Update March 5, 2025 and Book Recommendations
Ecological Rehabilitation
We want to present a short summary of the field to you. We will discuss it in 3 sections, A B C
- Summary of mankind’s destruction of the countryside and the urban outdoors
- Summary of the 3 primary recent pivotal textual resources, plus a few other texts.
- Summary of the kind, gentle, individual, super cheap and effective and efficient solution.
Section A
We will show that modern agriculture has fought Mother Nature tooth and nail for centuries, using mechanical technology, fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides for very short term financial profits to the detriment of the environment and society. Similarly, private industry has manipulated public fashion and taste to develop an urban landscape extremely detrimental to Mother Nature and society. Both by destroying native plants and ecosystems, have created artificial FOOD DESERTS and have been STARVING WILDLIFE to near extinction.
Farmers have been destroying the rural environment for about 12 thousands of years with intensive agricultural practices of, plowing and monocultures of annual grains. They started with the eastern part of the fertile crescent. This a boomerang shaped area comprising the Nile, north along the eastern mediterranean shore crossing east overland into the area of the Tigris-Euphrates River, then south to the Persian Gulf. The land was fertile with forests and savannah, perfect for hunter gathering. The Younger
Dryas(10,000 to 9,000 BC)a cool dry period decreased the forested land and the people turned to agriculture of grain crops, wheat and rye, in the high lands and domestication of goats. At that time there were about 4 million humans on earth. With agriculture the population doubled every thousands years reaching about 200 million at the time of Christ. Farming depended on rain initially. With population pressures, they resorted to irrigation. The land was abused and eroded and washed down to the Persian Gulf. The population was forced to move to new land.
Just as they destroyed the fertile crescent, they then destroyed north Africa, then North America, then South America, then south east Asia and then Central Africa. Initially, the rich deep forest deposited humus was exploited to complete depletion and then the exploiters moved geographically to find new
deposits of rich deep forest and savannah deposited humus.
In North America as elsewhere, the pattern was to displace by whatever means the indigenous population,“manifest destiny” and practice industrial agriculture, plowing and growing mono-cultures of annual plants. For example in the American South, tobacco was so profitable that entire valleys with 10 or 20 feet of black soil would be exhausted and washed to the sea, leaving just bare rock within a generation. The farmers would just repeat the exercise further west leaving devastated countryside. Until, another
crop, cotton, was found to be even more profitable. Millions of tons of topsoil are washed into the Gulf of Mexico causing a huge dead zone, yearly.
Urban lifestyles have incorporated landscaping practices, that are very profitable for private industry, but very destructive for the environment. For example, it is de rigour to have a manicured lawn made up of a foreign, invasive plant from Britain and France, called Kentucky Blue Grass. The latest fashionable plants include Hosta Lillies from Asia, periwinkle from Africa, butterfly bushes from China, cosmoses, bachelor buttons etc..
Today, there are very powerful tools to impose our will on the land. They include :
- Machines, manual and gasoline powered, that can destroy in hours what Mother Nature has spent thousands of years building
- Chemicals to kill a few selected or all plants and animals indiscriminately.
- Alien invasive plants and insects and other animals from continents away.
- Genetically modified organisms tailor made and patented that can do good or sometimes evil
Cruel, cold-hearted, conventional farming and land use, has poisoned Quebec. Within a generation due to huge government subsidies and practices, there are over 1 million acres of land in alien, GMO insect resistant Asian Soya, 1 million acres in neo-nicotinamide laced corn, millions of acres in monocultural insecticide sprayed forests. There are only 8 million acres of arable land in Quebec and so much is now off limits to native wildlife, almost 8 million acre of FOOD DESERT. Recently, millions upon millions of birds now bypass the St. Laurent valley and take the Appalachian Mountains to Tadoussac, cross the St. Laurence and then turn left to the Boreal Forest. Sometimes they, because of weather conditions, arrive too early, the Boreal forest cannot feed them yet. Millions of birds sometime in a bizarre reverse migration, fly south over Tadoussac to the Appalachians for a few days to eat, to rest, and to await warmer weather and food in the Boreal Forest. Besides whales, Tadoussac has a new tourist attraction, becoming more and more famous each year. Listen to the podcast by Birds Canada, “the Warblers” Sept 23, 2024 on Tadoussac. The American Birding Association, podcast did a similar podcast on Tadoussac last year.
