Mill Pond Garden to host open day May 20

Mill Pond Garden’s open day from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Thursday, May 20, will celebrate communities of plants, featuring clematis and companion plants including prize roses at peak, iris, alliums, rhododendrons, azaleas, pitcher plants, thriving trees and more.

Plant divisions will be for sale. To subscribe free and purchase tour tickets, go to millpondgarden.com.

Plants like company. They grow best in communities with other plants. Mother Nature grows garden plants happily mixed and growing into each other. Isolating plants on a large bed of mulch is not natural nor the happiest return for the effort. One can learn from the example of clematis, a vine that in the wild and in the garden grows best rambling among shrubs, thriving, to delight the viewer. Woody plants and perennials form relationships with each other, not just visually and physically, but underground. Founding communities of plants is the wave of the future of gardening based on emerging science and observation.

Mother Nature fills up space, allowing plants to grow shoulder to shoulder, spilling into each other. The gardener can copy nature and enhance by some selective pruning to allow all the individual plants to thrive.

University research has shown that plants benefit hugely from allowing their roots to grow among their neighbors’ roots intimately. They exchange nutrients as needed and protect each other in subtle ways, such as chemical signals of danger from predators to which the plants can produce anti-predator toxins, or sharing water and food as needed. All of this communication happens at the mycorrhizal level of fungal networks that orchestrate the whole for the plants and feed them all. Often the mycorrhizal fungi is a single, huge genetic biomass, an individual itself with its own unique genes that colonize a large area of plants and live symbiotically with them, each feeding and nurturing the other.

Plants thrive in communities. A solo tree in a lawn, with no other woody plants around, often does not thrive as it might if in a bed with other woody plants. Garden plants do better with thick plantings in larger beds, rather than isolated. The resulting abundance and health is also more beautiful.

UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard, a forest ecologist, said, “Organisms living in soil, fungi, help trees establish and grow. Some fungi live inside roots of trees and form mycorrhizas, literally fungus roots. These fungi help trees acquire nutrients and water from the soil in exchange for carbon.”

Simard discovered that trees connected to one another through an underground web of fungi can communicate by transferring carbon, nutrients and water to one another. Simard also helped identify mother trees, the largest trees that act as central hubs for vast below-ground mycorrhizal networks that support young trees or seedlings, ferrying them nutrients they need to grow. Most recent research has shown that such cooperation is across species, friendship between species. The happiest trees and shrubs grow in clumps. And if one of the clump dies or is cut down, the survivors weaken and may die, too, from the loss.

An example of how plants benefit each other is seen in the role of dandelions, which grow in acidic or compact soils poor in calcium, which is needed in abundance by trees, lawn grasses, and many other plants. The dandelion can have a taproot deep into the ground which sucks up calcium and micronutrients, bringing them to the surface. Gradually, this action restores the balance of pH and chemistry to improve the soil for other plants, and then the dandelions will decline naturally. The deep taproot of the dandelion ends up aerating the soil and letting nutrients, air, and other plants’ roots move in. The dandelion is a master at restoring soils and helping its neighboring plant species. Long a source of food and medicine to humans, the dandelion, which evolved 30 million years ago, is more nutritious than any other garden vegetable, and all its parts are edible, even if they are bitter.

An old saying is that for woody and perennial plants, “The first year it sleeps. Second year it creeps. Third year it leaps.” The science behind this saying is now known to be that it takes three years for a new plant to grow its mycorrhizal colony of fungi and to connect to the other plants in the area for extra support. A gardener can shave some time off this three-year establishment by adding the fungi in powder form when planting.

The state of the art and science is that the life of gardens is far more important underground than what people see above. Healthy soil means healthy plants. The lesson is to establish communities of plants close together for best results. They benefit each other and the beneficial soil microbes.

Gardeners find, as they have at Mill Pond Garden, that this produces superior results including greater plant abundance, health and beauty as well as resistance to infection and insect predation.

Mill Pond Garden recommends adding spores of beneficial soil microbes and mycorrhizal fungi when planting a garden, and fertilize with only organics such as horse manure which is very high in mycorrhizal fungi, as well as leaf compost, garden compost or commercial OMRI-certified organic fertilizers. The soil fungi are available online and in stores locally as Espoma’s Biotone.