Karin Ursula Landscapes

Beautiful garden and landscape design in the Hudson Valley

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KUL Native Plant Pollinator Garden in DWELL Magazine

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One of my favorite native plant gardens is featured this month in DWELL Magazine. In 2016 I designed and built this garden to be a soothing green on green, pollinator heaven using 98% native plant species that are deer resistant and major pollinator attractants.  The gardens were meant to enhance the extraordinary quality of the home – like a ship sailing through the forest. We used sedges as natural mulch and groundcover, bergamot bee balm, blunt-toothed mountain mint, prairie smoke, shrubby St. John’s Wort, sweetfern and fragrant sumac in a sea of native ornamental grasses: little bluestem, prairie dropseed, switchgrass and Indian grass. We also incorporated mosses, sedums, lowbush blueberry and ferns present on site to seamlessly merge the designed areas with the natural ecosystem.

As evidenced, native plant gardens are beautiful and life-sustaining.

Four years on, we still maintain this garden now mostly pulling out bee balm and mountain mint to transplant to other areas of the property. In July the bees are buzzing so loud, it is beautiful for my ears and my Soul to behold.

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All photos: Pippa Drummond, courtesy of DWELL Magazine

Dwell Magazine and KUL

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Years ago as a landscape design student, I used to read Dwell Magazine on the subway totally in awe of the contemporary architecture and landscapes.

Last summer 2019, one of my gardens was featured in Dwell’s Outdoor Living Issue. Published in the May/June issue, the article entitled Woodland Skills featured the property of architect Maria Ibanez and her husband Todd Rouhe. They hired me to design a spare, beautiful landscape to help heal the scars of construction and to blend the disturbed edges back into the surrounding woodland. To accomplish this I used almost entirely native plants – three types of sedges (Carex spp.), two species of ferns, three mountain mints (Pycnanthemum spp.) and a handful of native shrubs like bayberry (Myrica pennsylvanica), gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa), sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina), bush honeysuckle (Diervella lonicera) and American elderberry (Sambucus canadensis). Almost immediately, the bees arrived on the mountain mints. Some of the deer were curious about the elder and Maria and Todd had to net those. The following year the sedges were starting to spread; so were the ferns. Mission accomplished!

The Year Trees Came Alive

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Everyone’s talking trees. Peter Wohlleben (forester), Suzanne Simard (biologist), Richard Powers (author), Richard Attenborough (naturalist), Melvin Sheldrake (scientist). These people from varied professions are saying the same thing:  trees are intelligent and there exist vast interconnected networks of life both above and underground . Ever heard of the Wood Wide Web? Old growth or Mother Trees provide knowledge and nutrition to the younger saplings in the forest via underground mycorrhizal fungal networks that transfer water, carbon, nitrogen and other minerals. Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It is. Everything is sentient and alive, merely in its own non-human way.

To help combat Climate Chaos, nations around the world are planting large quantities of trees: Canada, Ethiopia, India, Ireland, Norway, Russia, Uganda all have accomplished major tree plantings or have a tree planting plan in the works.

Old growth forests, Mother Trees and regenerating woodland tracts are the most important as they have the age and the wisdom to pass along to younger trees. If you are a land owner considering a timber harvest, visit Healing Harvest Forest Foundation first to find out ways that our human need for forest products can co-exist with the forest’s life needs now and for the future.

If you are inspired to plant more trees but are running out of space, visit Tree Sisters and make a donation. Your money will advance their mission of planting trees to protect and expand intact forest landscapes, restore and protect watersheds and restore topsoil and land fertility.

To date, Tree Sisters has planted 4 million trees across the globe.

At the very, very least, hug a tree or thank a tree for her amazing and wonderful life.

 

 

 

Here’s to a New Year and a New KUL

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Dear Friends and Supporters.

I have been designing, installing and maintaining gardens in the Catskills for eleven years now. It has been incredibly gratifying, and I have had a good run. After some serious thought and agonizing, I have decided to hang up my Redwing work boots and disengage from the installation and maintenance side of the business. I want to give my body a break while still continuing to help clients create beautiful gardens by focusing on thoughtful design, consultations and coaching. My efforts will continue to focus on sustainable, ecological and pollinator and wildlife friendly gardens with native plants at their heart and soul. Additionally, I will offer project management, nurturing a project from design through to the installation phase.

Thank you for eleven wonderful years. It has been both hard work and an absolute pleasure. I am looking forward to this next chapter.

Coming Up Roses

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Snowy February is prime time to think of roses. Why? Because it is almost Valentine’s Day and roses are everywhere as gestures of romantic love. Years ago, in NYC’s East Village there was a place called Chez Es Saada, A Moroccan themed restaurant on two floors. The bar and entrance were on street level and access to the catacomb dining room required that one walked down a circular stone staircase strewn with rose petals. Despite not having any steady romance going on of my own at that time, I went there frequently for drinks and the rose petals which were beautiful beyond belief and a lovely gesture that added a dash of glamour and excitement to my life.

