Digging Deeper: Dynamic Successional Mosaic Landscape

Sat, Sep 7, 2024
10:00 AM-12:00 PM

Tickets for this Digging Deeper will be available on Monday, July 1.

I am a lifelong naturalist, and my landscaping practices reflect this interest in natural history. 

At the turn of the twentieth-century, there were 200,000 houses in NYC. Most of the land in my area, after previously being deforested, was planted with non-native grasses to feed horses. Most of the landscape here
is covered in agriculturally adaptive Eurasian plants. It’s difficult to imagine what the past plant configurations were.

The principal focus of my landscape project is to reintroduce as many appropriate native plants as possible, as well as remove as many problematic introduced plants as possible. 

Tilling the soil is often problematic because it exposes bad memories, that is, the undesirable seed bank present there. It also disrupts the soil and its living community. Plastic covering and solarizing techniques have been effective in preparing soil for plug and seed planting. 

Unlike typical gardening practices, my only interest is mowing management. No weeding, watering, mulching, or thinning. Once plants are established, mowing frequency and pattern will be the only management practice. 

All plants have different needs and respond to different mowing pressures. My goal is to encourage a diverse plant and animal community that will be more stable as time goes on with less intensive editing of invasives necessary.

It can also be considered a distribution center. The distribution vectors already exist in the form of birds, wind, and water flowing over the bottomland into the creek. The more desirable native plants are here, the more seeds can be spread far and wide.

Location:
David Nyzio's Garden
Stone Ridge, NY

Date and Time:
Saturday, September 7
10 a.m. to 12 p.m.