CAN NON-NATIVES PLAY NICE WITH NATIVES?

A FIVE-YEAR-LONG LANDSCAPE EXPERIMENT (THAT HAD TO LOOK PRETTY TOO) SOUGHT TO FIND OUT

In the fall of 2019, we were tasked with taking a somewhat unsightly butterfly garden made up of native plants of the prairie and completely rethinking it. To add much-needed structure and a hint of formality to the landscape, we added in a set of nursery-bred cultivars to co-exist alongside and around the original landscape's self-sowing native plants of the Minnesota prairie.

The approach actually had parallels to a set of experimental test plots called Competition Time that landscape writer and educator Noel Kingsbury had conducted in the UK, so we reached out to him to see if he would be interested in having this reworked butterfly landscape in Minnesota become a US outpost for the Competition Time project. Turns out Noel was on board, so for the next five years, we documented how the landscape evolved by species location and quantity over time.

Would one species reign supreme? Would the cultivars push out the natives? And what would the garden look like over time? The answers might be surprising and might challenge folks to rethink what they know and understand about our landscapes and inherent assumptions we have about both their ecological value and how they evolve over time. To read the full article on the project on ASLA's The Field, you may click HERE.