Naturalist turns lawn into a biodiverse forest

Valerie Blaine talks the talk when it comes to native landscaping, as you would expect from a naturalist for the Kane County Forest Preserve.

But she also plants the plant, as the woods surrounding her St. Charles area home attest.

When she bought the ranch house 11 years ago, the 2 acres were a monoculture - an area where only one species is grown - and Blaine can explain why that is bad. The lot featured white oaks all the same age and a lawn of grass that Blaine said looked like a golf course.

"The problem with an even-aged monoculture of trees is they all die at the same time, and if we get a pest that affects that tree, we have nothing. The first thing I did was put some diversity in - red oak, bur oak, and native shrubs like witch hazel, black haw and nannyberry to put another layer in the forest canopy."

The velvet grass of the lawn required a lot of chemicals and water, a condition Blaine does not consider healthy.

So the next thing she and her then husband did was to reduce their mowing, except for a little lawn around the house. When you live in a woods it's good to keep a firebreak around the home, and they also had young children who liked playing on the grass.

"The first year after we stopped mowing we started to see what came up from the seed bank in the ground," said Blaine. "Spring beauty, trout lilies, lot of fun stuff. It had been suppressed by all the mowing. Who knows what things were killed."

Blaine has also discovered shooting stars, Mayapples, Dutchman's breeches, bloodroot, Solomon's seal, side-flower aster, Joe Pye weed, snakeroot, ferns and sedges.

"It's full of surprises. It's wonderful to see what things pop up that maybe the birds brought in."

Blaine also started planting native plants under the trees to add diversity to the forest floor.

Why natives?

"If there's any place native plants should grow it's in native turf. They were there before I was. Once established - because they evolved with the vagaries of our season - if it's really dry they'll make it through. I never have to water. They have deep root systems so they soak up water when it rains."

And what about those birds!

Blaine credits her diverse woodland with bringing in diverse wildlife.

The Eastern Phoebe and red-belly woodpecker have nested on her property, and she saw a black-billed cuckoo migrating. This year she is watching the nest of a pair of red-tail hawks, trying to determine whether they have one chick or two.

Woodpeckers need hollow trees, so she urges homeowners to leave dead trees standing unless they are a danger to people or buildings.

"Standing dead trees are wonderful for wildlife like red flying squirrels and bats and a butterfly called Mourning cloak overwinters as an adult under the bark of old trees," she said.

Like the Native Americans, Blaine believes in fire as a way of maintaining her woodland.

"Burning is part of the ecology of a healthy woodland. It helps keep the nonnative plants from proliferating. It does help enrich the soil some. After a burn all it takes is one of the spring rains and like a phoeniz rising it turns green and healthy and new."

The best times to burn are in March or April after the snow melts and before things green up or November before snowfall.

But in 11 years Blaine has managed to burn her land only three or four times. These burns are strictly regulated, and it's difficult for all conditions to come together. She and her friends need a day off from work on a date with proper humidity, wind and even cloud cover for safety and air quality.

While Blaine considers native landscaping to be relatively easy to maintain once the plants are established, she does have two enemies that are constant challenges - buckthorn and garlic mustard.

Buckthorn is a European tree brought here decades ago as an ornamental. It grows invasively, crowding out everything else, depleting the soil and creating a biodiversity desert.

Blaine cuts large buckthorns and burns them in her fireplace. Seedlings are easy to pull by the root, and she leaves them on the forest floor.

Garlic mustard, which was introduced in the United States as a culinary herb and for erosion control, is particularly tenacious because it doesn't burn. If Blaine pulled it and left it on the forest floor, it would reroot and start growing again. Each flower produces thousands of seeds that can survive up to five years. Blaine maintains a pile just for pulled garlic mustard, containing it in a certain area.

And deer are also pests. Blaine says there are three times as many as there should be. She uses chicken wire to protect favorite plants like a bottle gentian she purchased.

And what is she working on now?

"Sit back and enjoy what comes up. Sometimes it's just miraculous what plants can flourish. Some of the oaks that I planted a decade ago have responded really well. They are taller than I am and look real healthy. Some shrubs are really going to town."