Scott Woodbury
Supervisor, Horticulture – Shaw Nature Reserve
After higher than 30 years at Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit, Missouri, Scott Woodbury retired this summer season from a protracted career in public horticulture to start out out Cacalia Yard Design and Wilding, a consulting and design enterprise in St. Louis. Over the interval of his career, Woodbury has seen native gardening develop from a definite phase nook of the horticultural enterprise to a most well-liked dwelling gardening kind that is now attracting widespread, steadily rising public curiosity—and with good function. Native gardening supplies many benefits to people, pollinators, and the ecosystem as a complete. Woodbury has been an enthusiastic advocate from the beginning, spending the earlier various a few years working in native gardens and instructing others how one can plant their very personal.
The Bascom Residence overlooks the Whitmire Wildflower Yard at Shaw Nature Reserve. {Photograph} by Tilda Adams.
A Love of Gardening at First Sight
Throughout the fall of his seventh grade school yr, Woodbury obtained a job raking fallen autumn leaves for a woman in his neighborhood. He cherished the work, so she invited him once more to work in her yard the subsequent spring. It was then that one factor clicked: this was what he wanted to do alongside along with his life. “Within the occasion you have in mind middle school to be ‘on a regular basis,’ then I’ve on a regular basis recognized what I wanted to do,” Woodbury talked about. “Not all people will get to find out it out that early.”
There have been quite a lot of stops alongside the best way during which between that first yard and winding up at Shaw Nature Reserve. As a youthful man, Woodbury labored at gardens and arboretums in Wisconsin, Italy, Pennsylvania, Prolonged Island, and Washington, D.C. It was in his perform at Tudor Place in Washington, D.C. that he really began to dig in to his work with native vegetation. There, he labored in a woodland yard area the place Tudor Place had started to experiment with native gardening. “Using native vegetation in gardening was a model new concept then,” Woodbury talked about. “There have been solely a handful of books, with Harry Phillips and Sarah Stein on the forefront. I study each factor I’ll get my fingers on.”
The Current of Whitmire Wildflower Yard
Concurrently he was ravenously learning about this thrilling new concept, Woodbury longed to maneuver once more to the Midwest. Within the meantime, once more in Missouri, native businessman Blanton Whitmire was planning a specific current for his partner, Peg. Shaw Nature Reserve was a very explicit place for the Whitmires, who’ve been longtime frequent visitors. On Peg’s seventieth birthday in 1987, the Whitmires received right here to Shaw Nature Reserve as that that they had completed many events sooner than. This time, Blanton had a shock for Peg: the promise of a yard in her honor. In what was then an unmanaged woodland overgrown with invasive honeysuckle, the Whitmire Wildflower Yard would develop. Woodbury was employed in 1991 to hold it to life.
Blanton and Peg Whitmire with horticulturist Scott Woodbury throughout the 90s.
Over the following two years, Scott and former Shaw Nature Reserve Horticulturist Joyce Davit led a small group of volunteers throughout the restoration of the world and improvement of the yard. The Whitmire Wildflower Yard was formally devoted in 1993. Proper this second, it supplies accessible paths by way of 5 plant neighborhood areas (woodland, wetland, glade, savannah, and prairie) and a home gardening area that includes a native perennial yard, rock yard, prairie yard, water yard, woodland yard, and rain yard. Over 500 Missouri native plant species are on present.
The Whitmire Wildflower Yard consists of 5 completely totally different plant neighborhood areas, along with the wetland areas pictured proper right here. Pictures by Tilda Adams.
Native vegetation are typically destroyed en masse when their habitats are eradicated in favor of human infrastructure or non-native plantings. The animals that rely on these vegetation disappear with them. With out vegetation, native pollinators endure; with out these bugs, native birds endure; with out native birds, small predators endure; and so forth.
“To yard with native vegetation is to yard with a goal that is maybe just a little bit deeper.”
Scott Woodbury
Reintroducing native vegetation to the panorama by your self property is a sturdy answer to create just a little bit oasis for these vegetation and the life that returns along with them. And, as many gardeners are learning, native vegetation will reciprocate the love that you just’re exhibiting them by making it easy on you: as quickly as they’re established, they’re easy to develop. In any case, they’re fully tailor-made to develop proper right here. “Native gardening will not be solely a job,” Woodbury talked about. “It feeds the soul.”