Todd Crail knows you don’t need a big to make a big impact.
Crail of Toledo, Ohio, has only one-fifth acre city lot, but that lot, named the Metal House Farm and Preserve, is brimming with gardens that represent different communities of plants, as well as food gardens, chickens and just enough turf grass to entertain people around the campfire.
A fish ecologist, Crail says he became interested in native plants about 15 years ago and started slowly adding some to his yard. “I became interested in native plants because I wanted to lessen my terrestrial footprint to benefit native fish and mussels that live in our streams,” he explains. “Everything goes someplace, and usually, it’s into a river first. You can’t fix things in streams; you have to fix what’s upstream.”
Wanting to gain control of his hydrologic footprint, Crail set out to reduce the amount of lawn in place, and not use chemicals or fertilizers to do that. “I started with a couple of beds, and water resources was my primary interest. I didn’t get interested in pollinators until later.”
He moved to his current home 10 years ago, transplanting some of the plants from his old house to his new one, and adding more. Today, Crail has nine gardens based on light, soils and competition. “As a researcher, I’m interested in interactions between species and themed communities that work together,” he said. “There is some level of organization in my gardens, but within the gardens themselves there is no organization, and that seems to work well.”
For an example, he talks about his blue lobelia. “The seeds blew to one side of the house and took off. They seem to be happy there, so why fight them?” he asks. Natives need to saturate a space, rather than have a plant here or there, Crail says. “I spend very little time on my gardens. I let them do what they do, but they somehow still look right.”
With heavy clay soil, Crail said he had to haul in sand for sand-specific species. “I made modifications for water, soil and light, and assembled communities according to those topics. We basically filled in all the spaces we wanted to fill in, and the grass that was left was the grass that was left. Everything here is about storing water and reducing our footprint.”
Crail says his yard is less about native plant gardens, and more about a philosophy for sustainability. “There have been great benefits to our food from having so many pollinators around,” he explains, adding that his neighbors are enjoying his extremely fruitful tomatoes thanks to the number of bee visits the flowers get.
Despite that there is more than 150 different native plant species in his yard, there is one plant that fascinates him most — the carrion flower (Smilaxecirrhata).
Why? “It’s ‘dead meat’ attraction for fly pollinators and the shape of its flowers,” Crail explains. He also enjoys Michigan lilies (Liliummichiganense) that dominate one of the rain gardens.
Crail doesn’t just enjoy native landscaping; he speaks to groups and tells them that natural landscaping is possible, even in small places. He uses Bret Rappaport’s BRASH acronym to stress important considerations when using native plants. (BRASH stands for Borders, Recognize the Rights of Others, Advertise, Start Small and Humanize.) “When you follow those principles, everyone is happy, including the neighbors,” he says.
Of those, the most important advice Crail gives others is to start small and not place your garden on the edge of your property. “Leave those borders,” he says. “Native gardens are the cultural pariah. Getting sanctimonious is not winning favors with other people, especially if they have common milkweed popping up in their grass.”
Crail has also done a lot of service learning with his University of Toledo environmental students, such as removing invasive buckthorn. In addition, Hometown Habitat featured Crail and his students who worked to restore habitat at Irwin Prairie State Nature Preserve.
Crail wishes all people would use native landscaping in their yards; the Earth would be better off if they did. But there are also other benefits to using native plants. “I enjoy having the plants here to photograph, as I can really get to know the ‘plant people,’” he says. “And with a 2-year-old daughter, it’s really nice to walk straight out the door into a nature preserve, even though we are squarely in an urban setting.”
About the yard
- It includes more than 150 species native to Lucas County, Ohio on a one-fifth acre city lot.
- Native gardens occupy about 40 percent of the lot, including the house, garage and driveway. All the plants come from a 60-mile radius of the home.
- The yard was featured on a recent Toledo Naturalist Association Garden Tour and Wild Ones Summer Garden Tour. The yard and home were also featured in the Hometown Habitat documentary.
- The yard includes six raised vegetable and herb gardens, pervious pavement (crushed stone to absorb and regulate soil moisture), as well as rain gardens, woodlands, prairies, and a savanna garden.
- Just some plants included are horsetail (Equisetum hyemale), Royal fern (Osmunda regalis), white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda), wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), tall coreopsis (Coreopsis tripteris), flat-topped aster (Doellingeria umbellata), bottle gentian (Gentiana andrewsii), and swamp, Sullivant’s, common and butterfly milkweeds (Asclepias incarnata, A. sullivantii, A syriaca and A. tuberosa).