Member Garden: Katharin Mason-Wolf

| Member Garden

Slow and steady. Just like the tortoise that won the race with the hare in the children’s story, Katharin Mason-Wolf knows that slow and steady is often the best way to add native landscaping to your yard or gardens.

“The house we purchased when we relocated to Toledo in 2009 had been beautifully landscaped so I definitely did not want to start from scratch,” she recalls. Instead, it’s been a gradual process to add in native plantings as she removed trees and shrubs that had overgrown their space or were declining.

Completing the Ohio State University Extension Master Gardener training in 2010, Mason-Wolf first started volunteering at The Nature Conservancy’s Kitty Todd Nature Preserve to maintain the Oak Openings Region demonstration garden there. By 2012, she created the first large garden area devoted to natives on her property, and she’s been adding to it steadily ever since.

“It was an existing garden area that had spruce trees and hemlocks planted many years before we owned the property,” she recalls. “The trees were planted too close together and were not getting enough light so they were not healthy at all.”

The first thing she did was take all those plants out. She doesn’t regret doing that, but she was surprised at the stark change it created in her yard. “Our privacy was gone,” she says.

In its place, she planted ninebark cultivars before she knew cultivars weren’t true natives. Next, she planted viburnum, bought at a local nursery, which to her surprise came with viburnum leaf beetles.

“I don’t mind my plants getting eaten by native insects,” she says, “but when a nonnative pest completely defoliates an area….” Well, let’s just say she wasn’t happy.

For those new to native landscaping, she tells them not to get worried if a native plant takes off and starts reseeding. She planted dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) in her new garden, and it “reseeded itself like crazy,” she says.

Wild ginger was used as an antibiotic by Native Americans and American settlers.

“I first panicked about it, pulling it out, moving it to other areas of the yard, and giving it away,” she says. “If I would have just left it alone, things would have balanced out. It takes time for some native plants to become established, and you should just let nature do its job.”

Mason-Wolf also recommends that those new to native landscaping consult with landscape designers that specialize in native planting to choose plants that are right for the soil and light conditions, and plan out the placement.

“I regret that I planted some shrubs and small trees before fully understanding the distinctions between straight native species, native cultivars and species related to our local natives that are not strictly native to our area,” she said. “I would have made different selections had I known what I know now.”

Those changes include not planting a buttonbush cultivar and a deciduous holly cultivar, and transplanting some ferns that she later learned were nonnative.

She also encourages people to keep things trimmed and well-tended, and consider adding in a Wild Ones sign, so people know that your garden is planned and deliberate. “You don’t want people to think it’s just a weed patch,” she says.

Her property also includes a wooded hillside that backs up to a floodplain area filled with invasive plants that she’s slowly been getting rid of.

“There are a lot of nice native trees down there — ash, oak, boxelder, basswood – and then it was mostly honeysuckle, burning bush and garlic mustard,” she said. She’s recently also started seeing another invasive, lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria L.) that she’s added to her list to cut, pull or spray.

Mason-Wolf said her plans for the future include continuing to improve the wooded hillside behind her house by planting more natives and increasing the value of the woodland habitat for a variety of birds, insects and mammals.

But her yard is already home to lots of wildlife. “We regularly see blue jays, robins, cardinals, wrens, hummingbirds, a variety of hawks, juncos, titmice, nuthatches and chipping sparrows, as well as woodpeckers and flickers,” she says. This spring, she also saw bluebirds several times. And pollinators are regular visitors, too.

When not busy with her yard, Mason-Wolf and other Wild Ones members helped to rid nonnative invasive plants at a public natural area just down the street from her home.

The group already cleared the area of honeysuckle (Lonicera spp.), common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), porcelain-berry vine (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata), garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) and other invasive species.

In March, the group broadcast a seed mixture donated by the University of Toledo through its Greening-UT Through Service Learning (GUTS) program. They plan to add a variety of native shrubs and small trees to help re-establish a healthy native woodland.

“There is a lot of traffic on the street, and during our workdays, we had a lot of people stop and ask what we were doing,” Mason-Wolf says. “It allowed us to educate people about native plants.”

Written by Barbara Benish
All photos courtesy Katharin Mason-Wolf