There are native plant enthusiasts and then there is Theo Witsell, who undoubtedly is one of the few who can sight identify nearly 600 species on Arkansas’ rare native plants list.
This is an excerpt from the Wild Ones Journal
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There are native plant enthusiasts and then there is Theo Witsell, who undoubtedly is one of the few who can sight identify nearly 600 species on Arkansas’ rare native plants list.
“If you’re trying to learn to identify plants in all stages of their growth and development, nothing beats growing them and seeing them every day,” says Witsell, who since 2000 has worked as an ecologist and botanist with the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission and surveys the state for rare plants. “I don’t grow all of these species, of course, since many require very specific growing conditions, but I grow a lot of them.”
Witsell says he first became interested in native plants in the mid-1990s when he was in college. But that interest intensified when he accepted his current job, which requires an intimate knowledge of the state’s flora.
More than half of his 0.4 acre lot is occupied by native plants, which he slowly planted with a little help from others.
“I started by studying the lot and identified various sites with different growing conditions,” he says. “There were shaded areas on the north side of the house and in portions of the backyard. There were sunny areas along the south and west property lines. There were moist areas near the gutter downspouts and at the outlet of the air conditioner drainage pipe. And best of all, there was a big sandstone outcrop along the north side of the driveway. I grouped the plants I had by their natural habitat affinities (mesic forest, dry woodland, prairie, etc.) and put each where they were most likely to be happy.”
Witsell says he also worked with the native elements that were present on the site when they moved in. “Our neighborhood was installed in the mid-1960s into a hilly, oakpine woodland and the developers left many of the original trees,” he says. Their lot is on a dry shale and sandstone ridge and has 27 remnant trees: 15 post oaks (Quercusstellata), two blackjack oaks (Quercus marilandica), five shortleaf pines (Pinusechinata), three black cherries (Prunusserotina) and two redbuds (Cerciscanadensis).
With 27 trees, Witsell says he has a massive amount of leaves to deal with. “I knew I wanted to do an undulating border garden around the entire backyard, so I left a portion of the leaves each year for the first few years and raked them into the footprint that I envisioned for these beds so that they would smother out the grass,” he says. “Then I started at one corner of the yard, lining the border beds with rocks and putting in plants. I jumped ahead and installed shrubs at regular intervals, but I am filling the border out with herbaceous plants as I can.”
His front lawn was wall-to-wall nonnative zoysia grass when they moved in, but like many lawns in the neighborhood, it became infected with a fungal disease and developed dead spots. Rather than fighting the fungi with chemicals, he converted the worst areas to native gardens.
“I’ve kept a small mowed area in the front yard to give the kids a place to play, reassure the neighbors and contrast with several semi-formal native beds and some wilder prairie-like areas,” Witsell says.
The backyard was regularly mowed, but was largely unimproved with poor, rocky soil. Witsell started mowing the area infrequently, about two to four times a year, and was pleased to see a few remnant native forbs appear.
ladder (Polemonium reptans), and yellow trout lily (Erythronium rostratum)
“By the second year, up popped violet wood sorrel (Oxalis violacea), manyray aster (Symphyotrichum anomalum), gray goldenrod (Solida-gonemoralis), pussytoes (Antennaria parlinii), small-flowered crowfoot (Ranunculus micranthus), lyre-leaved sage (Salvia lyrata) … and later creeping bush-clover (Lespedeza repens), trailing bush-clover (Lespedeza procumbens), potato dandelion (Krigia dandelion), woodland sunflower (Helianthus hirsutus) and Arkansas beard-tongue (Penstemon arkansanus).
His next plans are to create a mesic forest garden on the north side of the house. “I have a number of species I’ve been growing in pots, some for years, waiting to go into this area,” Witsell says.
His favorite native plants are rare ones, but he also has collections of certain genera that he has a strong interest in, including variously scented mountain mints (Pycnanthemum) and bee balms (Monarda), both which are pollinator draws.
Witsell says he is also fond of two native plants that were there when he moved in: Arkansas beardtongue and adder’s tongue fern (Ophioglossum nudicaule). “I’ve always been for the underdog, and I love that these plants have managed to persist through 50 years of persecution by bulldozer, mower and herbicide sprayer,” he says. “I want to give them their place.”
About the Yard
- Theo Witsell started his current native garden in 2010 when he purchased the house in Little Rock, in the southeastern part of the Ouachita Mountains near the northern boundary of the Gulf Coastal Plain.
- About 0.25 acres out of a 0.4-acre lot is dedicated to growing natives, including a 3,500 square foot occasionally mowed “lawn” area in the backyard that is dominated by poverty oats (Danthonia spicata) and Cherokee sedge (Carex cherokeensis).
- The yard is home to several hundred species native to Arkansas.
- A semi-natural south-facing sandstone outcrop along his driveway has been converted into a rock garden to grow glade and outcrop plants.
- Witsell says it’s hard for him to name his favorite native plants, but he enjoys the rarer species, such as whorled sunflower (Helianthus verticillatus), which was believed extinct before it was rediscovered in western Tennessee in the 1990s; Stern’s medlar (Me-spilus canescens or Crataegus × canescens), which is known in the wild from a single site in eastern Arkansas; and Ozark hedge-net-tle (Stachys iltisii), which is endemic to the mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma. He also enjoys pinewoods lily (Alophia drummon-dii), which he says is perhaps Arkansas’ most beautiful native wildflower.
Written by Barbara Benish
All photos courtesy Theo Witsell