When you plan your new home at Farm Pond Circle, also plan your landscape... we believe they are integral and best considered together. To help you along, we have partnered with The Plantsmen Nursery (www.plantsmen.com) to develop this special program exclusive to Farm Pond Circle property owners.
Offer details
When you close on the purchase of your new building site at Farm Pond Circle, you will receive a voucher from The Plantsmen Nursery that entitles you to a full 10% discount on all nursery purchases, landscape design services and installation on your new Farm Pond Circle lot. This offer is good for all purchases made for the first twelve months of ownership of loits in Phase Oe (lots 3, 5, 16, and 17 If your building lot is located in Phase Two (lots 6-15), the offer begins at the time the lot becomes eligible for building as authorized by the Town of Lansing, or at the time of your first voucher purchase, whichever is earlier. This offer is not transferrable. Proof of Farm Pond Circle lot ownership required.
Native to Where?
by Dan Segal, owner, Plantsmen Nursery, reprinted by permission
As I begin this article, I already regret raising the subject, in some ways. More and more, discussions about native plants cut right to the chase and ask the question, what is native? Or, native to where? There's no easy answer, and probably several right answers, so if you're looking for a quick fix, you might save some time and stop here.
The problem is that some plants have a wide range and are native to large areas, including many states. So if you are going to grow red maple for its fall color, you are wise to grow a plant from seed collected locally or regionally. On the other hand, some widespread plants aren't native in our region, but are granted a sort of honorary 'native' status--Echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower, is a sort of poster child for this phenomenon. Yes, it's a North American native, and even eastern to some degree. And it's more native than all the Eurasian species so prevalent in horticulture, so how can we not give it some kind of native status?
You may have noticed I tried to sneak around the widest pitfall--mentioning local or regional seed sources. Not only can these be hard to come by (we are working on that at The Plantsmen Nursery), but few people will actually agree on what is meant by local, or even regional. In our area, The Finger Lakes is a nice neat name for a geographic area. But what about northern Pennsylvania? Where does that become western PA? Or Southern PA? And to what extent is northern PA more similar to the Southern Tier of NY than it is to cental PA? Not that it matters all that much to you or to most gardeners, but it's amazing how predictably any discussion of native plants among professionals, gardeners and shcolars boils down so quickly to this slippery notion of locality, of localness.
For non-native plants, we have a few simple ways of evaluating whether or not a plant is likely to thrive in a given area. Hardiness zones, established by the USDA, are generally accepted as roughly reliable when deciding which plants to use for your climate and region. The easy way to remember how USDA Hardiness Zones work is that the lower the temperature, the lower the zone number. This has come up a few times this spring in the nursery, with customers questioning the viability of a Zone 4 plant in our Zone 5 winters, so remember lower temps mean lower zone numbers. Hardiness zones are the formal, published guidelines. There is also an abundance of anecdotal information, collected and dispersed as a kind of modern horticultural oral tradition, as well as displayed in living gardens all over the world. Generally, if you see a plant living in your area, it is hardy there.
Native plants have a real, living range and distribution in their home lands, so their likelihood for survival is sometimes simply expressed on a map. This tells us where the plant actually lives. Remember, for hostas there can be no map showing their natural range in North America, because they don't come from here, One could collect oodles of records showing where hostas grow well in North America, and map that, but it's still not a true range map. That would be a spatial version of the USDA Hardiness Zone maps, more or less.
Many discussions of nativity seem pointless to gardeners, and they may be. In most cases, it's the ecologists, working on ecological problems, who are most interested in nativity. In the garden it often boils down to survival, so if the plant lives, that's great, that's enough. But there are gardeners who swear by using local plants--not only plants having a range including their locality but plants grown locally using local seed and cuttings. Knowing where plants are native to (the world over, not just here) sheds light onto what they need to do well here, and it also enhances your knowledge of your own garden, the plants in it, and of all plants you will learn later in life. The added perspective is rewarding. So keep up the good work! Read up on the plants you meet and find out where they come from. The more you know the more you'll find yourself falling head over heels for the green world.