Inside America's Healthiest Yards- Rebecca McMackin's Secret Garden (Garden Tour)

So, I'm an ecological gardener, and I like to garden in ways that are absolutely beautiful for people, functional for people, but also provide really rich habitat for wildlife and make space for the plants that evolved on the site where I'm working. In these scary times, it can be so hard to know what to do and how to help, but it feels great to cultivate life with your own two hands, and there's an abundance of research now to show how beneficial gardening is for our health and even our happiness. Ecological gardening is a hugely popular movement right now. During COVID, more than 20 million Americans started gardening for the very first time. One third of households in the United States in the last couple years have planted a plant specifically to help wildlife. So, this is huge, right? I've been in this work a very long time. I'm used to having trouble finding native plants at nurseries. That is no longer the case. It has really gone mainstream. It is really a big movement where people recognize that maybe the ways that we've been managing land have been harmful, and we can manage land in ways that are absolutely gorgeous while also supporting the ecological systems that we're within. So, we just moved into this house six months ago, and we've just started really watching the land to see how we're going to design it and how we're going to use the land as a big part of that. I don't believe in lawn that's ornamental. Lawn should be actively used. It should be for picnics, it should be for parties, playing frisbee, etc. So, we've spent the last few months watching ourselves, our families, our friends use this land and really marking out the areas that nobody ever goes on, and those are the areas we're going to reclaim. We're taking a very light touch, moving very slowly, and trying to figure out what this land wants to be rather than just imposing our will on it. We know we want to shrink the lawn. We don't need this gigantic lawn, but we wanted to see what was in the seed bank, what were the plants that were already here. So, we let this whole section of lawn just grow up, and we were so charmed to find this fleabane everywhere. It's just here, just growing wildly. It was getting mowed, but we stopped mowing and just sprang right up. And so, we're gonna, you know, spread the seed around, let it go, but we're also bringing plants in and diversifying intentionally as well. This little plant here is a really special plant that I brought in literally from across the street. I saw it blooming in my neighbor's yard, and I asked them if I could weed their lawn for them, and they said, yes, of course. They were very generous, and it's called Antenaria Neglecta. It is the host plant for the American lady butterfly. It's one of their many host plants. And so, when I went over to their lawn and looked closely at the plant, I found caterpillars all over it that were getting mowed pretty regularly. And so, I took any of the plants that had caterpillars on them and transplanted them with the caterpillars and brought them into my lawn where they would be safe. And you can actually look and see these little caterpillar homes right here. They make these little webs that some people might think look like a pest eating their ornamental plant, but for me, I know this is literally how we get butterflies. Right now, we're in the middle of this biodiversity crash that you've probably heard about, and the statistics are absolutely terrifying. Just since I was a little kid, we've lost almost half of insects on planet Earth. It's just absolutely staggering. This is not some abstract thing anymore. We are seeing the downstream effects of biodiversity loss right now. One of the best ways to bring biodiversity onto your land is to shrink your lawn. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to look under trees, reclaim that land, and then allow all of these many animals that are already using your trees in order to complete their life cycles. And if you have a tree like an oak tree, it can be a host plant for 500 species of moths and butterflies. That's really important because birds rely on those caterpillars in order to feed their babies. Those caterpillars, when they're eating the leaves after they've gotten their fill, almost all of them then slowly drop down into the plantings or the leaf litter or the duff underneath the tree in order to pupate or overwinter. And so when we reclaim that space and give them a place to land, it vastly improves their chance of survival, rather than landing on the lawn. And then my husband, who's an arborist, he developed this beautiful strategy with all of these sticks in order to protect this and make sure no small children stomp through here, but also in order to feed that soil and incorporate the dead wood into the mix. That's really our goal, right, is to make functional landscapes that are beautiful that also allow all of these natural processes to take place. When I look at all of the various crises that we are all collectively facing right now, I can be immobilized sometimes when I think about the world that I'm leaving to my child. And this ecological gardening work brings me so much hope because even if we're just planting a few native plants, we're building these networks, we are supporting these networks that exist all around us that desperately need help right now. We can be agents of help, we can protect the ecosystems around us and then literally cultivate them when we have to as well. I'm heading out to the pasture to transplant some geranium into my front yard. You're probably already familiar with geranium maculatum. It is a beautiful purple flower that is often sold at garden centers, but the flowers here are wild. They're growing in the pasture behind the barn and that's special because they evolved here. They have relationships with this land and it's really different than buying a plant, right? I kind of think of this as their land and I'm just helping them, you know, live their most beautiful life on it. This girl is Winterberry, the dog. She loves the camera. She's the good girl. So this is the pasture behind our barn. Until about 75 years ago, it was an active sheep pasture and now we're managing it for biodiversity and of course beauty. This is geranium maculatum. I think you'll agree that it is absolutely beautiful. It has many bees that rely on the pollen and I have absolutely found bees asleep in this flower. So I'm going to take a couple of these. There's tons all over, so there's a population big enough that I can take some for my garden without hurting it. It is not the ideal time to transplant. When a plant is in flower, that is not really when you want to disturb it. It's expending a lot of energy flowering and so it's usually good to wait until it's dormant. So in this instance, we're going to take a pretty big chunk of soil to make sure that we're not shocking the plant while we're doing the transplanting. One of my favorite things in the whole world is pollination ecology. I love to look at flowers and to have a sense of what they're doing with their lives, what they want. That's my absolute favorite thing. So I've got the geraniums here and I'm going to select a location and I'm trying to make this garden as biodiverse as possible, but I'm not going to get rid of every single exotic plant. Some people like to do that, that's not my style. It's rare that an exotic plant poses an ecological problem. When they are causing ecological damage, when they're pushing out other animals and plants, I like to remove them. But when these plants are just beautiful and maybe even helpful or delicious, I tend to leave them around while making space for these plants that actually evolved here and that have all of those ecological relationships that we're trying to support. When I look at the geranium, I think about all of the bee communities over thousands and thousands of years who literally designed that flower. They liked the color purple, they liked the shape, they liked the flavor of the pollen and the nectar, and that's why we have geranium flowers. That to me is truly magical. So I'm a huge nerd and I'm always doing all these experiments, but I hope that in what I've been able to share with you today, there might be some techniques that you could take back to your space, be it a huge garden or a balcony or a stoop filled with pots, that you'd be able to figure out ways to make your space a sanctuary, not just for yourself, but also for the butterflies and birds and flowers that are all around you.