Section B
There were over 5.14 million research papers published in 2022, 2.82 million were on scientific subjects. Many of the papers if they were tested, where unreproducible. Too often, charismatic leaders who have garnered huge following and captured research fields have been shown to be false, examples are Ancel Keys and Garrett Harding. This is especially true when a field is new. We will show that the new field of ecosystem rehabilitation is best understood if 3 books are read.
The 3 pivotal books are, “Braiding Sweet Grass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Bringing Nature Home” by Douglas Tallamy and “Wilding” by Isabella Tree.
Later in another paper, we will take a more intensive look at the field. We will talk about pioneers such as E.O. Wilson, Kenn Kaufmann, Ted Parker, Lee Reich, Larry Weiner, Dave Foreman, Franz Vera, and many others.
We listened to a podcast of Backyard Ecology with guest Douglas Tallamy, about his awakening to the problem of environmental degradation and his solutions. For too long, society has disregarded dire warnings of pollution, global warming, menacing extinctions. It was always someone else’s problem. More and more people are beginning to understand the dimensions of the problem and are beginning to start to kindly, gently, and humanely and individually start to solve the problem. He noted that his 10 acre land which was an old hay field was over grown with alien invasive. He and his wife took over the land in 2000 and he, being an insect specialist, an entomologist noted that the weeds were pristine. They had no insect or animal predators. Any native plant that recovered from the seed banks in the field was promptly eaten by deer and insects. Not so with his invasive alien weeds. They were uneaten, growing luxuriantly. Only a few native plants that sprouted from time to time were eaten and provided food to wildlife. Therefore the land was a FOOD DESERT to native insects and animal wildlife. So how to return the land to health.
His biggest solution to this was his wife Cindy who worked tireless all year round to clear his 10 acre land of invasive weeds. He is the godfather of environmental restoration, but he has been working in this field of study for only 25 years. While, his wife Cindy worked on physically ridding the land of these invasive alien weeds and he studied the literature on what had been done. There was not much literature. He promised the publicist of the University of Delaware to print a pamphlet on the results of his study of the literature and solutions. That pamphlet turned out to be a book called “Bringing Nature Home” published in 2009. Over 20 years they rid the land of these free-loading invasive alien species and planted or had native plants arise out of long forgotten hidden seed banks. Mother Nature was bountiful and the land recovered. He raised over 1370 moths and over 67 bird species on his 10 acre land. It was a gentle, kind miracle. It was almost costless once the weeding was done. But it restored the food chain on his land. If Mount Royal park at 672 acres had 67 bird species breeding on it, it would be famous Canada wide as a top birding hot spot. We have trouble seeing half that number in one day at full spring or fall migration, let alone breeding on the land. And 1370 moths comprises over 40% of the whole moth population of Pennsylvania a state of 28.6 million acres. Ridding his 10 acres of land of invasive plants and letting Mother Nature re-wild it with native plants cost next to nothing in dollar costs but over a 20 year period made it among the most biodiverse, fruitful, productive properties in the state. The rough hard part was getting rid of the alien invasive weeds.
To restore native plants to his land, he just let Mother Nature through long forgotten seed banks and transport by indigenous animals restore the land. After 20 years of restoration, the land is now too shaded with an almost complete canopy of tree tops and he needs to use a chain saw to open spaces for wildflower meadows. A climax forest is a poor carbon sequestrator. A meadow is more productive as a food source and carbon sequestrator.
What he discovered is the basis for the new wave of Environmental Awareness and the kind, gentle humane movement to help Mother Nature. Today’s society through its practical, hard-nosed emphasis on getting the utmost economic return on investment in farming is destroying the land and starving wildlife. We have choices to make in life and more and more people are becoming aware of what these choices are, what they cost and are choosing to side with Mother Nature.