In addition to being closely connected to all things amour, shrub roses have benefits beyond bouquets and candied cake toppings. They offer love to birds and wildlife and to your pocketbook because unlike fussy English roses, they are easy to establish and maintain.

First, the ecological benefit of having shrub roses in the garden. Birds hang out, chit chat, eat and make nests in shrubs more than trees so if you are in the market for a shrub, why not make it a shrub rose? In addition to scented flowers, all shrub roses feature rose hips. These red, round fruits appear in late summer and early fall after flowering. High in both essential fatty acids and vitamin C, rose hips are coveted by turkeys, birds and other wildlife. Humans also have learned to make rose hip jam and rose hip tea. During WW II the British government collected rose hips to produce rose hip syrup rich in vitamin C as a replacement for citrus fruits which were in short supply. Rose jelly, spread on toast is a mildly sweet and earthy treat.

I often include roses in wild borders, hedgerows and larger more cultivated garden spaces. Specifically, rose shrubs like native Virginia Rose (Rosa virginiana), pasture rose (Rosa carolina), Prickly Rose (Rosa acicularis) and Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris). The first three are terrific for open, sunny sites – meadows, slopes and wild hedgerows that are of average to even dry garden soil. Clay? No problem. Swamp rose, as you might have guessed works well in moist situations. The flowers on all of these roses are similar – round and at about three and a half inches wide, smaller than English roses yet usually possessed of  traditional rose fragrance.

Two excellent non-native shrub roses are salt spray rose (Rosa rugosa) and the heirloom rugosa cultivar Blanc Double DeCourbet that blooms white. Both are highly fragrant. All of these shrub roses are tolerant of harsh conditions. I’ve planted the naive roses in clay and hard pan with a layer of wood chip mulch on top and once established, they have spread even in times of extreme cold and drought. The rugosa roses are tolerant of wind and salt spray. Typically, these shrub roses mature from four to eight feet tall by four to six feet wide. Hardy to Zone 4 and readily prunable (watch for the thorns) to maintain size or shape, shrub roses usually only come in white, purple or pink flowers but what they lack in bloom color diversity, they make up for in reliability and wildish romantic beauty. Available at most nurseries and locally at Catskill Native Nursery, Gallo’s of Woodstock, Augustine Nursery, Kern’s and Story’s Nursery.

 

A Stronger Hug for Trees

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This year, I decided to create the first ever digital Holiday Card for my business. Numerous headlines about the Paris Climate Agreement and the alarming evidence of natural resource depletion, finally got dire enough for me to examine my own holiday customs. I reached the tipping point. (Thank-you, New York Times Editors!) What can I do through my business in even a small way to stop the cycle of holiday consumerism?

For the last several years, the annual mailing of the holiday card  has been a fun tradition for me – taking photos all year of gardens and my dogs Bella, Arthur and Suzie, then choosing the photos that would make the cut, perusing the Shutterfly card layouts, heading to my local Post Office to purchase holiday stamps and finally, sitting down with a cuppa hot tea and some German Christmas Stollen to write the cards to my friends, clients and suppliers.

This December though, new words started popping up in relation to these cards  – supply chain, carbon footprint, source material, chemical processes.

I hit the internet to do some research.

According to an article in ecology.com:

  • Nearly four billion trees worldwide are harvested each year for paper.
  • The world consumes 300 million tons of paper each year.
  • The United States which accounts for 5% of the world’s population consumes 30% of the paper worldwide.
  • Wood pulp comes from softwood trees: spruce, fir, pine, larch and hemlock.
  • According to the EPA, pulp and paper mills are some of the worst polluters to air and water and land of any industry in the country with millions of pounds of toxic chemicals toluene, methanol, chlorine dioxide, hydrochloric acid and formaldehyde released into the air yearly from worldwide paper plants.

Suddenly, my cheerful holiday card wasn’t looking so merry anymore. Hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), and recently the American larch (Larix laricina) are two of my favorite trees. While walking my property or hiking Catskills trails, I regularly I hug giant old hemlocks like the ones in the photo above. Sure, my team plants thousands of native plants each year for pollinators and local ecosystems but these statistics on the  paper industry somewhat negated all of that. My holiday cards were dooming hemlocks to be cut down for paper that after it spews pollution forth into our environment most likely gets tossed out at the end of December to enter a landfill. Not a good enough reason to keep on doing the same old thing.

So, after a bit of back and forth – mostly my consumerist Western Self being petulant: I like this tradition, my friends and clients are used to receiving my annual card, it is fun! – I decided to go paperless.

Here’s hoping you all agree. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Kwanza. Joyous New Year. Go hug a tree. Better yet, plant one.