Carolyn Summers believes that native plants should be part of the strategy to combat the effects of overcrowding, both in Chautauqua and around the world.
Summers will be the fourth speaker in the Bird, Tree & Garden Club’s Brown Bag Lecture Series this season, presenting a talk titled “How Native Plants Can Help Us Share A Crowded Planet” at 12:15 p.m. today in Smith Wilkes Hall. The main focus of her lecture, she said, is to encourage Chautauquans to look into planting native plants in their own gardens, as well as to explain the vast benefits native plants can bring to both a single garden and to an entire ecosystem.
“The bottom line is that native plants are some of the only foods that our insects can tolerate,” Summers said. “If we don’t have certain plants, we won’t have certain insects, and it turns out to be quite a lot of them.”
Summers is the founder and owner of Flying Trillium Gardens & Preserve in Sullivan County. Flying Trillium’s goal is to “establish, develop, and steward native plant demonstration gardens,” highlighting the importance of native plants, while also showing visitors that they can be beautiful and enhance the appearance of a garden. Summers said highlighting the aesthetic qualities of native plants was of great importance because many gardeners are under the impression that native plants make gardens less appealing to the eye.
“People still equate a native plant garden with messiness, even though that’s never the plant’s fault,” she said. “It’s always the gardener’s fault; if the gardener doesn’t maintain the garden, it won’t look like a garden — it will look like a mess.”
Summers’ decades of experience in the world of gardening have taught her that native plants certainly don’t make gardens uglier, and that their positive environmental impacts are almost unmatched.
She received a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from City College of New York and began her career in the country’s most populous city, working with the Trust for Public Land. There, she produced a report that has guided efforts to create a wildlife refuge on Staten Island. She then moved on to New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, serving as the agency’s first director of natural resources.
During her tenure with the DEP, she saw firsthand how every part of an ecosystem works in tandem with the others to function — at the center of every one of those ecosystems was native plants, and the DEP began incorporating native plants into all of their projects,
“Native plants became the foundation of all of our efforts,” she said. “Whether we were working in tidal wetlands, freshwater wetlands, or even in upland areas where there were no wetland issues, we would always use native plants.”
She explained that native plants are always preferable to any other option because they provide food for native animal and insect populations, and they can strengthen the ability of soil to maintain water.
She has built much of her career around informing others about native plants and encouraging them to incorporate the plants into their own lives, and that work will be the center of her lecture today. She hopes that Chautauquans will leave Smith Wilkes Hall with a desire to begin working with native plants in their homes and gardens, and with a new sense of appreciation for the importance of those native plants.
