gonna rip out all my lawn."

Don't do that, then you've got this giant blank space and a lot of work ahead of you.

Just pick at it.

- Right.

- And you're moving in the right direction, then it's not overwhelming, it doesn't become a huge cost.

You start your plant small, so if you're gonna plant that tree, plant a seedling, it won't cost you much, or you've got the seed yourself and it won't cost you anything.

And in 10 years, they will be bigger and healthier than that big tree you spend a thousand dollars on.

- Have to mention Homegrown National Park, a wonderful concept.

How can people get involved with that work?

- Go to our website, homegrownnationalpark.org, and you register your property on the biodiversity map, and that's simply a matter of putting down your location, and then you're essentially making a pledge, or you're recording all the good conservation you're already doing.

But let's say you really do wanna reduce the area of lawn.

You say, "Okay, I'm gonna reduce this much."

You put that in the database, and then it doesn't mean you have to have finished, but that's your pledge.

Then your little piece of the county is gonna light up with a firefly.

And, of course, the goal of Homegrown National Parks is to get the entire country to light up with the fireflies.

Our mission is to get the information and the motivation for people to recognize that they are the future of conservation.

- Wonderful.

Well, Doug, I wanna thank you so much for coming on "Central Texas Gardner" today.

We're massive, massive fans here, and have taken inspiration and insight and wisdom from your work.

And we just thank you for all that you're doing.

- Well, thank you for the opportunity.

- Today is the second time that "Central Texas Gardner" has been honored to host Doug Tallamy.

This fall, we're celebrating CTGs 30th season.

So here's a clip from his visit with Tom Spencer on November 22nd, 2014.

- It's not as drastic as it sounds, is what I'm trying to say.

- Mm-hmm.

- We've got to abandon the notion of humans here and nature someplace else, because now humans are pretty much everywhere.

- [Tom] Exactly.

- And we are not gonna do well on this planet if we eliminate nature.

- Now, let's check in with Daphne.

(bright orchestral music) - Congratulations on the 30th season of "Central Texas Gardener."

In the years that I've been on CTG, one thing stands out, the number of gardeners who now choose plants that support wildlife.

Yes, everyone still wants plants that are pretty, and most still have a color scheme in mind too.

But rather than just choosing for looks, they're looking to bring wildlife up close.

Taylor Flanagan and her mom are CTG fans.

Taylor wrote, I love my garden and my little pond.

When things get hard, which feels like more and more often, I go out to my garden and find something that's alive because of the choices that we've made on our little property.

The decision to go pesticide-free, to re-wild where we can, and to choose native as often as possible has been so rewarding.

Time with the flowers, bugs, birds, and fish has been a balm to me."

Well, Taylor, I feel wholeheartedly the same.

Find out more and watch online at CentralTexasGardener.org.

- In April, 2013, the Wildflower Center's Andrea DeLong-Amaya taught us about mulches.

- As gardeners, we have a huge choice of different kinds of mulches to use in our garden, and sometimes it can be overwhelming to try to figure out what is the best thing to use in your landscape.

- Now Andrea first joined "Central Texas Gardener" in October, 2005, with a conversation about native plants for shade.

Well, since then, she's been an integral part of the team, teaching us about native plants and the wildlife that rely upon them.

Today, she's gonna get us ready for some spring wildflowers.

(bright orchestral upbeat music) - Hi, I am Andrea DeLong-Amaya with the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Fall is the ideal time to plant wildflower seeds for a spring bloom, particularly for your annual spring blooms.

It's also the antidote or the counterpart to spring fever, we have fall fever, we're just itching to get out into the garden.

August through November is the best time to plant wildflowers for spring bloom.

But planting a wildflower meadow is not as simple as just scattering out some seeds.

It helps to understand the process of ecological restoration, and that is the process of how plants change over time.

So you start with a bare soil, some kind of disturbance, it might be development, or it might be a fire or flood, hopefully not.

But even just gardening can disturb the soil.

And so, when you have bare soil, that bare soil wants to grow something, and, usually, it's the early colonizers that we consider the annuals.

Their strategy is fast, they get in, they do their thing, and they condition the soil, and make it really hospitable to the slower growing plants, like the perennials, the perennial wildflowers, and also the perennial grasses.

Annuals do their whole life cycle in one season.

So my first tip is to make sure that you have a good blend of annuals, perennials, and maybe a few grasses.

A lot of your wildflower seed mixes only have annuals.

So, for example, this one has Bluebonnets, Prairie Coneflower, Brown-Eyed Susan, Indian Blanket, those are all annuals.

So if you were to plant a wildflower packet, you might want to mix in some other things that you can buy separately, or maybe even harvest your own.

So annuals will dominate for the first year or two, giving way to the perennials, which will then start to take over, things like Winecups, Mealy Blue Sage, and a lot of your Penstemons are some good examples.

The second tip I'll give you is to really keep your eye on the weeds.

This is a really tricky one, and it's really important.

It's hard to see when seedlings are there, which ones are supposed to be, and which ones aren't.

One of the big things that I like to do is to sprinkle a little bit of seed in a potting mix and then look at them and and start to see what the seedlings look like.

Because when you put 'em out in a meadow area, or in a garden bed, it might be hard to tell what is supposed to be there and what isn't.

The other trick is, once your weeds get going, if you can identify them, please, pull 'em out before they set seed, that's gonna make it a lot easier for you as we move forward.

So when you're getting ready to plant your wildflower meadow, you want to make sure that you have good soil preparation.

Ideally, you'll have a nice bare soil that's weed-free and you can scatter your seeds down.

You wanna make sure that you don't bury those seeds, you pretty much wanna leave them right on the surface.

Some of these seeds are really tiny.

If you don't have bare soil, you at least mow whatever you have and then rake out the thatch, and you can throw the seeds over.

It's really important to make sure that those seeds touch the ground.

Then, ideally, we'll have some nice rain in the fall.

If we don't, it's really important to water those to get them germinated, and then hopefully we'll have rain throughout the fall and into the winter.

But if we don't, it's also really helpful to keep watering, to make sure that those little seedlings don't just dry up.

So, of course, we plant wildflower meadows because they're beautiful to us.

But you know it's funny, the plants really don't care that we think they're beautiful.

Their goal is to attract pollinators, so that the pollen can transfer from one plant to another, and that's how those plants get fertilized.

Then my third tip for you is to hold off on mowing.

As the wildflowers start to senesce, the seeds start to get mature and they turn brown.

A lot of times that's when people get all upset, and, "Oh, it looks so dead."

But it really is a temporary thing, and you can actually find a lot of beauty in those old seed heads.

But you want to make sure that you leave them standing long enough for the seeds to drop and replenish the seed bank into the soil for the next season.

Another important tip is that, if you leave those seed heads standing, a lot of your seed eating birds will come in like your finches and your buntings.

They'll come in and they'll pick the little seeds out of the heads.

For more detailed planting information, we have lots of information and articles on our website at wildflower.org.

This is Andrea DeLong-Amaya from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Enjoy!

- Be sure to check out CentralTexasGardener.org for tips, resources, and to watch online.

Until next time, adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

(bright orchestral upbeat music) (bright orchestral upbeat music continues) (bright orchestral upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener's" 30th season is made possible by Lisa and Desi Rhoden: supporting our love of gardening and nature for all communities.

- [Narrator] Wanna know what happens to your recycled plastic?

Since 2004, HEB has turned 58 million pounds of recycled plastic into things like composite decking and Field & Future by HEB trash bags.

You can learn more at OurTexasOurFuture.com.

(bright orchestral music)