Isabella Tree and her husband Charles Burrell, had a many problems with their huge estate of 3,500 acres in Britain, called Knepp. For centuries the Burrell family had farmed the clayish land. But the conventional farming practices had poisoned the land with nitrogen and phosphorus and almost all the native vegetation was gone. They applied for grants to rehabilitate the land with native plants and animals indigenous to the area in 2000. They relied on the expertise of Franz Vera and Ted Green and others. Within 10 years they started to have success with the return of so many endangered species such as Nightingales, the giant Purple Emperor butterflies, woodstorks, peregrine falcons, and red kites. Their land became a tourist Mecca. Nature lovers travelled hundreds of miles to see the “miracle at Knepp”Like the Tallamys’ they found that Mother Nature seeded the restoration of their land, and with time a full tree canopy needed to be managed so that very sunny productive open areas could thrive. The rough hard work was getting rid of the invasive alien weeds. They went from a staff of 17 farm employees to 270 when they converted from farming to wildlife conservation, and tourism. Isabella Tree published her book “Wilding” in 2019. The restoration was simple and cheap except for eliminating the invasive weeds.
So you can see the field is very young and little known. We have spoken to hundreds of people about the new field of study and have met only 16 Quebecers who have even heard of Douglas Tallamy, let alone Isabella Tree. The graduates in botany and ecology we have met from the Universities of McGill, Concordia, UQUAM and Montreal have never heard of Tallamy or Tree.
We want to address this knowledge gap with a quick resume of people we think you should know. Later, in another article, we’ll take a deeper look at this field. We’ll talk about pioneers like E.O. Wilson, Kenn Kaufmann, Ted Parker, Lee Reich, Larry Weiner, Frans Vera, and many others.
Indigenous people throughout the world, have always known and have always used the Rules of Mother Nature to guide their practices as they have Stewarded their lands. Their lives and that of their family and friends depended on modifying the land so it was as productive as possible on a daily and yearly basis. They learned Mother Nature’s rules and followed them and avoided disasters that would cause hunger and disease for themselves and their loved ones. And they developed codes such as the Honourable Harvest that would protect them from rule breakers that would destroy the environment.
More and more non-indigenous people are realizing that the best policy is to follow Mother Nature’s rules. Do not impose rules and solutions that fight against Mother Nature. To plant an alien invasive species such as Norway Maple is foolish. Similarly, an agriculture that wants to plant tomato plants and peppers from South America and celery and lettuce from Europe and carrots from Asia should be looked at for the long term implications. Non-indigenous farming slowly and inexorably destroys the land, unless specifically and expensively planned for. The Autochthones were and are the best stewards of the land. For centuries they lived healthy, happy lives in harmony with an abundant nature. They never imported food crops from continents away. John Muir and others naturalists misinterpreted indigenous stewarded lands as wilderness. The autochthones farmed these lands for thousands of years. It took European settlers just a few decades to destroy this stewarded land. Let us look to indigenous crops like the 3 sisters, (corn, beans and squash), and blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, black cherry, etc.
We agree with people farming outdoors. This has been shown to increase mental and physical health enormously. Just being outdoors increases your parasympathetic system. It lowers your blood pressure, your blood sugar, your cortisol levels. It makes you calmer and happier. It helps you and your family and your neighbours. Everyone should be outdoors more in nature and enjoying nature and working with nature. But, if you were to chose between an activity that helps Mother Nature, planting native plants and one that you are fighting Mother Nature, European farming, we recommend the former.
More and more non-indigenous people are learning how to help and restore Mother Nature:
- Douglas Tallamy, the godfather of ecological restoration has written many books and given countless interviews. He should be studied and consulted for all programs of environmental rehabilitation.
