Honeybee on butterfly weed. Photo by Kim Bailey
By Emma Castleberry
The Gardening for Life Project of Polk County presents the Gardening for Life Celebration on Saturday, March 4, at 2 p.m. at Polk County High School. The free event will feature a keynote address by entomologist, ecologist and conservationist Doug Tallamy, author of several groundbreaking books including Bringing Nature Home; the New York Times bestseller Nature’s Best Hope; The Nature of Oaks, which won the American Horticultural Society’s 2022 book award; and The Living Landscape, coauthored with Rick Darke.
Tallamy’s core message is about coexistence with nature and promoting our individual responsibility for the tracts of earth we claim in our gardens, lawns and yards. “We have a biodiversity crisis on this planet that we have created by excluding nature from our human-dominated spaces needlessly,” he says. “You’re either going to choose plants that share their energy with other beings or plants that don’t. In the past, we’ve landscaped with aesthetics in mind, but now we’re going to make them ecologically functional.”
Photo by David Huff
Donna Wise, a founding member of the Gardening for Life Project, is from a long line of passionate southern gardeners. When she and her husband bought a house on a wooded lot in Tryon in 2015, she tackled the landscaping, adding ground covers to eliminate the need for mowing and creating step-stone paths. “I designed and executed comfortable, inviting vignettes to enable us to be outside with the birds, the acceptable critters and the managed yard,” she says. “It took 50 bales of pine needles a year to be sure everything was neat, tailored and under control.”
After watching a webinar with Tallamy, Wise realized the error in her approach. “It took less than an hour to change everything I thought I knew about nature,” she says. “I went from being what Tallamy calls a ‘gardener’ to being a converted ‘guardian.’ As a guardian, I’m now learning more about native plants, planting them where and when I can, removing invasives, and delighting in the leaf bed around my shrubs, knowing it is providing overwinter protection for so many species.”
Partners in the Gardening for Life Celebration include Conserving Carolina, The Congregational Church of Tryon, Weiler Woods for Wildlife, Carolina Native Nursery, Lanier Library and New View Realty. In addition to Tallamy’s keynote, the event will feature educational exhibits, community resources, book sales and a native plant sale. Pollinator-friendly seed packets, hand-decorated by Polk County elementary and middle schoolers as part of the Seeds in Schools project, will be given away to attendees. The Gardening for Life project will also give away 500 baby oak seedlings at the event. Planting an oak tree, which supports hundreds of species, is a simple, individual act that can make a huge difference for biodiversity.
In 2021, Tallamy cofounded the Homegrown National Park grassroots initiative, which promotes and records successful conservation on private property. “Because more than 78 percent of lands in the US are privately owned, restoring and protecting biodiversity in our yards and in our neighborhoods is critical,” says Wise. “By making simple choices and taking small steps we can each create biodiverse habitats large and small that support the greatest number of plants and wildlife. From a patio planter filled with milkweed and phlox to a large farmscape functioning in balance with the local ecology, these acts of conservation make a meaningful and measurable difference.”
As of press time, all seats have been reserved for the Gardening for Life Celebration. For more information, visit GardeningforLifeProject.org and HomegrownNationalPark.org.
