We Made Our Farm a Garden for Wildlife
How we turned our dream horse farm into a sanctuary for native plants and wildlife.
June/July 2009
By Ellen Sousa
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The Sousa's have turned their farm into a sanctuary for native plants, and for Ellen's horses.
ELLEN SOUSA
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We fell in love with this farm the moment we saw it. My husband, Robert, and I had been looking for a property where we could fulfill my lifelong dream of keeping my horses at home (rather than boarding them). And, as a passionate gardener, I immediately recognized the potential of this four-acre parcel of hemlock- and beech-wooded river valley in central Massachusetts, complete with a farm pond, stream and large pasture. It was a gardener’s dream.
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Previous owners had established wonderful garden “bones” with fieldstone retaining walls, damming a stream to create a pond, and using electric fencing to keep horses from eating the plants and shrubs.
Plant and They Will Come
Beautiful as the property was, it was ready for a gardening intervention. I was eager to eradicate invasive and non-native plants in order to encourage a diverse and robust habitat of native plants, insects and wildlife. So, in addition to the horse farm and food garden, I dove headfirst into resurrecting and nurturing the native plant and wildlife populations. We bought bare-root native “wildlife-friendly” shrubs (gray and silky dogwood, serviceberry, bayberry, blueberry, viburnum and chokeberry) from our local conservation district (you can find your conservation district at www.nacdnet.org), and planted groups of them to create thickets providing habitat for many birds, snakes, insects and small mammals. The flowers of these shrubs, after being pollinated by various tiny insects, turn into berries that provide important sustenance to migrating birds who return (exhausted and hungry) here in spring. I chose native plants already adapted to our localized New England climate. When planted in their natural growing conditions, these plants require no fertilizer or supplemental irrigation (other than rainfall) once established.
By buying and planting just a few native plants, I was able to collect their seeds and propagate them in large numbers. I took classes at the New England Wild Flower Society’s native plant center, and grew beautiful native flowering plants such as butterfly weed, liatris, coneflower, boltonia, rose mallow, virginia rose, rudbeckia, New England aster, perennial sunflowers (helianthus) and native grasses, such as switch grass. We also encouraged the wild goldenrod to seed itself to provide late-season nectar for butterflies, as well as seeds for birds.
Genetic diversity helps plant species survive environmental threats such as global warming and competition from invasive species, and growing native plants is a valuable way to help protect biodiversity as a whole. By doing so, I was able to help establish new and genetically diverse populations of many native plants, which are disappearing from our region as New England becomes increasingly urbanized.
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