Virginia Turfgrass Journal

The Turf Zone: Welcome to TheTurfZone. In this episode we’re speaking with Margaret Fisher, Chair of the Plant NOVA Natives Outreach Committee. Good morning Margaret, how are you?

Margaret Fisher: I’m good, how are you?

TTZ: Doing great. I just want to lead in with why you and I are talking for this occasion. Tom Tracy has shared some information that you and he have been passing back and forth and it sounds like you two have really come up with some great things in common and ways you can work together to reach both of your goals. I want to start with what you do and what your goals are with the Plant NOVA Natives Committee.

MF: Plant NOVA Natives – the NOVA stands for Northern Virginia – this is a social marketing partnership made up of something like 150 local organizations in Northern Virginia that are all working together to get out the word about native plants and their value in saving our local ecosystem. We’ve been going for almost a decade now, trying to reach people in as many ways as possible—social media to a certain extent but also by reaching people where they are in person. And by doing events and conferences, including conferences for landscape professionals. So my role in that is to come up with and organize ways of doing outreach.

TTZ: I think probably most people in Virginia have heard a little bit about the push to move toward more native plants. Can you tell me why that’s been such a focus and why it’s so important?

MF: What people need to know, which is almost all they need to know to get started on this is that insects can only eat the plants with which they evolved, for the most part, and birds can only feed their babies insects, for the most part, so if you don’t have native plants to feed the insects, you won’t have insects to feed the birds, and in general the ecosystem falls apart. Those are just two examples of why native plants are key to the future of our local ecosystem. Unfortunately, when we build houses in Northern Virginia and elsewhere, of course we tear out the native plants to put down houses and driveways and roads, and what we leave behind in between is just construction dirt and then we throw down some turfgrass and put in some plants. But mostly what developers have been using are non-native plants. That includes the turfgrass. So you could have a landscape that started out as woods that fed the whole ecosystem, the birds and everyone else, and end up with a landscape that feeds nobody. What we’re trying to do is encourage people to start substituting or adding native plants to their landscaping so that there’s something for the birds to eat. And it turns out that in order to actually support the ecosystem, your property or your neighborhood needs to have at least 70% or so biomass consisting of native plants. A lot of that is going to be trees, so native trees are particularly important to this process.

So we’re helping to get this word out because our population of birds and other wildlife has been steadily declining over the last 50 years in Northern Virginia, and the world in general. And we want to help out on a local basis because sometimes people think of nature and wildlife as something “way out there” maybe in the mountains or in the Chesapeake Bay or somewhere else, but this is part of the world too. These birds are as important as any other birds. Se we can actually do something about it on our own properties and we are trying to urge people to do that. You can imagine that this work is unlikely to happen in a city to a great extent. It will to some extent, but only little pockets here and there. And it’s unlikely to happen on a farm where they’ve clear cut everything and are spraying insecticides everywhere, so what that really leaves is the places in the exurban and suburban environment where we do have control over our property, we have no reason why we need to spray insecticides or any particular reason why we have to have one plant over another. So it’s going to make a difference if we all work together on this.

A lot of things follow from this concept, by the way. If you’re planting native plants in order to support the insects, like the caterpillars that are the main food for baby birds, it would be extremely rude to then go and spray them with insecticides because you don’t like mosquitoes. Killing off the things that you’re trying to support. Again if you just start with that basic concept that you need native plants to feed the insects, then if follows that you should not be spraying insecticides on your property, no matter how much you hate mosquitoes or ticks, you can find other ways to control their population and to live with them and leave the animals alone. Other things follow like not overdoing it with other chemicals that damage the soil that support other parts of our ecosystem. It also follows that you don’t want to overdo it with the lawn. Because turfgrass is from Europe – even if it’s called Kentucky bluegrass it’s not from Kentucky, it’s from Europe. It has essentially no value to wildlife, so if there’s ways that you might want to think about chipping away at that, that would be a good idea. You want your lawn, because you want a place to walk, although of course if you’re talking about California, that’s totally different, you wouldn’t want to walk there. But in this water-rich environment in Northern Virginia, you still can get away with having lawns that you play on or walk on, but most of our lawns, we don’t play on or walk on, we just look at them. So how about looking at some more shrubs and maybe some native grasses… other things that could look equally beautiful and attractive in a suburban environment without having to resort to non-native plants. And the other problem that we need to consider with lawns and where we put them is that they don’t soak up stormwater very well, of course they soak up stormwater better than cement, but not nearly as well as other landscaping would. So we’re urging people to think about how they might capture that runoff that comes from their roof and their driveways in the landscaping by adding landscaped beds, natural beds that may catch that runoff before it leaves the property. Of course, people aren’t used to this kind of landscaping, and this includes the landscape workers. So one of our missions is to try and help the landscape industry figure out how they’re going to accommodate that and still make a living. It is our hope and expectation that can definitely be done and that the landscape industry can play a very big positive role in helping our local birds and butterflies.   

