Get away in your own backyard this summer
Create your own nature retreats at home simply by paying attention to what you plant.
What does it take to make you feel like you’ve gotten away? What lengths will you go to, to find relaxation, serenity, and natural beauty – that place where your psyche just goes, “Ahhhh”?
Does it involve hours in the car? A plane trip? Wrangling reservations for a destination on your bucket list? And yet it’s all worth it in the end?
Each year, millions of people flock to our national parks—areas set apart and protected from settlement, development and/or extraction of natural resources, so that all may enjoy their extraordinary beauty. I’ve personally enjoyed spending time in a handful of these national treasures: Yellowstone, Glacier, Badlands, Redwoods, Acadia, Crater Lake. The experiences have been awe-inspiring. Traveling through them, hiking and camping, I’ve felt grateful for the wisdom, foresight, and fortitude behind their creation. Our many state parks, too, are wonderful destinations to leave our daily stresses behind, immerse ourselves in nature, and settle down to a slower pace of life.
This year, sadly, due to the pandemic, many of us are missing the usual opportunities and freedom to just pick up and travel to these spots, to camp on “our” land, to be wowed by natural wonders, to feel close to nature, and sink into a more relaxed state of being.
But . . . what if you could create your own national park? And what if you didn’t have to travel to enjoy it? Even more, what if your national park was your own property? That vision is the brainchild of Doug Tallamy, Professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. Tallamy sets out this idea of what he calls “Homegrown National Park” in his latest book, Nature’s Best Hope. Here, he invites us to create our own nature retreats, simply by paying attention to what we plant.
“It might seem preposterous to equate a walk in your yard with a trip to Yellowstone,” he says, “but there is much that Homegrown National Park (HNP) can provide without the expense, crowds, reservations, or traffic jams of a monumental road trip. And it can provide these things every day! Admission to HNP is free, and there are no restricted seasons.”
Plant it, and they will come
Scratch the surface of the natural “web,” and it’s easy to see how every species relies on others. For instance, many of the birds we enjoy watching and listening to rely on insects for their food source. In turn, many of these insects rely on specific plants. (A familiar example is milkweed, which is the sole host plant for the monarch butterfly.) On the other end of the spectrum are plants that provide food for multiple species. The white oak is the champion in this regard. Tallamy says that oaks in our Mid-Atlantic region support hundreds of caterpillar species—557 to be exact. By comparison, most other native trees in our region don’t break the 100-species mark. If you have room to plant just one tree, you might consider making it a white oak.
What happens when you plant with the food web in mind? Animals know what they need to survive, they know how to find it, and there’s endless delight in seeing who arrives. There’s also a benefit to letting dead things remain. The old, rotting, pin oak tree in the corner of our yard is host to different species of woodpeckers, along with nuthatches and other birds that thrive on the insects living in the rotting trunk and limbs. As