Dan Jaffe's Home Run

I had a recurring dream through high school.  I would walk into my first class of the morning, sit down, and immediately be told ‘the test’ was about to start.  What test?  I haven’t studied for it!  Then I noticed my feet were cold because I wasn’t wearing shoes.  Oh, and I had forgotten to put on clothes.  And everyone was pointing and laughing.  I dealt with that nightmare by always verifying I had on clothing before I walked out the door.

For the past eight years, I’ve had a different kind of nightmare.  In this one, I walk into a room and everyone is waiting for me to talk.  Except I can’t find my computer with the program on it.  And my projector’s bulb has died.  And the cables to connect the two aren’t there.  And everyone is drumming their fingers, waiting for me to begin because I’m also half an hour late.  To prevent that nightmare from coming true, I approach every presentation with a set of preparations that Betty says has more checklist items than packing for a two-week vacation.

Dan Jaffe in his natural element

Last night, I accompanied Betty to a meeting of the Norwood Evening Garden Club where a terrific horticulturalist named Dan Jaffe was scheduled to hold forth on the subject of native plants.  Dan has a file-folder-full of programs with names like ‘Kill Your Lawn!’.  To his acolytes, it doesn’t matter which program he is doing because they’re all endlessly fascinating and jammed full of information encapsulated in humorous anecdotes.

Dan arrived a few minutes before 7 p.m. for a 7:30 presentation. 

Dan's book...

The venue was the meeting hall of a vintage-early-20^th Century church and a screen was already in place.  As the club held its business meeting, I could sense an animated conversation going on in one corner.  Dan’s laptop computer was open, but I didn’t see a projector.  Several minutes later, a projector appeared.  His back was to me, but I sensed all was not well.  A second laptop appeared.  A member of the garden club with apparent technical skills began working with the second computer – probably her own – and two cell phones.  All I could see was a screen that kept saying ‘no internet connection available’.

The business meeting ended and all eyes fell on Dan.  He told the group, as the dragooned IT specialist’s fingers flew across the keyboard, “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to have one of the most interesting presentations I’ve ever been part of.”

For lack of a connector between the
old and the new....

As he said this, I saw the dreaded ‘no connection’ flash on the screen.  As I later learned, Dan thought the club was supplying a projector, and the club thought Dan was bringing his own.  Dan told me he usually keeps his projector in his car, but stops doing so during the dead of winter when sub-freezing temperatures are common.  The projector that showed up – from which good Samaritan, I never learned – was indeed a digital projector, but one not accepting input from a now-standard HDMI-format cable.  (Part of my ‘pack everything’ checklist is an octopus of a converter that bridges incompatible formats. I have never used it myself but once loaned it out for a state garden club convention.)

Dan could have responded in a number of ways.  He could have apologized and said the presentation would have to be rescheduled.  He could lay responsibility at the foot of the club (I have been in attendance at such a presentation).  But he did neither.  Instead, he asked his audience – somewhere between 35 and 40 people – to form a circle around him with their chairs.  And, for the next hour, he proceeded to give his presentation in the round, holding out his laptop for everyone to see photos of the plants as he discussed them.

The Norcross Wildlife Center
straddles Massachusetts
and Connecticut

The presentation was a wonder.  Dan – who is horticulturalist for the Norcross Wildlife Center, an 8,000 acre preserve in south central Massachusetts set up to protect and propagate native flora and fauna – knows native plants as few speakers do.  And, he speaks in a conversational manner that never intimidates. 

This talk, perhaps because it was unencumbered by having to talk to a large screen, was freewheeling, full of anecdotal asides, and incorporating far more interaction with the audience than in a ‘normal’ presentation (when questions are usually asked at the end).  Few speakers of my acquaintance – and I certainly do not number myself among them – can pull a rabbit out of a hat the way Dan did at that meeting. 

It was, in short, a home run.  A master class in how to turn adversity into an education for everyone attending.  Bravo!

Spreading the Doug Tallamy Gospel

Doug Tallamy

I had the pleasure last week of hearing one of the clearest and most compelling voices on the intertwined topic of ecology, landscaping, native plants, and survival of wildlife (including humans).  Then, this week, I heard a second voice… one of someone who just doesn’t get it.

The first voice was that of Doug Tallamy.  He spoke at the Harvard Science Center in Cambridge.  His talk was given in the building’s largest auditorium, which seated 500, and every seat was filled with an additional 75 attendees standing or seated on the floor.  The talk was sponsored by Grow Native Massachusetts, a group with goals closely aligned with those of the guest speaker.  The audience gave him a sustained standing ovation at the conclusion of his talk.