TTZ: We’re talking about this obviously for the Virginia Turfgrass Journal, I think that we’ve seen habits for a long time for lawns that maybe are just established and maybe haven’t been thought about from the perspective that you’re presenting. You can still have your turfgrass lawn, but also… Is that a bigger battle with landscape professionals or with homeowners? 

MF: Mostly with the homeowners. They mostly just haven’t thought of this. So even though, you mentioned that maybe people had heard of this by now, I’m always interested to see in Northern Virginia, where there are 2.4 million people, probably most people have not heard of this. I run into people who are very much into environmentalism who haven’t heard of this. The movement is growing in a big way, and more and more people are recognizing this, and governments are really getting into this because of the reasons I’ve mentioned, we still have a long way to go to reach all the homeowners and other property owners, homeowners associations, even faith communities that have large lawns where they could use some trees. So we still have our work to do in that regard. So what I think of when I visit for instance a local homeowners association that’s a couple of miles from here, is that when they did the construction originally of the townhomes, because they have these bigger parking areas, they presumably, to flatten the parking lot, they had a whole lot of dirt that they had to move, so they piled it into hills and then to meet the necessary requirements  to control erosion and sediment runoff, they scattered grass seed on those hills. And then they sold the houses. And the homeowners came along and they saw these grass-covered hills and they just figured, “Well, that’s normal.” It never occurred to them to do anything else about it afterwards. So from then on, the poor landscape workers have been mowing on these steep hillsides, grass that’s not being used at all. So that doesn’t seem very safe to me, but at the very least it must be difficult. So that’s the kind of place that’s really ideal for potentially reforesting. Just plant some trees in there, then gradually let the leaves stay there afterwards, and then slowly it’ll reforest by itself. You just need to control the invasive plants, which is another subject, and then you won’t have to mow that anymore. But you’re still going to need to hire your landscape company to take care of that area too. So we want to help, if we can, anyone who’s interested in figuring out how to make that part of their business model. That they would be maintaining that area so that it looks nice while controlling the invasive plants. Let me talk about that.

We had this initial problem that we cut down the forest and put in a house and turfgrass and shrubs and maybe a tree or two and created a sterile environment, so that’s big problem, but an even worse problem is that some of those shrubs and trees and plants actually turned out to be invasive, meaning that because they’re no longer in their native environment, they don’t have the control mechanisms that the ecosystems normally would provide. So they escape very frequently because the birds eat their seeds or berries then carry them elsewhere, including into our few remaining natural areas where they start to grow and grow and displace the native plants that are there. So in Northern Virginia, just as an example, I spent time regularly on wildlife surveys in some natural areas around here and those surveys include documenting all the plants that are in bloom on a given day and when you look at the data produced, approximately a quarter  of the plant species that we’re documenting are not from this continent. That includes the majority of what we call weeds in our gardens. Sometimes people think about native plants as being weeds. Such as butterfly weed, which turns out to be one of the best landscaping plants for a formal looking landscape. It’s a beautiful orange color, it’s very well-behaved and it stays in a nice small size and yet it called butterfly weeds. But if you actually look at the weeds themselves, the things that you’re pulling out. Certainly more than half, I think probably way more than half are non-native. They’re coming from Europe and Asia for the most part.

TTZ: How does your work align with the VTC and the EI and how have you and Tom envisioned working together to promote your causes?

MF: It aligns in a lot of ways. First of all, his audience, we appreciate all the work that they’re doing. We know that they have already been trying to do a lot of work to help the environment and they have a way of reaching the very folks that we’re trying to reach. So this makes a very good alignment. We met at a an NVNLA meeting a year or so ago. And when he was introduced, I immediately knew I wanted to go talk to him. I think he pretty much immediately knew he wanted to talk to me because we can definitely work together. I don’t actually see any inevitable conflict in our missions, here. Which is to make it worth everyone’s while to do landscaping in an environmentally friendly way and try and make it profitable for people.

So for example, we at Plant NOVA Natives started a regional tree campaign last year called “plant NOVA trees”. As we thought about this, our goal being to increase the tree canopy in northern Virginia, it seemed more and more likely that though planting trees is wonderful, the goal of increasing canopy will never be met if we’re cutting them down or losing them for other reasons faster than we’re planting them. There are many reasons why that happens. One reason, not statistically the biggest reason, is that sometimes trees are planted and managed improperly. So working with each other and trying to help the landscape folks know how to do that properly is a very good thing. Looking around along the roadsides and in our common areas, what we’re seeing is that one of the biggest threats to trees is that there are non-native vines, like Japanese honeysuckle, that are killing the trees at an enormous rate. We did some extrapolation of data from Tacoma Park, Maryland that gave us a figure, potentially, of three million trees at risk from invasive vines in Northern Virginia. Which is way more than the planting goal of 600,000 little tiny trees. That data, that number may or may not turn out to be exactly right, but we know from the work we’ve done so far in surveying the trees in Northern Virginia that we are looking at the very least, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of trees at risk from invasive vines. The way you save those trees is to cut the vine at the base of the tree and paint the stump with herbicide. Well, you have to be a certified pesticide applicator to do that if it’s not on your own property. So this is an enormous opportunity for the landscape industry.

