HOST: With climate change occurring at a rapid pace due to human
activity, a worldwide loss of vertebrate species of more than 30
percent since 1970, and droughts and floods becoming increasingly
commonplace across the planet, one of the very important steps an
individual, family, corporation or community can take to help reverse
these trends is to establish a native plant garden.
Today we
highlight the laudable work of Alrie Middlebrook, an artist and
professional landscaper from Santa Clara County, California, USA whose
deep love of indigenous plants and the environment led her to become
one of the most prominent native plant experts in California.
Her
book, “Designing California Native Gardens,” which was co-authored with
renowned field botanist Dr. Glenn Keator, has become the number one
best-selling book on the topic.
Ms. Middlebrook founded the
California Native Garden Foundation, a charitable organization which
provides information to people looking to design and create their own
waterwise gardens with beautiful indigenous plants.
Her
landscape design firm, Middlebrook Gardens, has helped over 150 people,
organizations and communities live more sustainably by aiding them in
starting native plant gardens.
Middlebrook Gardens is a conservation-minded entity that has launched the “Lose the Lawn” initiative.
The
project seeks to raise awareness that lawns are not
environmentally-friendly and to encourage the public to replace their
lawns with native garden landscapes as they are inexpensive,
pesticide-free, require little water, and are low-maintenance.
Ms. Middlebrook now gives us more details on her landscape design firm.
Ms. Middlebrook:
Middlebrook Gardens is a sustainable garden company. The most important
part of a sustainable garden company is that we grow and we help
people, encourage people to grow native gardens because we want to
restore habitat.
If we’re going to fight global warming the
most significant thing we can do is to have less of an impact on nature
and understand the natural world and restore that habitat in a home
garden.
So that’s what we’re about. But we are also about other
things as far as protecting the natural world. One of them is to
protect watersheds and we want to keep all the rainfall that falls here
on the property. We don’t want to divert it to the storm drain.
So
if you look around you see all these surfaces where water can percolate
through. When we first moved here this whole lot was covered with
concrete.