2. Isabella Tree and her husband Charles Burrows should also be consulted extensively.
3. Mary Reynolds has written a book “We are the ARK” about Acts of Restorative Kindness. Anywhere and everywhere, everyone should be doing ARK by working outdoors in harmony with Mother Nature, planting indigenous native plants to re-establish a productive wildlife.
4. Nancy Lawson has written “The Humane Gardener” with the same goal of people working outdoors in nature restoring wildlife and diminishing the danger of extinctions.
5. Kristin Ohlson has written “Sweet In Tooth and Claw” and “The Soil Will Save Us” with the same intent of helping nature by working outdoors with nature
6. Judith Schwartz has written “The Raindeer Chronicles” “Water in Plain Sight” “Cows Save The Planet” giving countless examples of people working together to save nature and the planet. She talks about the Loess Plateau restoration involving millions of people in China to restore an area the size of Belgium.
7. There is a very interesting youtube video
That shows what a little thought and care and love can do to help the environment. A small 6 acre garden at Great Dixter to the south east of London has over 2,000 species of plants and animals.
8. Baptiste Morizot has written several books on that advocate practices to make the environment livable.” MANIÈRES D’ÊTRE VIVANT : ENQUÊTES SUR LA VIE À TRAVERS NOUS”,” RAVIVER LES BRAISES DU VIVANT”
9. George Monbiot is the author of at least 9 books. He has won the United Nations Global 500 Award, the Sir Peter Kent Award, The Primio Mazotti prize, SEAL Environmental Journalism Award. He has fought for indigenous people in Indonesia, Brazil, East Africa, Great Britain. He has been severely beaten and shot at and arrested by militarily juntas and has been declared dead at least 2 times.
He has written about environmental awareness in “Feral” written in 2015 and “Regenesis” written in 2022. Both extremely well written and informative. He is a polymath who should be consulted on many topics. Over the centuries, thousands and thousands of enclosure acts have destroyed common lands, transferring it in perpetuity to rich aristocratic families.
He is an activist and has had many many videos, among these are:
Section C
We have learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Douglas Tallamy, and Isabella Tree that you need to rid your environment of alien invasive weeds and then repopulate your land with indigenous, native plants. They provide the FOOD in the FOOD CHAIN. The wild life will gravitate to the food source and recover.
That the best way to help the environment is to learn Mother Nature’s rules for your neighbourhood and then follow them..
A)The first thing is to learn Mother Nature’s rules for your local area.
B) To work with Mother Nature following her rules for your local area.
The rules of Mother Nature are few and simple, but depending on the rule, if not followed can lead to major disappointments. For example, wildflower seeds unlike commercial seeds require a prolonged period of COLD AND DAMP simultaneously. So, you need to plant wildflower seeds in the fall, winter or very early spring. So if you plant wildflower seeds in May, 2025, they will not germinate until May, 2026.
WHAT ARE MOTHER NATURE’S RULES FOR MONTREAL:
Douglas Tallamy and his wife and university student and colleagues found:
1) NATIVE insects and NATIVE herbivores in general could not eat and use non-native alien plants from another continent. It would take thousand of years for the local NATIVES to develop the genetic mutations to compete. Therefore, these aliens spread like wildfire and often created monocultures of indigestible weeds for native animals. Examples are phragmites, Japanese knotweed, ox-eyed daisies, canary grass. This created local FOOD DESERTS. Phragmites after 350 year in North America is eaten by 2 or 3 insects. In Asia, it’s native land, it is eaten by 175 insects. Man often encouraged the growth of these weeds which they planted initially in their gardens as Decoratives. But Man did not stop there.
2) Birds in general feed their young not seed, not adult insects, not worms, but CATERPILLARS. There are a few exceptions such as raptors, waterfowl, robins, goldfinches, swallows, swifts etc. The vast majority feed their young CATERPILLARS. Caterpillars are the young of butterflies and moths. These caterpillars like Monarch caterpillars require in general specific native wildflowers or trees. It takes about 7,000 caterpillars to feed the average chickadee clutch of 6 to 8. If the area cannot support 7,000 caterpillars, the parent may not breed that year or move away, or a few chicks might starve to death. Caterpillars in general cannot feed on NON-NATIVE PLANTS.