TTZ: Sometimes these conversations can be really hard with people that haven’t sat down to understand what you’re talking about. I know that in the past there’s been a little tension between the turfgrass community and people who do what you’re doing. And there doesn’t have to be that tension, there doesn’t have to be conflict if there’s some understanding of how you can work together to further both of your goals. I think that’s amazing that you and Tom have connected on that level. Just being able to verbalize that you don’t have be anti-lawn, you don’t have to be anti-turfgrass entirely and “we just need to get rid of all lawns altogether.” It’s nice to see where the two can meet and advance each other’s purpose. That’s been a missing part for a long time and it’s taking a lot of work to meet in the middle. 

MF: Yes, and I’m sure we’ll have some misunderstandings along the way and people who are overenthusiastic and who haven’t thought this through. But hopefully we can be patient with each other and help each other figure these things out. It’s going to take a while, and like I said the landscape industry is critical to this.  Without their help, we’re not going to get anywhere.

In Northern Virginia anyway, from what I can tell, certainly most of the planting decisions are made by professionals. For the most part, whatever landscaping plants came with the house is what ends of getting sold with the house. Most people don’t seem to garden at all, so all those properties out there are still going to need to be taken care of. A little bit of shift in the skill set of the workers could be quite useful. What we’ve found is that those companies that provide competent care and maintenance of landscapes that include native plants, whether they’re more naturalized landscapes or formal landscapes that include native plants, they’re in huge demand, these companies. There’s not anywhere near enough of them and so people are always complaining that they can’t get anyone to do the work. Which basically what we’re talking about is figuring out how to properly weed and prune because if it’s a plant that you’re not familiar with, there’s an effect when you take a clipper to it. Somebody may be, for instance, putting in annuals every year at their homeowners association entranceway, and then switch it over to perennials, because natives for the most part are perennial plants, and you can’t then just rip it all out three times a year, spray herbicide to control the weeds and put in now ones. You have to actually weed. You can minimize the weeding by carefully planning which plants you’re going to use and how you lay them out. But you still need to be able to distinguish what is in fact a weed from the native plant that just hasn’t bloomed yet. It may take a new skill set, which is that companies will have to do gradually, but they’re still going to be in demand, people still want to pay them. They don’t want to do it themselves.

TTZ: Being in the green industry publishing area, I read more turfgrass research than anybody I know, but yet my lawn is a little disappointing, including any landscape plants as well, I know that the homeowners may be less interested or more resistant to taking the time to learn those things. So I love that there’s a push to work with landscape professionals. Hopefully that’s the beginning of the process. 

MF: Yes, and we can start with small steps. Homeowners can start with small steps we recommend. Just adding a few native plants, that’s really easy. And if someone isn’t sure how to do this or what would do the most good, what I suggest to people is they take their big empty lawn and plant a tree in the middle of it. That tree, when it grows up is going to provide more value to both the ecosystem and the temperature of your property and the aesthetics of your property than anything else. But it has to be properly planted and not run over by the lawn mower. It’s a very simple problem, but we hear it all the time. The healthiest way of transplanting a tree is to transplant when it’s really young. So it may be only two feet tall and look like a stick. So it’s easy to nick it with your lawnmower or your string trimmer. It’s just a matter of getting people to really care about not doing that. I actually had this experience myself at the church I attend. We proudly had a tree planting day last fall and transplanted from my yard, a tiny little white oak seedling and put it in there and had a little ceremony, and the next spring it was taken out by the landscape crew. So this was really entirely my fault and not their fault because there were other little tree seedlings that were coming up in the garden beds that definitely didn’t belong there and needed to be weeded out. This was just one that we wanted to keep, and we didn’t put any kind of marker around it to protect it. So, you see the problem. 

TTZ: What would be the one major takeaway that you want our readers or listeners, turfgrass managers in Virginia, what would you want them to take away from your mission and your cause in our conversation the most?

 MF: The main takeaway that I would like to share is that we all appreciate the birds and value the wildlife that’s around us. We all want to help it, but most of us don’t know how. That includes everybody, not just the turfgrass industry, so let’s work together and make it happen.

 TTZ: Don’t miss an episode of Virginia Turfgrass. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit us at TheTurfZone.com.

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