Feature

VTC Industry Partner Spotlight on Margaret Fisher

Chair of Plant NOVA Natives Outreach Committee

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What are the goals of the Plant NOVA Natives Committee and what do you do as Chair?

Plant NOVA Natives is a social marketing partnership made up of about 150 local organizations in Northern Virginia that are all working together to get out the word about native plants and their value in saving our local ecosystem. We’ve been going for almost a decade now, trying to reach people in as many ways as possible—social media to a certain extent, but also by reaching people where they are in person. We also do this by attending events and conferences, including conferences for landscape professionals. My role in that is to come up with and organize ways of doing outreach.

Most landscape professionals in Virginia have heard a little bit about the push to move toward more native plants. Can you tell me why that is so important?

What people need to know is that insects can only eat the plants with which they evolved, for the most part, and birds can only feed their babies insects, for the most part. So if you don’t have native plants to feed the insects, you won’t have insects to feed the birds, and in general the ecosystem falls apart. Those are just two examples of why native plants are key to the future of our local ecosystem.

Unfortunately, when we build houses in Northern Virginia and elsewhere, of course we tear out the native plants to put down houses and driveways and roads. What we leave behind in between is just construction dirt. Then we throw down some turfgrass and put in some plants, but mostly what developers have been using are non-native plants. That includes the turfgrass. So you could have a landscape that started out as woods that fed the whole ecosystem, the birds and everyone else, and end up with a landscape that feeds nobody.

What we’re trying to do is encourage people to start substituting or adding native plants to their landscaping so that there’s something for the birds to eat. It turns out that in order to actually support the ecosystem, your property or your neighborhood needs to have at least 70% or so biomass consisting of native plants. A lot of that is going to be trees, so native trees are particularly important to this process.

We’re helping to get this word out because our population of birds and other wildlife has been steadily declining over the last 50 years in Northern Virginia, and the world in general. We want to help out on a local basis because sometimes people think of nature and wildlife as something “way out there,” maybe in the mountains or in the Chesapeake Bay. But this is part of the world too. These birds are as important as any other birds. We can actually do something about it on our own properties, and we are trying to urge people to do that.

You can imagine that this work is unlikely to happen in a city to a great extent, it’s only pockets here and there. It’s also unlikely to happen on a farm where they’ve clear-cut everything and are spraying insecticides everywhere. So what that really leaves is the places in the exurban and suburban environment where we do have control over our property. There, we have no reason why we need to spray insecticides or any particular reason why we have to have one plant over another. It’s going to make a difference if we all work together on this.

Margaret Fisher

Photo by Nancy James

Is this initiative a bigger challenge for landscape professionals or for homeowners?

Mostly with the homeowners because they mostly just haven’t thought of this. In Northern Virginia, where there are 2.4 million people, probably most people have not heard of this. I run into people who are very much into environmentalism who haven’t heard of this. The movement is growing in a big way, and more and more people are recognizing it. Governments are also really getting into this because of the reasons I’ve mentioned. However, we still have a long way to go to reach all the homeowners and other property owners, homeowners associations, even faith communities that have large lawns where they could use some trees. We still have our work to do in that regard.

What I think of when I visit, for example, a local homeowners association is that when they did the construction of the townhomes, they had a whole lot of dirt that they had to move, so they piled it into hills. Then to meet the necessary requirements to control erosion and sediment runoff, they scattered grass seed on those hills, then they sold the houses. The homeowners came along and they saw these grass-covered hills and they just figured, “Well, that’s normal.” It never occurred to them to do anything else about it afterwards. As a result, from then on the poor landscape workers have been mowing on these steep hillsides, grass that’s not being used at all. That doesn’t seem very safe to me, but at the very least it must be difficult. That’s the kind of place that’s ideal for potential reforesting. Just plant some trees in there, then gradually let the leaves stay there afterwards, and then slowly it’ll reforest by itself. You just need to control the invasive plants, which is another subject, and then you won’t have to mow that anymore. But you’re still going to need to hire your landscape company to take care of that area too.

We want to help anyone who’s interested in figuring out how to make that part of their business model. That they would be maintaining that area so that it looks nice while controlling the invasive plants.

What is the problem with invasive plants?

We had this initial problem that we cut down the forest and put in a house, turfgrass,shrubs, and maybe a tree or two. That created a sterile environment, so a that’s big problem, but an even worse problem is that some of those shrubs and trees and plants turned out to be invasive, meaning that because they’re no longer in their native environment, they don’t have the control mechanisms that the ecosystems normally would provide. They escape very frequently because the birds eat their seeds or berries then carry them elsewhere, including into our few remaining natural areas where they start to grow and eventually displace the native plants that are there.

