The Case for a Messy Native Plant Garden

Forget aesthetics, garden for ecology and wildlife.

Rudbeckia maxima in my garden this summer. Film scan.

Hello garden friends!

I had started a few sentences of another draft that was going to focus on messy gardens and why we shouldn’t care about how our gardens look but I’m not sure I want to write about that today. We may get there—let’s see, shall we?

What I do want to start of with is talking about podcasting. Moreover, how did I have so much time to podcast for so many years? As I wander about life now, not producing The Garden Path Podcast, I wonder where I got the energy to produce it for so long. I know that I enjoyed creating it for many years but now I marvel at how much effort I put into coming up with guests, reaching out to them, coming up with outlines, reading books/deep diving into social media about my guests, interviewing them, editing the podcast, writing up the podcast for the website, publishing the podcast, and then sharing it across social media. It was a lot. And I enjoyed it for the most part.

But now? I look back and realize how much time went into all of that and wonder why I spent so much time doing it. I truly enjoyed some of the connections I made through it all but I’m a different gardener and different person than I was in late 2015 when I started the podcast. I was more hardcore into vegetable gardening then, and now? I question just about everything edible I grow and the reason why I’m bothering to grow it. Most of the time I’m wondering how much more fulfilling it would be to add flowers into those spaces instead of trying to come up with something edible to fill that space during the heat of summer or whatever difficult season we’re handed these days.

Perhaps it is this miserable, abhorrent summer that is provoking these thoughts. It’s been much worse than last year’s drought. We’ve dragged the hose around the yard to attempt to keep trees alive and I wonder if we’ll manage. Around town I’m noticing oaks up and die, and other species are going dormant early this year. Maybe they will end up dead by the time spring comes around. Leaves are curled and wilting on so many plants. It seems hard to think that anything will be pleasantly growing and happy once again. Sure, there are plants that have thrived, but not much is truly thriving, they are mostly surviving and biding time until some miraculous burst of rain comes or a true cold front arrives.

Which, I guess, does lead me to the messy garden discussion. Through all of this—this trying to limp along with climate change and whatever it throws our way—too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry—why do we even need to care that our native plant gardens look tidy and somewhat designed? Why are we bending over backwards for a society who doesn’t actually care? Over here in Texas we’re seeing springs and creeks running dry or at lower levels than seen in decades due to increased pressure from increased populations over the aquifers. So, again, why do we need to care what Jim and Susan down the street say about how our native plant gardens are designed? We should be beyond caring about how our gardens look to everyone else by now. “Wow, look how pretty your coneflowers are aligned with the switchgrass and clumps of sedges! By the way, did you see the 20 acres of native prairie that were cleared today for the new box store?” Make it make sense. We’re worried about aesthetics while the world is literally burning.

Honestly, I’m tired of it all. I’m burnt out on the talk about how to design native plant gardens that are out of reach of most of us, not only for the cost involved but the maintenance involved. I’m striding into my mid-40s and don’t even consider myself nearly as busy or strapped with commitments as many others and yet I still have a hard time keeping up with the garden beds we have. I’m really eye-balling 20 years into the future and considering now how I want to start getting my garden and yard ready for life in my 60s and how I want to approach that season of my gardening life. (That was really awkward, writing about my life in my 60s because it seems far away and yet, around the corner!)

And so, I make the case for not caring. Not caring that the latest trends are keeping a well-designed native plant garden, and instead, gardening for wildlife and ecology. Nature does not care if you’ve clumped the right number of grasses together with the right number of perennials. Invite the messy into the garden for the moments where you can’t be out there tending to every plant that finds itself in a place you didn’t originally plant it and for the times you physically and mentally can’t be outside to keep up with the aesthetics.

Our wild, natural spaces aren’t gardens. Gardens are manufactured ideas of nature and while they can be beautiful, they aren’t the same as truly restoring an ecosystem. How many social media posts have I come across recently about someone “re-wilding” their yard and yet have native plants that aren’t even from their local ecoregion. Just call it a garden. It’s fine and is perfectly acceptable. Let’s stop pretending most of our gardens are more than what they really are. They are a balm for our souls and for what wildlife uses them but they aren’t much more than a band-aid for the wounds we’ve given to the world.

Am I being pessimistic and antagonistic? Perhaps. But let’s look at it this way, if we stop caring what others think about how we garden, or what our native plant gardens look like, we’re more likely to be growing more oriented for the ecology of our locales instead of gardening for strictly human desires. We’re more likely to plant the wilder native species that others would suggest are aggressive or invasive, because they sustain wildlife to a greater extent than other, more tame species. We’re more likely to experiment and see what will grow, to look around at what eco-region we live in and find what truly thrives there. We may decide that it’s worth having a more bustling species take over a certain area because it can maintain the area better than we can, filling out a space and preventing unwanted weeds from coming into the space. Those aggressive native species are aggressive for a reason.

I’m unsure if I will ever return to garden podcasting. I don’t know what I would talk about at this point, nor am I interested in doing all of the work to interview guests once again. I listen to very few garden podcasts these days, most weeks none. It’s a stark contrast to what I was listening to a decade ago, even five years ago. It’s not that I don’t care or appreciate it all but I just can’t bothered to be influenced by it all anymore. I find myself even pulling away from social media these days, though the ties to that are still strong. I know that I’ve filled the time I spent podcasting with other things. Just like in a garden, voids get filled with something else.

I’m not sure how to end this essay so I’ll say, go plant a native plant tomorrow…or in a few months when it cools off so it doesn’t die a week after you planted it in this heat and lack of rain. And then plant more until it makes you and the wildlife happy.

—I know I’ll have more to write about this in future essays, so stick with me! And I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

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Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.