3) In general, it takes an area with 70% NATIVE plants to support a normal clutch of chickadees. Less than 70% and you have a partial or complete food desert for Native Birds.
4) NATIVE wildflowers in general require a prolonged period of both COLD AND SIMULTANEOUSLY WET. You need both at the same time. This is called STRATIFICATION. Wildflower in general have a built-in germination inhibitor. This is to prevent the plant form germinating in the fall and freezing to death during the winter. STRATIFICATION allows the seed to destroy the inhibitor. Then the seed can germinate.
5) To get STRATIFICATION, you can use a complicated time-consuming method of putting seed between wet paper towel and alternately putting them in the refrigerator followed by the freezer over a week and even more prolong periods for some stubborn plants species. OR the simple method is plant outdoors in the fall or over winter or very early spring. If you do not properly STRATIFY the seed and you just plant them in late May 2025, the seed will probably not germinate until May, 2026.
6) In the past it was recommended to prepare the seed bed for 2 to 3 years. They recommended, digging up the land, poisoning the land with roundup to kill weeds, use interim cover crops like rye or oats, and repeat until the land now no longer showed weeds. We use a new method that covers the ground with a few layers of newspaper then covering with weedless earth to depth of 3 or 4 inches and then immediately tamp in the seeds on the soil. We used this method on the gardens behind the Grand Potager last year and we got a crop of over 70 Native Wildflower. It cost us about $500 for the soil for a garden of about 300 square feet.
7) Weeding is required
IN SUMMARY:
A) Grow native plants
B) Young birds eat caterpillars which eat native plants
C) 70 % is minimum required to sustain bird population
D) Native plants require stratification
E) Plant in fall or winter or very early spring
F) Kill weeds with newspaper and weedless soil in one day
G) Weeding is required
THINGS TO DO TO HELP MOTHER NATURE IN MONTREAL:
If you want, you can purchase 2 bags of soil, usually on sale for about $1.00 or $3.00 each for heat treated to make them completely seed free. Eco-Lawn,= Eco-grass, does not require stratification. You can plant an area the size of a kitchen table in the spring with “Eco-grass”. You can do the same in the fall with NATIVE wildflower seeds.
We are giving out small samples of both, enough to cover a kitchen table size area of Kentucky blue grass. By doing this you will change yourself, your family and your neighbours. If everyone loves the results and increases the acreage. Montrealers will save millions of dollars in expenses and the wildlife will explode in numbers. The young and the poor and the old when they see this will demand the change everyone wants, but only they can ask for it without flack.
You can buy wildflower seeds for a high price from a reputable nursery or you collect them yourself in the fall for free. Please do not buy non-native wildflowers. They are cheap and they will grow quickly in the spring. But insects and animals cannot eat them and feed them to their children. You will have a colorful, biodiverse garden but you will be starving wildlife.
We consider GUERILLA GARDENING as vandalism. You are invading your neighbours land without permission and sowing NON-NATIVE ALIEN FLOWERS. How gauche. Native wildflowers require stratification and will not flower until one year later. So what you are sowing are NON-NATIVE ALIEN FLOWERS and what you are creating is a FOOD DESERT for NATIVE ANIMALS. The flowers may be beautiful to look at but are often very invasive and destructive.
HOW TO KNOW WHAT IS A NATIVE INDIGENOUS WILDFLOWER:
1) Read BRINGING NATURE HOME by Douglas Tallamy. It has a chapters on native plants and what butterflies and moths they support
2) Birds Canada has a wonderful app available at birdgarden.ca. just follow the steps and it will give you a list of about 450 species of native plants for your local area.
3) Your local horticultural society. They can refer you to lists of native plants.
4) A free app called Quebec wildflowers. Download it and it will tell you whether a flower is NATIVE OR NON-NATIVE
5) iNatualist is a free app. It can identify the plant for you and tell you if it is native or non-native
6) Akène is a new company that sells native wildflowers and wildflower seeds. It seems to follow our principles , but they do sell some non-native plant.
