Land heals but it doesn’t go back

I visited a new construction site the other week – I get called in often to help fix them up after the inevitable gash of backhoe and truck.

These sites look like a wound in the forest – but with the seed of something great inside them. Humans have disturbed woodland to make a home and now they want to fix it.

The most obvious hurt is the forest edge. Bare trunks are revealed where forest used to be.

Some of the trees are accidentally damaged – a possibly fatal wound that will take a few years to play out. Others stand tall and alone, perhaps the centrepiece of the new cottage landscape.

This is the inevitable disturbance of residence. We’re not the only creatures to disturb a landscape, and disturbance is an important ecological process.

But those who call me want to go to the next stage.

Mullein and goldenrod

I just finished a project at a new construction site where I planted 1,300 small perennials and a few shrubs to bridge the gap between cottage and forest.

The land had already started healing: ruderal plants – what we might consider weeds – had popped up. Mullein, yarrow, the first shoots of goldenrod.

I could have left it and, given enough time, the yarrow would give way to raspberry which would give way to oak and maple. Nature heals itself.

In this project I helped the process along. In the sunny areas I added more later-stage perennials and grasses: little bluestem, foxglove beardtongue, liatris, three types of aster.

At the edge of the site I added dogwoods and ninebarks to soften the edge of the forest, and a serviceberry for flowers and berries.

My client will weed out the unwanted plants – pulling the fuzzy leaves of the mullein and keeping an eye on annual grasses and horseweeds – to allow the longer-lived plants to take over.

She will have a landscape that looks established and part of the site rather than weedy.

Nature will have a head-start on healing.

Sparrows and chipmunks

My own home is eight years into the process. I’ve been pretty laissez-faire, allowing nature to do its thing. I did however plant some dogwoods, pearly everlastings and columbines. Because I wanted to.

This year nature has leapt forward. The herbaceous plants are lush. The dogwoods and willows I added are large. The elderberries and poplars I didn’t are even bigger. Bare slope is now a thicket, home to song sparrow nests and chipmunk burrows.

And on the other side of the house, flowering plants I added are breaking up compacted ground, ferns I didn’t are growing in the part-shaded conditions around the septic. Common milkweed, which found a home for itself, is forming a lilac-scented forest.

Dogwood flowers

My landscape looks healthier – but it will never go back to where it was. The opening cut from the forest for my home will always be an opening – black cherry will never replace my kitchen.

But I see dogwood flowers and woodpeckers out of the living room windows. Pale green pearly everlasting leaves brush my legs as I walk down the hill to the dock and monarch caterpillars crawl on the swamp milkweed leaves by the water.