In Northern Virginia, just as an example, I spent time regularly on wildlife surveys in some natural areas and those surveys include documenting all the plants that are in bloom on a given day. When you look at the data produced, approximately a quarter of the plant species that we’re documenting are not from this continent. That includes the majority of what we call weeds in our gardens. Sometimes people think about native plants as being weeds. One such plant is butterfly weed, which turns out to be one of the best landscaping plants for a formal looking landscape. It’s a beautiful orange color, it’s very well-behaved and it stays in a nice small size and yet it’s called butterfly weeds. But if you look at the weeds themselves, the things that you’re pulling out certainly more than half are non-native. They’re coming from Europe and Asia for the most part.

How does your work align with the VTC and the EI and how have you envisioned working together to promote your causes?

It aligns in a lot of ways. First of all, we appreciate all the work that VTC-EI members and supporters are doing. We know that they have already been trying to do a lot of work to help the environment and they have a way of reaching the very folks that we’re trying to reach. This makes a very good alignment. We met at an NVNLA meeting a year or so ago. When Tom Tracy was introduced, I immediately knew I wanted to go talk to him. I think he pretty much immediately knew he wanted to talk to me because we can definitely work together. I don’t see any inevitable conflict in our missions, which are to make it worth everyone’s while to do landscaping in an environmentally friendly way and try and make it profitable for people.

Those companies that provide competent care and maintenance of landscapes that include native plants, whether they’re more naturalized landscapes or formal landscapes that include native plants, they’re in huge demand.

Plant NOVA Trees tag.

Photo by Margaret Fisher

For example, we at Plant NOVA Natives started a regional tree campaign last year called “plant NOVA trees,” our goal being to increase the tree canopy in northern Virginia. It seemed more and more likely that though planting trees is wonderful, the goal of increasing canopy will never be met if we’re cutting them down or losing them for other reasons faster than we’re planting them. There are many reasons why that happens. One reason, not statistically the biggest reason, is that sometimes trees are planted and managed improperly, so working with each other and trying to help the landscape folks know how to do that properly is a very good thing.

Looking around along the roadsides and in our common areas, what we’re seeing is that one of the biggest threats to trees is that there are non-native vines, like Japanese honeysuckle, that are killing the trees at an enormous rate. We did some extrapolation of data from Tacoma Park, Maryland that gave us a figure, potentially, of three million trees at risk from invasive vines in Northern Virginia. That is way more than the planting goal of 600,000 tiny trees. That data may or may not turn out to be exactly right, but we know from the work we’ve done so far in surveying the trees in Northern Virginia that at the very least, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of trees are at risk from invasive vines. The way you save those trees is to cut the vine at the base of the tree and paint the stump with herbicide. You have to be a certified pesticide applicator to do that if it’s not on your own property, so this is an enormous opportunity for the landscape industry.

In the past there’s been a little tension between the turfgrass community and some environmental groups. It’s great to see some mutual goals and cooperation. What do you anticipate for the future?

I’m sure we’ll have some misunderstandings along the way and people who are overenthusiastic and who haven’t thought this through, but hopefully we can be patient with each other and help each other figure these things out. It’s going to take a while, and again, the landscape industry is critical to this. Without their help, we’re not going to get anywhere.

In Northern Virginia it seems that most of the planting decisions are made by professionals. For the most part, whatever landscaping plants came with the house is what ends of getting sold with the house. Most people don’t seem to garden at all, so all those properties out there are still going to need to be taken care of. A little bit of shift in the skill set of the workers could be quite useful. What we’ve found is that those companies that provide competent care and maintenance of landscapes that include native plants, whether they’re more naturalized landscapes or formal landscapes that include native plants, they’re in huge demand. There’s not anywhere near enough of them, so people are always complaining that they can’t get anyone to do the work. You need to be able to distinguish what is, in fact, a weed from the native plant that just hasn’t bloomed yet. It may take a new skill set, which is that companies will have to do gradually, but they’re still going to be in demand, people still want to pay them. They don’t want to do it themselves.

How will homeowners be part of the process?

Homeowners can start with small steps we recommend. Just adding a few native plants, that’s really easy. If someone isn’t sure how to do this or what would do the most good, what I suggest to people is they take their big empty lawn and plant a tree in the middle of it. That tree, when it grows up, is going to provide more value to both the ecosystem and the temperature of your property and the aesthetics of your property than anything else. But it has to be properly planted and not run over by the lawn mower. It’s a very simple problem, but we hear it all the time. The healthiest way of transplanting a tree is to transplant when it’s really young, so it may be only two feet tall and look like a stick, and it’s easy to nick it with your lawnmower or your string trimmer. It’s just a matter of getting people to really care about not doing that.

What is one thing that you want landscape professionals in Virginia to take away from this?

The main takeaway that I would like to share is that we all appreciate the birds and value the wildlife that’s around us. We all want to help it, but most of us don’t know how. That includes everybody, not just the turfgrass industry, so let’s work together and make it happen.