A Gentle Approach to Habitat Resoration
The understory.
Let me start by describing the piece of land I live on:
It’s about half an acre in size and sits on the side of a wooded hill. There is a small amount of “flat” land in the backyard of my house - around 60’X40.’ The front of the property (the majority of it…) tumbles down to the road on a steep incline. It’s a rocky hardwood forest consisting of mostly red oak, choke cherry, various types of hickory, and green ash, with a few basswoods dotted throughout. Oh, and one lonely eastern hemlock that seems to be holding its own.
The understory is ninebark, elder, maple leaf viburnum, solomon’s plume and solomon’s seal, rosy sedge, stoneroot, various species of ferns, canada mayflower, black cohosh, and dozens of other shade-loving native plants. It is lush and beautiful and thriving. While it still isn’t quite the ideal forest ecosystem I would like it to be (the shrub layer needs more work…), to say it has come a long way in the time I’ve lived here feels like an understatement.
When I moved in ten years ago, the prospect of healing this land and getting it back to a healthy place was daunting. Both the front and back yard were completely dominated by sprawling thickets of invasive wineberry, bittersweet, garlic mustard, and mugwort. A massive forsythia hedge, left to grow out of control, had taken over a significant portion of the front slope.
On top of the less than ideal vegetation demographic, the front of the house had clearly been used to dump leftover debris from various construction and renovation projects. Just beneath the surface of the soil I found heaps of roof tiles and old shag carpets; brittle, moss-covered, but intact window blinds; and endless bits of impossible to identify plastic and metal scraps.
It was, to be frank, a wasteland. The energy was incredibly off, filled with reverberations of disrespect for the land. I wanted it fixed right away, but clearing everything out and then buying and installing enough native plant plugs to populate the space was…prohibitively expensive. Instead, I decided to treat the situation like an experiment: what would happen if I just kept pulling the plants who really shouldn’t be here and adding in a few native plants whenever I could? Could I, one person, get the ecosystem back up and running on almost no budget? Would the native seed bed have a chance to emerge if the way was cleared?
And so began years of gently but persistently nudging the land back to health. I pulled out bags and bags of debris, fought with the deep roots and spiked canes of wineberry, and religiously hunted down bittersweet vines and garlic mustard. I moved fallen logs to form barriers and breaks to prevent erosion and created soil behind them by mounding up leaves and the weeds I had pulled (all of them, importantly, before they had gone to seed). I added a ninebark, some black cohosh, and one or two elder trees to keep the soil from washing away down the slope at the steepest points.
Slowly, changes began to happen. On a summer day this year, as I made my way down the steep slope of the hillside to survey the plant life, it hit me just how far the land had come. I tugged up a lone garlic mustard here and there - that will never truly end - but the majority of the understory now consists of native plants that returned, emerged, and spread when given the opportunity.
Black raspberry and blackberry sprung up in place of the wineberry thicket. A forest of poke has established itself in the gap that formed when I cut back the forsythia. Blue stem goldenrod, white wood aster, dewberry, jewelweed and solomon’s seal crept into the voids where garlic mustard and barberry had faithfully been removed. Hooked buttercup, wild basil, pitcher plant, Canadian black snakeroot, violets, and wood avens appeared. Yes, there is poison ivy, too, but that is a native plant that feeds the birds and deserves a place in the forest. Near the road, regularly tugging out daylilies, garlic mustard and mugwort allowed a small grove of bladdernut to establish itself and spread.
The formula is, essentially, to take out the plants that seek to dominate the space, push everything else out, offer little in the way of food or shelter to the local wildlife, and then see what naturally comes up. One you know what you’re working with, you can add in what you can when you can, focusing on plants that are suited to your region and the type of habitat you’re working with (which is what I’m really here to help you with).
I’m sharing this because I regularly talk to clients who feel overwhelmed by the prospect of rehabilitating their space. Many of them are constrained by time and budget, and I don’t want that to stand in the way of them taking action to make an impact on their land.
I also don’t want people to feel that if they can’t do it all at once, they can’t do it at all. I want you to know that it is possible to slowly and gently encourage an ecosystem to revive itself over time. What I have come to realize over a decade of working with the land is that the work is never done.
As I mentioned at the start, this little piece of earth is far from perfect (whatever that even means…). There are still swathes of packysandra to be pushed back and replaced with native groundcovers that do more for the creatures I share this land with. I have stiltgrass growing on the side of the house, and it will take time to replace that with jewelweed and wild basil. English ivy is creeping across from a neighboring yard. Landscapes and plant communities have always, and will always, continue to change. The earth is a living thing, after all, and nothing is static.
To be in relationship with the land where you live means having a conversation that never ends. Feeling anxious about an endpoint will stop you from even getting started - let go of the idea of “finished.” Instead, start where you are and do what you can with the understanding that there will always be more to do, but that that is the joy and honor of having land to take care of.
If I can do this much on my own to restore a half acre forest, you can do it too. It takes is patience, persistence, and attention, but one day you’ll stop, look around, and realize how far you’ve come.