Janis Solomon describes her garden as a perpetual work-in-progress rather than a manicured showpiece. But it’s a work-in-progress that keeps her busy and happy.
This is an excerpt from the Wild Ones Journal
Current members can log in to read the latest issue or check out the Journal Archives.
Solomon says she is lucky she doesn’t need to consider “curb appeal” due to the rugged terrain the house is built on and its distance from the road. “The closest neighbor lives about 100-150 feet away, and we have a totally different gardening style,” she says. “But she enjoys looking at my garden, and I like looking at hers.”
In fact, Solomon has helped to educate her neighbor about the importance of native plants, and the neighbor has added some native prairie plants to her landscape, as well as removed some invasives like burning bush.
Solomon says she started her native garden in earnest in 2008, after retiring from Connecticut College as a German studies and film studies professor and completing the Connecticut Master Gardener program. She jokes that being a “professional gardener” is her new career.
Shortly after finishing the Master Gardener program, Solomon learned about Wild Ones and joined. She recently finished her term as a member of the national WO Board of Directors, as well as president of the local Mountain Laurel chapter, and now is vice president.
But her affection and interest for native plants started when she was a child growing up in Texas. “We lived in a small town, but spent lots of time at the farm/ranch near Breckenridge that has been in my mother’s family since the late 19th century,” she explains. Her mother liked to point out the different cacti, wildflowers, and shrub oaks that existed on their land. “I learned about poison oak the hard way,” Solomon recalls.
Since 1970, Solomon has lived in the same home in Quaker Hill, Connecticut. It’s a Bavarian chalet style home built in 1919 on a ledge, which means it’s a challenging property on which to navigate and garden. “One needs to be part mountain goat to negotiate the terrain!” she says. “At 80, I can still manage it, but more slowly and with caution due to cranky knees.”
Solomon says she spent the early years on her property trying to educate herself about the plants that were already there, and she admits to originally adding some nonnatives such as hydrangeas, holly and rhododendron.
Thankfully, when she purchased the property it was already home to an unusual number of native plants, shrubs and trees, such as oaks, maples (sugar and red), ashes, mountain laurel, yucca, many aster and goldenrod species, Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum biflorum), jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), and many others.
But as she soon discovered, there were also a lot of invasive species, such as oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), burning bush (Euonymus alatus), wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) and Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), which are still problems.
Her favorite native plants on her property (in addition to those mentioned above) include maple leaf viburnums, high and low-bush blueberries, sumac species, spicebush, Clethra, ash, white and red oaks, hackberry trees, hickories, butternuts, red maples, American beech, and towering sugar maples.
She has added serviceberries, chokeberry, lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium), black haw (Viburnum prunifolium), American holly (Ilex opaca), vernal witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis), American hazelnut (Corylus americana), red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) and many others. But she has also added a wide variety of native flowers and grasses, such as native columbines, golden Alexanders, mayapples, meadow rue, and yellowroot.
“It’s clear that I have tried to get one of every native plant,” she says, adding her neighbor has noted she has a “large palette to work with.”
In addition, Solomon says virtually every large tree on the property is native, and that she probably has around 100.
But many of the trees on the property are eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), thanks to birds that ate its berries and then “deposited” them elsewhere. “They grow everywhere. Most of the older ones are female, so uprooting the seedlings is actually a big chore.”
After neglecting to uproot the seedlings for a few years, she soon discovered that several areas turned into cedar mini-forests.
However, she does have some nonnatives on the upper areas of her yard around the house. She also has some nonnative ground covers that a previous owner put in out of desperation to stabilize slopes, such as periwinkle (Vinca minor), common bugle (Ajuga reptans), Japanese pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis) and English ivy (Hedera helix). “They cover too large a sloped area to be easily eradicated,” Solomon says, “although I am reclaiming some smaller areas.”
Last fall, for example, she killed off a 10-foot by 30-foot level area of Vincaminorwith a vinegar solution and replaced it with Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica) plugs.
In front of a 4-foot high granite retaining wall on the lower drive, Solomon has planted a mix of swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata L.), eastern bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix L.), purple giant hyssop (Agastache scrophulariifolia), black cohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa), and other plants. She also created a border of native flowers and grasses along the road on the perimeter of the lower half of the property.
“This is still a work in progress,” she says, noting that the area is already home to such plants as mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum), yucca (Yucca), lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and others.
Not surprisingly, her yard is home to bumblebees, sweat bees, honeybees, and a variety of other bees, moths and wasps that she can’t identify. But her gardens also attract a variety of butterfly species, including monarchs, various swallowtails, painted ladies, fritillaries, and cabbage whites en masse. Plus, many birds are often found on the property, as well as mice, wild turkeys, bobcats, chipmunks, white-tailed deer, red fox and others.
Her advice to others is to garden incrementally and stay on top of your gardening. She knows from first-hand experience how important that is.
“I bit off more than I could easily chew in trying to landscape a half acre, which is the size of my lower garden,” Solomon says. It didn’t start that way, but frequent visits to see her daughter, son-in-law and new grandchild in Istanbul, now back in the U.S., and contracting Lyme meningitis in fall 2015, made that garden a low priority. “When I finally revisited the ‘lower 40,’ I found what I can only describe as a jungle, and have spent lots of time and money trying to get it under control again,” she said.
But contracting Lyme meningitis has made her more aware of ticks, and that’s the second part of her advice: Be careful, especially if you live in areas where ticks are plentiful. “It really caused me to change my habits when I decided to attack the ‘jungle’ last spring,” she said. “I now wear the uncomfortable protective clothing no matter what, or at least use Deet spray on my shoes and lower legs. Lyme (disease) is a real and scary issue…”
About the Yard
- The Solomon property is located in southeast Connecticut, not far from the mouth of the Thames River in New London.
- The area has endless supplies of rock deposited by retreating glaciers and has mostly acidic soil. Her soil, however, is close to neutral, probably because of the years and years of leaves that were left to decay.
- The native garden takes up about half of her 1-acre lot, where she has lived since 1970.
- The native area is on the lower, relatively flat part of her property, which rises more than 100 feet from the street to the level of the house and terraces.
- Her favorite woody plants are native white dogwoods and flame azaleas; favorite herbaceous plants are blue wood aster and blue-stem goldenrod – both insect magnets.
- With the exception of ground covers, Solomon estimates that about 80 percent of her gardens are native with species indigenous mostly to the New England coastal region, and a few that are just native to the Eastern U.S.
- Her yard also includes a small patch of “lawn,” which is part weeds, white clover, fescue and other grasses.
Written by Barbara A. Schmitz
All photos courtesy Janis Solomon