Tallamy writes and speaks lucidly on the environment and how ‘citizen biologists’ can effect change for the better.  He’s a professor of etymology at the University of Delaware, though I suspect he spends more time on the road than in the classroom.  A few years back, he wrote what I thought was the defining book on the importance of native plants to support the native food chain.  Bringing Nature Home was and is a highly readable and thoroughly researched treatise on why we can’t just plant what’s ‘pretty’. 

Soft-skinned worms and
caterpillars are the most
nutritious foods for baby birds

For example. oak trees abound with hundreds of species of native caterpillars which, in turn, are the preferred food for birds, and just about the only food for their nestlings.  Conversely, the Bradford pear – a Chinese import despite its anglicized name – supports no native species of any kind.  Yet, homeowners (and municipalities) continue to plant Bradford pears because they provide a well-proportioned, uniform tree for streetscapes. 

Bringing Nature Home ought to have brought about a revolution in America’s thinking about what is planted and where.  It made an impact, but climate change and species extinction require more than just ‘an impact’.

So, Tallamy had written another book, Nature’s Best Hope, with the telling subtitle, ‘A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard’.  Like its predecessor, it is a page-turner and rife with practical suggestions along with supporting statistics.  Tallamy is no prophet of gloom; rather, he is a self-described optimist.  He offers concrete solutions; not just horror stories.

In his new book, Tallamy takes aim at the absence of biological ‘corridors’ in 21^st Century America.  Wildlife is increasingly relegated to isolated pockets, and those pockets are not sustainable.  Species extinction is as much a product of lack of habitat as of climate change (though the two are linked).

Collectively, America's lawns
are the size of New England

The solution, he writes, is at our feet: the lawn.  The U.S. has 40 million acres of lawn (an area the size of New England), and it is growing at 5,000 acres a year.  Lawns are sterile, they use 30% of the available water in the East and 60% in the West. Moreover, in our efforts to maintain perfectly green and manicured lawns, we pour carcinogens on them, and 40% to 60% of those chemicals make their way into the surrounding surface or groundwater.  Lawns are the ultimate lose-lose proposition.

The perfect lawn is an ecology desert

But, he said, our love affair with turf is not necessarily unbreakable.  Once upon a time, everyone smoked.  Today, cigarettes are considered filthy and smoking is banished to parking lots.  Coats of sealskin and other rare furs were status symbols.  Today, they’re shunned.  All it takes is for public opinion to determine a practice is ‘bad’.  Vast lawns are a bad habit that needs to be broken.  Once broken, those biological corridors will thrive.

What should replace most of those lawns is native plantings that will feed native moths and other insects that will lay eggs that will produce juicy caterpillars that will feed native birds… the ultimate virtuous cycle. 

Which brings me to the second part of the story; the voice that just didn't get it.  

Betty teaching

My wife, Betty, is a Doug Tallamy acolyte.  She has absorbed his writings.  She has put his tenets into practice at our home.  And, she packages what she had learned into talks for garden clubs and libraries.  One in particular, ‘Healthy Lawns and Alternatives’ is a 45-minute distillation of Tallamy’s observations, aided and abetted by Betty’s own study and practice.

She gave the talk this morning to a garden club, and I had the opportunity to observe part of it.  The conclusion of her talk is a graphic of an average suburban property; a house, a driveway, some trees and foundation plantings, and lots and lots of grass.  She points out the problems: why maintain a narrow strip of grass alongside a driveway, or where a side of the house is near a property line.  Why not replace those areas with native trees, shrubs, ground covers, and perennials?  No one plays on front lawns, so why not reduce the space and add to the plantings?  In the back of the house, how about a permeable patio on which to entertain, and a vegetable garden? In three slides, a property that was 80% grass became 20%.

The graphic that incensed an attendee
double-click for a full-screen view

As soon as her talk was finished, a hand shot up.  A woman said such a scheme might be workable for some people, but would be impossible in her own case.  Her husband believes a vast expanse of lawn is the natural scheme of things.  I happen to know this woman and I have seen her property.  Her lawn is measured in acres, interspersed by an occasional perennial bed.

The woman said they entertain on the lawn and her husband practices golfing on the lawn.  He would never change his views, she said, and to achieve marital harmony, the lawn had to stay.

Betty handled the question (there was no question; just a justification for the woman’s own gardening practices) admirably.  Betty carefully said everyone had to make their own choices.  But they should do so with all the facts in hand; including the ones that point to acres of lawn as creating an ecological desert.  Perhaps, Betty suggested, she could work from the margins; gradually shrinking the lawn. 

Based on the balance of the questions, I have a suspicion Betty made headway with most of the audience.  She presented not just a rationale for change, but a specimen list of native plants that have all the glory of the sterile ones she wants to replace.  She came home to an inbox filled with additional questions.