7) Urbain Seedling at 7000 blvd LaSalle. It has super kind people who are very knowledgeable about NATIVE and NON-NATIVE PLANTS.
8) The internet. Just google the plant name and you can find many article about the plant.
We see our role at Renature Montreal as educators. We are not advocates or propagandists. We give you the facts and you decide how to use them. We will never knowingly lie to you. We will sometimes contradict some untruths, but that is not our role. As educators, we teach. As for fighting against untruths, that is up to the public. We believe over the long term, it will be the young the seniors and the poor, who by becoming wise with knowledge who will do what their minds, hearts and souls tell them is the right thing to do. It is they who will change the world.
Al Gore is rich and powerful. He had the world best climate change experts as advisors, the world’s best speech writers and the best media experts to help him craft his lantern lectures on Global Warming. But nothing changed. He won among the intellectuals and the rich and powerful. But they were practical and cynical enough to listen but do nothing, except to ignore his advice and rake in billions of dollars in cold hard cash. As a gift to him, they awarded him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He had not won the hearts, minds and soul of the people who most matter, the young, the old and the poor. He gave talks to the cynical, practical, rich and powerful, but not to the poor, the young and the old.
Almost all the hero authors, experts we mentioned previously, knew as children in their minds and hearts and souls, what needed to be done. Unlike most, they did not become practical and cynical. The kept what they knew in their minds, hearts and souls and worked over 20, 30, 40 years to develop what they knew as children and finally to be heard and listened to. We hope to help children bypass the 20 to 40 year hiatus before they are heard.
The poor have always been neglected. Shunned, disbelieved, discounted, disregarded. We hope when they realize how simple, dirt cheap, efficient it is to help Mother Nature. They will participate like everyone else, equal to everyone else and as effective as everyone else to follow their minds, hearts and souls to do what they know is the right thing to do.
“April is the cruellest, month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memories and desire, stirring dull root with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow.” T.S. Eliot.
Oz is 78 years old. Like all seniors, too often he awakens in mid night with the dreams of childhood of the flowers and scents too vivid to be lived now with dulled senses or having dreaded nightmares of his compromises, his faults and old friends he abandoned in their need. Seniors have constantly relived these dreams and nightmares. With mortality getting closer, senior are wiser and ready to cast aside their cynicism, their practicality and fears and are ready to listen to their thoughts, their hearts and their souls.
Yes, it is the young, the poor and the old who will first listen with their minds, hearts and souls and will change the world.
If you want, you can purchase 2 bags of soil, usually on sale for about $1 each in the spring or for $3.00, the weedless versions heat treated to kill weed seeds. You can plant an area the size of a kitchen table in the spring with “Eco-grass”. You can do the same in the fall with NATIVE wildflower seeds.
We are giving out small samples of both this evening, enough to cover a kitchen table size area of Kentucky blue grass. By doing this you will change yourself, your family and your neighbours. If everyone loves the results and increases the acreage, Montrealers will save millions of dollars in expenses and the wildlife will explode in numbers.
The rich and powerful have hundreds if not thousands of dollars to spend for green gardens, but they are too cynical and practical to waste their money and time on them. The young and the old and the poor can afford $2 to $6 and they will insist on spending their money because they know in their minds and hearts and soul that it is the right thing to do.
Elinor and Vincent Ostrom are best known for their work on studying successful commons, Common Lands belonging to the public and run by groups dedicated to their wise use. The best way to know them is to listen to Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Acceptance speech. Yes she was the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. The best way and fastest way is to watch a video made by their friend Barbara Allen of the University of Indiana, “Actual World, Possible Future”.
https://polisci.indiana.edu/news-events/news/2020-ostrom-documentary-barbara-allen.html
“Healthy Nature Handbook, From The Volunteer Stewards of Chicago Wilderness.”
The book describes a group organization that is long lasting and effective and cohesive.
Horizontal leadership vs top down.
