Try This Martha Stewart-Approved Way to Make Your Garden Healthier Than Ever

Martha Stewart‘s newest book, Martha Stewart’s Gardening Handbook: The Essential Guide to Designing, Planting, and Growing, is her first in-depth gardening guide in over 30 years. From planning to design, the manual is filled with helpful information like how to choose the healthiest plants for your specific climate. Plus, the book includes gorgeous images, many of which are from Martha’s own gardens. Below is an excerpt from the book, out now.

Introduction

Gardening is an ever-evolving relationship, making it both immediately gratifying and a source of long-term awe and enjoyment.

Those bulbs you planted in the brisk days of fall emerge once the ground thaws in spring and continue to do so year after year. A thicket of scrawny saplings grows into sturdy trees, casting shade, sporting blossoms, or yielding fruit (or all of the above). Nursery-bought perennials and shrubs settle in, take root, and become big and bountiful. Tiny seeds sprout, send up shoots, and provide delicious sustenance or showy flower heads. It all unfolds gradually, and there’s great pleasure in checking on each plant’s progress.

Or as celebrated British horticulturist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll sums it up: “A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.”

Growing Native Plants

Native plants are the heart of a healthy ecosystem, removing carbon from the air, providing shelter and food for wildlife, and promoting biodiversity.

A plant that is native to an area grows there naturally, without any cultivation. It is also cold-hardy for the area, though that same plant is not necessarily cold-hardy in other areas within the same zone or region where it is not native. Picture the vastly different natural landscapes in Utah and Kentucky (both in zones 5–7) or Montana and Maine (zones 2–5)—or even a rural, inland county versus coastal towns in South Carolina (zones 8–9). Numerous studies have shown that native plants support more species and larger numbers of bees than non-native plants, too.

When growing native plants and supporting pollinators, look past hardiness zones to your particular “ecoregion,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Specifically, you can learn about “keystone” plants—the top native plants used by pollinating butterfly and bee species, without which the ecosystem and wildlife would suffer.

North America has been divided into 15 broad “level I” ecological regions with 50 level II and 182 level III ecological areas. The ecoregion maps can be hard to decipher—instead, focus on keystone plants for each level I ecoregion on the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder, which also lets you search by zip code.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is another excellent resource, with convenient downloadable one-page plant lists, or you can search by zip code via the National Audubon Society. You can also consult your local nursery, botanical garden, or cooperative extension to learn about native plants that will thrive in your area.

Native Plants

Here is just a sampling of some native plants that thrive in Pennsylvania. Consult your local nursery to learn what will flourish in your garden.

1. Rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium)

2. Goldenrod (Solidago speciosa)

3. ‘Little Henry’ sweet coneflower (Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Little Henry’)

4. Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

5. Hubricht’s bluestar (Amsonia hubrictii)

6. Tennessee purple coneflower (Echinacea tennesseensis)

7. ‘Autumn Bride’ coral bells (Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’)

8. Muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris)

9. Aster Spp.

10. White snakeroot (Ageratina altissima)

11. Blue wood aster (Aster cordifolius syn. symphyotrichum cordifolium)

12. ‘Proud Berry’ coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus ‘Proud Berry’)

13. Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium dubium)

Source: Home Ideas - goodhousekeeping.com