Events

The goal of Member-to-Member garden visits (aka Show Me-Tell Me), is to allow members to share experiences, ideas, and challenges with maintaining native plants in our landscapes. The location of the member hosting these visits will be shared privately with the A2WO members and invited guests.

Ruth Ann Logue on Her Experiences Gardening and Nurturing Native Plants  

Our family of four moved to our little farm northeast of Ann Arbor twenty-eight years ago when we were soon to become a family of five. Our oldest daughter, then six, was horse crazy, and we took the leap to buy a place where we could keep horses, which we did for twelve years.

At one point, maybe 100 years ago, this farm had been the largest dairy farm in Washtenaw County, but it has since been subdivided many times so that now the original house and barn sit on fifteen acres. We have a photo of the “front yard” from about 1924 that shows the line of peonies the owners planted next to what was then a potato field; four of those original peonies remain.

I have been a gardener my whole adult life, and it’s been wonderful to garden in Michigan after growing up in the Deep South. Many of my beds are fairly traditional plantings where you’ll see more peonies, plus other typical perennials, interspersed with native flowers.

Our start down the native trail began in 2018 when we decided to convert an acre of lawn in front of the house into a native meadow/ prairie. Because of the size of the job and our lack of experience with this largescale project, we hired Feral Flora to do the work. We chose twenty native flowers and six native grasses to seed the acre with, and it has been a wonderful addition to our property. We did our first controlled burn in 2023.

A few years ago a friend gave me Doug Tallamy’s book, Nature’s Best Hope, and this jumpstarted our work on what we call our big pasture, approximately six acres of what had originally been cow/horse pasture but had turned into a thicket of buckthorn. Starting in 2021, we began the arduous process of trying to “cut and treat” buckthorn, quickly realizing we were outmatched!

Hiring a company with a forestry mulcher was the best solution we could come up with, so we mulched a little more than half the field—twice, with six-nine months in between. We also seeded several big sections with native mixes. Some have been more successful than others, but we keep working on it. And we’ve added at least 100 native trees, some small and some more substantial. We see this as a long-term project.