Noah's Garden

by Sara Stein

I recalled species I had once known that now were missing: orioles, purple martins, meadowlarks, bluebirds, box turtles, walking sticks, praying mantises, monarch butterflies, luna moths, red spotted salamanders, green grass snakes, little brown bats, weasels, and many more. That I could compile so long a list from memories going back no more than forty years was startling. What if I hadn't known the rural countryside before development transformed it? How does one miss what one has never known? What longing, then, would drive one to repair the damage?

These thoughts bothered me considerably... As the years pass, fewer and fewer people will long for the call of bullfrogs. Today's children, growing up on lawns and pavements, will not even have nostalgia to guide them...

Noah's Garden, by Sara Stein, is a web of questions and ideas, of gardening and ecology, gentle and provocative; shortly after I read it, I sought out a hard-cover copy for my own. I also bought a copy for my brother as a housewarming gift. And I plan to present one to my mother this Christmas. I suggested it to friends, mentioned it to office mates, and then read it again. I liked this book.

I like it because it is a practical answer to the eternal question, "Well, what can I do?" Stein answers: you can garden. "This is not someone else's problem. We - you and I and everyone who has a yard of any size - own a big chunk of this country." Let us all plant our little half-acres and quarter-acres, Stein argues, or multiple acres if you are lucky enough to have them, with a little less lawn, and more wildflower. A little less yew, and more viburnum and serviceberry. Less hybrid rhododendron, but perhaps some native roses.

Already our understanding of wildlife is based mostly on such presentations as National Geographic Specials; as a result, we are likely to have more sympathy for rhinoceroses in Africa than for the toad on our own doorstep...

Noah's Garden is not a quick read, because it is chock full of information. But it is very well written, and each chapter is fairly self-contained, so it is easy to put down and pick up again. It charms in part because Stein traces her own mistakes, and her own dawning realization of them, as she and her family began to transform their own 6 acres. She banished the grouse from her meadow and the toad from her doorstep as she mowed and paved and neatened to create a beautiful and barren manicured estate; and only gradually did she realize what she had done, and begin the slow process of undoing it.

Throughout, Stein weaves a tapestry of ecological information. She tells of the microsystem responsible for composting, whose services we use without understanding. Of the origin of the lawn, that grassland whose fragility is mocked by the robust grasses of the native prairie, yet which would in fact flourish were it but in its proper place. Of the sweet gum tree, whose early-turning autumn leaves are a curious deception that is mentioned in some field guides, but not explained. ("...spots of shining scarlet against a dark green foliage as though it were in berry. And indeed it is - but the actual fruit is dull blue... the author didn't get the joke of this arboreal illusion.")

She tells of the interdependence of squirrel and bird, nut and fruit, and why plants that bloom in April and plants that bloom in August both produce in September. We as gardeners cannot understand and reproduce interdependencies that took a million years to weave together. If we plant nectar for the hummingbird, have we also planted what they need for their nest-building, or their fledglings? Yet, she says, "paradoxically, the Plan may not be so hard to follow. The general outlines are before us in the woodlands, thickets, meadows, marshes... As for the fine details, I thin we needn't worry. This is a picture that, well started, will fill in itself..."

Stein is a pragmatist, not a purist. Kansans, she acknowledges, cannot now graze buffalo in their front yards, nor Yankees welcome black bears to the suburbs. We cannot eliminate the non-native daylilies from our roadsides, nor is their much need, though perhaps we should try to eliminate the more invasive Japanese honeysuckle or purple loosestrife. ("My pluralistic argument respects exotics that have naturalized as responsible citizens.") But we can, each of us, anytime we wish, improve our own stark and barren lawns, one bush, one tiny flower at a time. We can garden with a new perspective. "...if I could buy only one tree, I'd have to favor a rarer native over a commoner exotic. There's no other way to repopulate the land. The trees must come from us, our gift." And the animals will follow.

Stein has convinced me. If one person in each neighborhood did it, it would be an unrivalled genetic repository. If a quarter of every neighborhood took part, it would be a revolution, and perhaps advance the cause of conservation further than any other single act we can undertake. Remember luna moths?

...for if we don't grow milkweeds in our gardens, we'll have to tell our grandchildren, "We used to see monarch butterflies long ago."

© 1995, Greg Tillman.

latest update: May 30, 2001
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