In Quebec like much of modern society, the dominant organization is a top down model. You have a leader, who through getting the funding or delegation by the government is in complete charge. Often strong leaders like Jean Drapeau, make foolish choices and society is stuck with a folly costing billions of dollars. The operative words in top down models are secrecy and obey the leader, the experts, “the smartest guys in the room”.
The organization recommended by the Healthy Nature Handbook is an horizontal model of a community, of colleagues, volunteers, a collective, a tribe, a congregation. There are leaders and stewards, but they are chosen by meritocracy. There is open discussion, cheap talk, were everyone gets to know everybody’s strength and weaknesses and just naturally people who have demonstrated the dedication, hard work and love for their field become in charge of that aspect of the project.
The qualities you are looking for in a worker, a steward are:
1) curiosity, needed for a lifetime of learning
2) humility
3) ability to find and keep mentors
4) willingness to lead
5) confidence to act
6) Eagerness to share with others
7) at least a minimum of technical skills
8) proximity to work
9) ability to plan, act, assess, improve
10) ability to work well with others, especially those different from you.
We hope that the renature montreal movement will always be governed by the above principles.
We hope that the grand pottage will also adopt these principles and have a horizontal administrative structure. We are hoping that each individual group in the grand potager cooperative will act as a member of a community and will work collectively and separately to help each other as friends and mentors and neighbours. They will have individual and collective discussions and enough information will be exchanged so that everyone knows everyone, who to trust, who to help, who needs help, who can give help. So everyone will protect each other’s back and we will be a well knit community of friends.
There are hundreds of articles by many Universities and their extension courses, the Audubon society, Sierra Club etc. We will just give you 2 examples:
Come visit our indigenous wildflower garden behind the greenhouse in Verdun. Last spring we were given permission on April 5, 2024 to plant a 300 square foot garden over invasive Kentucky Blue grass. Over 8 days we covered the grass with newspapers and about 3 inches of soil and on April 13, 2024, we planted over 120 species of native wildflowers seeds. The time was too short for all the seeds to be stratified, (cold and damp period), so they could not eliminate all their internal germination inhibitor. So we only got 70 wildflowers species to sprout and blossom over the next 6 months. We followed Mother Nature’s rules and within 6 months had a 300 square foot indigenous wildflower garden at a cost of $500 for the soil we used.
We hope like the Great Dixter Garden to do a biological survey. We hope with time by avoiding herbicides and pesticides green concrete, alien invasive like Norway maple, gingko biloba and planting for maximum species diversity to have more native species than the Botanical Gardens of 190 acres or MountRoyal Park of 692 acres.
Come visit us. We hope to have over 100 species of indigenous wildflowers on a dangerous 45 degrees sloping north shore of the St. Laurent this summer. We had to remove over 30 tons of Canary grass, burdock, phragmites, Japanese knotweed, chervil, etc.
But think of it. Just following Mother Nature’s rules and what can be accomplished in such a short period of time. At a minimal cost. The wildflower will feed hundreds of little critters like birds, snakes, amphibians, insects, etc and will help save the St.Laurent river from pollution. The yellow perch population has crashed, and last year, there were no May flies at all on the north shore of the St. Laurent in Montreal and only a few May flies scattered populations on the south shore. The eel grass, the lungs of the river we found was 95% a sickly yellow rather than a healthy green. Without the May flies, swallows, swifts, purple martins, night hawks, which are obligate aerial insectivores, and already severely endangered are going to be extirpated from Montreal. There is too little food to feed their young in Montreal. This year they went east or west of Montreal, but do you think even over the short term when they have trillions upon trillions of their food crop killed by pollution, that they do not need urgent help?
EVEN MORE BROADLY THINK OF THE WHOLE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC.
So in the end we just followed Mother Nature’s rules. And we had a dirt-cheap wildflower garden in 6 months’ time. We hope to repeat the same thing on a 3,700 square feet dangerous north shoreline.
