Soft landings

How can you create a garden bed that is both beautiful and ecologically beneficial? Consider creating a Soft Landing. 

A Soft Landing mimics a natural forest floor and supports local ecosystems by providing food and shelter for pollinators and other wildlife. This gentle landscaping technique can be used in our landscape by planting a diverse group of native plants under a keystone tree. 

A keystone plant is a term coined by famed entomologist and author Douglas Tallamy and is based on the concept of 1960’s ecologist Robert Paine’s work on keystone species. Paine defined a keystone species as an organism that plays a vital role in maintaining the strength and biodiversity balance in an ecosystem. The removal of one keystone species can cause devastating ripple effects and cause a potential collapse of the ecosystem that depends on that keystone species.  Keystone plants are “super plants” that help build complex food webs by forming what can be thought of as an essential foundation (PSU.edu). These plants are hyper-local and have been here for thousands of years and were not brought over and planted by people. These plants support a large amount of lepidoptera, (caterpillars, butterflies, and moth) larvae who are then eaten by birds. According to Tallamy, 14% of native plants support 90% of the total lepidoptera population. These caterpillars eat the leaves of a keystone plant and convert the sugars of the foliage into protein and fat are a faster delivery of nutrition to baby birds than berries and nuts. The hatchlings can eat up to 500 caterpillars a day. A single brood can consume between 6,000-9,000 caterpillars over their 16-day nesting period. Keystone trees include Quercus alba (white oak), Salix nigra (black willow), Prunus virginiana (chokecherry), and Acer rubrum (red maple), to name a few. I have attached a list of keystone plants for New England below. 

Caterpillars eat the leaves of the keystone tree and when they are in their pupae stage they fall onto the ground. 90% of the pupae stage happens on the ground. In a natural setting like a forest, the soft landing could be woodland shade plants or leaf litter around the tree line. In your yard you can create a safe zone around the tree, with native plants instead of grass, to protect the pupae from the blades of a mower or string trimmer, thus allowing them to complete their life cycle. 

There are many native plants that you can use for your soft landing. Polystichum acrostichoides (Christmas Fern) is an evergreen that thrives in moist, shady, woodland edges that have a mound-like form and fiddleheads that appear in spring. Other good choices include: Dicentra eximia (Bleeding Heart), and Asarum canadense (Wild Ginger), Carex pensylvanica (Pennsylvania sedge) is a low growing semi-evergreen ground cover that forms a grass like mat through underground rhizomes. It reaches 6-8” in height,  has an elegant arching habit, and tolerates drought once established. Other soft landings can consist of leaf litter, duff, and plant debris. I like the idea of a select group of plantings, which can allow for ephemeral and more diminutive plants to also thrive without the threat of being smothered by heavier plant material. 

For Further Reading:

Keystone Native Plants - Eastern Temperate Forests - Ecoregion 8

Keystone-Plant-Species-for-Landscape-Use_GNMA-web.xlsx

Soft Landings - Bee and Pollinator Books by Heather Holm

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