MAY/JUNE 2007
While it may never be possible for men to know what women want, I can tell you what this woman wants—a reduction in property taxes, someone to core aerate my lawn, and an Asclepias curassavica ‘Silky Gold’.
I first saw ‘Silky Gold’ in 2005 at Ball Horticultural Company’s trial gardens in West Chicago. Around two feet tall with slightly rounded clusters of yellow flowers, it’s an annual from South America, unlike our orange-flowered prairie native Asclepias tuberosa. I envisioned it paired with the purple spikes of ‘Mystic Spires’ salvia, so I jotted down the name, fully expecting to find it at a garden center in 2006, but it didn’t happen.
Then the plant resurfaced this past February at a Kishwaukee College symposium where Ball’s plant trials manager Jim Nau sang its praises as a plant keenly attractive to butterflies. Wrap your hands gently around the stem, head up to the flowers and cup a butterfly, he said, and it will crawl out from between your fingers and flit back to the flowers as if drawn by a magnet. I immediately moved it to the top of my must-have list.
Why? Because it’s important that, as gardeners, we use the land we have to create habitat for wildlife. All over the world, creatures are finding less and less space on which to live, and the land that remains is often compromised in quality. Less food, water and shelter lead to less reproduction, which leads inexorably to extinction.
In his book Second Nature, author Michael Pollan explores the conflicted attitude of Americans toward Nature. We’ve seen Nature as something wild, dark and evil that needed to be controlled (think 17th century Puritans) but also as something to be revered and worshipped (19th century explorers, writers and painters). And whatever extreme we’ve embraced, Nature has been juxtaposed in our minds against Civilization. There are cities, artifacts of Civilization, and there are places like national parks where we erect a symbolic fence and set Nature apart from the rest of our world. One or the other.
But Pollan posits that a garden can be a way of bridging the gap in our thinking, a second Nature. While a garden is a mix of diverse plants in a man-made space and thus inherently “artificial,” it can sometimes be better than Nature. A good gardener, for example, can improve the soil, and a garden plot can be more beautiful, more productive, more useful than what was originally there. A garden can provide habitat.
So while I can’t grow a prairie or plant a woods within the confines of my urban plot, I can certainly bring in more butterflies and other beneficial insects. Planting Asclepias ‘Silky Gold’ is one little thing I can do. I’ve even tracked down a couple of local sources. Natural Garden and Hawthorn Gardens, get ready. I’m on my way.
