Good stuff grows in these here parts, and some of the region's neatest plants are the ones that evolved to fit our unique climate. However, you won't find them for sale at the local Home Depot.
by Adrienne Martini
The Tennessee Coneflower, a type of Echinacea, has beautiful purple petals that frame a dark greenish center. It's a striking plant, as plants go, and is surprisingly easy to grow despite its pampered appearance. This foot-tall gem is native to three mid-Tennessee counties (Wilson, Rutherford, and Davidson) and is notable not only for its appearance but also because it is rapidly disappearing—so quickly, in fact, that it was placed on the federal Endangered Species List.
Andy Sessions and the small crew at Andersonville's Sunlight Gardens—which includes husband Marty Zenni and nursery manager Lin Burnett—have long been champions of the power of planting native plants and of saving the plants that progress is rapidly plowing under. The seeds of the business were sown at the beginnings of Zenni's career as a landscaper; he wanted to use native plants yet couldn't find sufficient supplies of them. Sessions was able to put her MA in Botany to practical use. Now, 16 years later, Sunlight Gardens is growing like a weed.
Most of the business is mail order. The greenhouses can be visited, however, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Don't expect to be dazzled by retail flashiness—this is a working nursery, and the bare-bones environs are geared toward raising healthy plants rather than pleasing shoppers.
But the trip to Andersonville is well worth it. Pot after pot of native species mass against each greenhouse's walls. Some are in bloom, some are just beginning to send out small green tendrils. Burnett bends over a group of black plastic pots, pulling an order that will be heading to Chattanooga. These rows of greenhouses compose a fulfilling, almost bucolic, picture even on a gray, overcast day. And Session's enthusiasm for native plants as well as for what Sunlight has managed to achieve makes this scene that much more idyllic.
Q: What are some of the benefits of gardening with native plants?
Andy Sessions: The main benefit is to be able to grow and to landscape with attractive plants that reflect your sense of place. So there are attractive plants that we can use here in Knoxville that are typical of what grows around here anyway. Plus, they may require less maintenance. They may tolerate our weather better than non-natives. Many of them attract various kinds of wildlife—if that's what you want to do—birds, butterflies, whatever. Plus, they're more attractive plants—they increase the palette that you can choose from.
Q: And what is the downside?
AS: I would say that the only disadvantage of trying to garden with native plants is availability. Right now so many things are still hard to get—both in numbers and at a reasonable price.
It's not really a disadvantage—you just have to think about it before you get into it. If you're thinking about a woodland garden, naturalizing your woods with abundant wildlife, and you conjure up pictures of phlox and trout lilies blanketing your hillside—that would be a big job.
It would require that you prepare your site beforehand, getting rid of invasive species that will out-compete what you're trying to put in. You have to take into consideration the trees that are growing there and whether or not the plants that you want to plant will grow under those trees. The numbers of plants you require may be very high and the availability...you're just not going to get trout lilies. They're just not available through propagated means.
Q: What are the bigger challenges to gardening with native plants? And how do you deal with that in your business?
AS: The biggest challenge is propagation—definitely.
Some of them [native species], we have figured out over the years how to propagate them successfully and reliably. But the learning curve was steep! However, the two wildflowers that I would say are always going to be the all-time favorites people ask for more than any others are still the most difficult or slowest to propagate—the lady slipper orchid and trillium.
Our nursery grows and sells only plants that are 100 percent nursery propagated. We don't collect, we don't salvage, we don't get plants from the highway department when they're going to destroy them to build a highway, just because our ethics right now are that we only deal in propagated plants.
Trilliums just take so long to propagate—and first you have to have a stock to propagate from. We don't yet have that stock in any kind of numbers but maybe, in five years or so, we will have enough plants to sell.
The lady slipper orchids—although they are now being offered by some tissue culture labs as propagated entirely through a lab, they still haven't worked out the problems of transplanting them into your garden. They still require a fungus that goes with their roots in order to grow. Until that's worked out, we don't feel the need to sell them when we think that their chance of success will not be good.
Q: Why not just dig up plants next time you go hiking?
AS: There are a number of reasons why somebody shouldn't collect plants from the wild. One, it might be illegal to take plants if you don't have permission.
Two, and this is my biggest reason, is because with the increase of construction and development going on, wild areas are being gobbled up by the hundreds of acres daily. So we're losing native habitat—and with that goes the native plants. There are a few that are threatened with extinction because of this. So one should not collect plants from the wild because they are already disappearing due to construction.
The third reason is when you dig plants from the wild, especially when the commercial diggers do it, they're generally in flower, which is the worst time to be transplanting anything. The degree of success is probably slim. Those are the big three: Survivability, depleting wild populations and that it might be illegal.
Q: How have East Tennessee gardeners taken to the idea of landscaping with native plants?
AS: I think that a small but growing group has taken strongly to it. There are the devotees that are really into it, and then there are more that are slowly learning the benefits and also realizing that these plants can be attractive at the same time. Just because you're growing wildflowers doesn't mean that your yard is going to be a tangled mess. You can have an attractive, cultivated-looking garden (if that's what you wish) using native plants as well.
The thing that we are still having to teach people, though, is that growing with wildflowers and native plants does not mean necessarily that there is no maintenance—that you just chuck these plants out and up they come, you never have to take care of them again and they naturalize and everything's beautiful. That's not the way it works.
You still have to do—perhaps more—thinking ahead of time in order to be successful than if you just go out and plant a regular garden. You're talking about long-term survivability, not only of your plants, but you're also trying to facilitate an interaction between your planting and your environment and the other wildlife around. There's a lot to think about.
Q: Which plant is your favorite?
AS: It would change. I really couldn't say. But if I had to pick one, today it would be Spring Beauty, a claytonia.
Q: What is a year at Sunlight like?
AS: We try to do the bulk of our propagating in the summer and in the fall so the plants will be sufficiently rooted in the winter time—so that they can come up in the spring and go on and be planted. Summer and early fall, there's lots of propagating going on—seed propagating, cuttings, division. Late winter is spent transplanting seedlings and, perhaps, doing some potting up of other things.
Starting late February, early March, mail order picks up. Mid-March through April is really spent getting orders out—and it is the prettiest time to see many of the wildflowers. May is still a lot of deliveries, then starting in May and June we start taking cuttings and collecting seed from the spring-blooming wildflowers. The rest of summer is spent potting things up.
Of course, all along we're trying to weed and keep things clean. One of the things we like to do is to let some plants go to seed where they are, so we can't really apply that many herbicides around here because we're wanting things to come up. So there's a lot of hand labor that goes into this.
Q: So why spend your days mucking about with native plants?
AS: Given that I have to have a job, this is about the best thing I can think of. I go to bed every night knowing that I'm doing a good thing. We're making more plants to beautify your gardens, to make people happy, and to attract wildlife. Or to increase the numbers of plants that might be threatened with extinction.
For instance: the Tennessee Coneflower. Those sites now are all protected but for the past number of years we have been co-operating with the Tennessee Natural Heritage Program, who monitors and protects those sites. They have been giving us seed from those sites to grow here, then we give them back the seedlings, and they plant them back. We were just told, late last fall, that due to their efforts and our efforts, it's going to be removed from the endangered species list. And we think that's really great.
March 20, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 12
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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