We must mention AKÈNE, CULTURE FORESTIÈRE. It was started by Philippe Denis to specialize in wild and native plants He believed like Douglas Tallamy in restoring the Environment to a healthy status by planting and husbanding native wildflowers and shrubs and trees and grasses. Bravo to him and his dedicated team.
One aspect of urban agriculture easily forgotten, is what we have been doing to destroy the environment for several centuries now. We have been wasting extremely expensive land growing a noxious alien invasive weed. We call it Kentucky Blue grass but it comes from Britain and France. It has extremely short roots and demands frequent cutting, and reseeding and frequent fertilizers and herbicides and insecticides and watering. Ecologists call it GREEN CONCRETE. But it is a living mess which requires millions of dollars to maintain and because it does not absorb heavy rainfall, it leads to severe flooding. The sewer caps you see blown several feet high in St. Leonard flooding every year are due to Green Concrete. It does not cool the earth and causes heat islands. The runoff of the herbicides and pesticides are what are polluting and killing the St. Laurent River. You can save millions of dollars a year by growing Eco-Grass = Eco-Lawn which is composed of native fescue grasses with deep roots that absorbs heavy rainfall and does not require cutting or watering or herbicides or pesticides.
The initial cost is about $60 to cover about 1,000 square feet. But it will save millions of dollars in lawn care in the future.
Shawn Manning of Urban seedlings has replaced his Green Concrete with Eco-grass and is happy. You can buy Eco-Grass from Urban Seedlings, no need to order it from Ontario and pay shipping costs.
We wanted to give you one last example of what following Mother Nature’s rules can do at no cost and quickly and the savings it gives to the environment and society. There is a podcast NATURE’S ARCHIVE. February, 3. 2025, Cultural Fire with Margo Robbins.
The Yurok Tribe in Northern California has been abused for over 120 years. When the union army arrived in Northern California, they found a paradise of fertile land abundant with forests and grasslands, deer and elk. The army seized the land and put the Yurok on a small reservation and gave the rest of the land to Caucasian settlers. It was illegal to give free American land to Amerindian, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The so-called wilderness was land that the Yurok had been stewarding for centuries with controlled burns. When the Yurok tried to steward the land with controlled burns, the army and vigilantes shot and killed the “vandals”. When this became unacceptable, they passed laws that imprisoned “the vandals” not for a few years but for the rest of their lives. So, for over 120 years, the land deteriorated. It used to be 50% grassland now became 1% grassland. Invasive weeds like tamarisk etc invaded and lowered the water table. The deer and elk could not feed on fresh shoots or move through the dense debris and disappeared. Margo Robbins and some elders wanted to revive basket weaving. They need the straight shoots of hazelnuts, that came up after a controlled burn. So they petitioned Indian Affairs and California Fire. They had to spend years taking firefighting courses. But finally, they were allowed a few controlled burns. The invasive weeds and piles of dead debris, were eliminated. The deer and elk returned. The wildflower plants and shrubs returned. There was enough hazelnut shoots to make baskets again and they shared these with neighbouring tribes. The Yurok were famous for their baskets. They were used for carrying their babies, storage and transport. They were so finely woven, they were waterproof and could be used for cooking over hot rock. They sold the baskets as works of art and made very good money. They could buy cars, have better foods, better schools. The culture of poverty with alcoholism, family violence, truancy from school changed. All this within 1 to 4 years after the controlled burns.
So by following Mother Nature’s rules in 1 to 4 years at no cost to the people or to the government, they enriched the environment and are into process of eliminating the culture of poverty.
Trust in Mother Nature and help her by respecting her and by showing understanding and kindness and love to all her children.
This was a very short survey about what has recently been happening in the field. It is a very young field and many new innovations are happening. Listen to some of the podcasts and videos by George Monbiot, the genius polymath. He writes columns in the Guardian and just google his name for the latest crusade he is involved with. He is talking recently about modified grain crops grown from perennials instead of annuals. Think of all the costs, financial and ecological saved !!!!!
Joan and Oz Obukuro re**************@***il.com