Grow your own: Herbs have enhanced our culinary, medicinal, and beauty pursuits dating back to ancient times. Yet the struggle to perfect a backyard plot of lush, fragrant herbs without insect or disease interference is a real one. Learn how to grow your favorites with help from the experts during the Piedmont Master Gardeners’ Virtual Garden Basics Workshop: Herb Gardening, History & Design.
Saturday 4/17, Free, 2pm. Zoom required. piedmontmastergardeners.org.
Summer better: Nothing says summer like a ripe tomato, fresh from the vine. But for novice gardeners, growing one may not be as easy as it looks. Ira Wallace, owner/worker with the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, talks viewers through trellising, pruning, mulching, watering, preventing disease, controlling pests, and amending the soil in her virtual lecture Better Backyard Tomatoes, part of Piedmont Master Gardeners spring series. Wallace speaks from decades of gardening experience, and her expertise is Virginia specific, as evidenced by her books The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast and the new .
Thursday 3/4, Free, 7pm. Zoom required. piedmontmastergardeners.org.
Sweat glistens on Amy Lewis’ brow as she cracks open a bottle of beer in the kitchen of her home in Free Union. It’s late August, and she’s just back from the 1,000-acre Albemarle farm where she maintains the grounds and gardens, her full-time job. At the wooden dining table sits her husband of 21 years, Reid Humphries, and at her feet lie their two Australian shepherds. A hummingbird hovers at the feeder hanging on the back porch.
“Everything you see here, we did,” she says, patting her forehead with a wadded-up paper towel. She sweeps her hand to direct my view out the glass-paned door. The land tumbles down to a dry creek bed and then climbs a broad hillside covered by a sun-drenched thicket of native plants.
She’s sure they are native plants—with a few invasives to be weeded out—because she and Humphries put them there. They have been tirelessly creating their 11-acre “labor of love” (her words) since 2010. The landscape has become a showcase of cultivated wilderness and environmentally conscious living, so much so that the Piedmont Master Gardeners and Rivanna Garden Club chose it as a site this year in a series of tours of extraordinary domestic green spaces.
Lewis has lived in Charlottesville since 1978, when she moved here with her now ex-husband after he took a job at Georgetown Veterinary Hospital. Humphries, born and raised in Virginia, had been an itinerant carpenter—living and working in Manhattan, Colorado, and Nantucket—before landing in Charlottesville. He met Lewis 25 years ago on a job: She was installing a garden that included a water feature Humphries was building.
After Lewis’ kids moved away—her daughter, 35, now lives in Washington, D.C., and her son, 32, in Denver—she and Humphries, who has a wry and slightly off-color sense of humor, bought the land in Free Union. He likes it because it’s secluded. “My definition of privacy,” he deadpans, “is that I can take a piss off the back porch and not get busted.”
Amy lets that line slide without comment but takes it as a cue to begin our tour of the property. The upper portion of the parcel, in front of the house, has a small orchard, vegetable garden, chicken house, and barn, all built by Humphries, who is a multi-talented craftsman. When their house was being built, they hit rock—dense sandstone—not far beneath the surface, and excavated a great deal of it. Humphries used it to build stone walls that bracket the house—the wall in back is 82 feet long.
For gardeners, the real show begins at the creek bed, where ferns, bulbs, Virginia bluebells, and woodland phlox have naturalized. Paths of packed soil and mowed grass lead up the hill and into the meadow, a scraggly but beautiful three-and-a-half-acre display of native plants: witch hazel, bee balm, St. John’s wort, plumbago, cedum, aster, prairie grass, coneflower, sumac, and the list goes on. Grassy paths criss-cross the meadow, the plants buffering the sound and providing a green embrace. Butterflies flit around, alighting on flowers. Songbirds provide the soundtrack.
Before the couple cleared that land, it was a livestock pasture that, once abandoned, became overgrown with non-native trees, poison ivy, rosa rugosa, and more. “It was a mess,” Lewis says.
To clean it up, Lewis and Humphries successfully applied for two federal grants to create the native habitat, one from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the other from the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program.
The funds enabled the couple to realize Lewis’ vision. “I wanted to contain the soil on the hill with natives that have strong root systems,” she says. “I didn’t want a landscape that was tied to plants that require a lot of water and can’t survive on their own.”
Today, the meadow—and most of the property, in fact—consists of plants that not only survive on their own but are deer resistant. They provide an idyllic preserve where birds forage and bees and butterflies thrive, fulfilling their natural duty as pollinators.
The work, usually initiated by Lewis, has been intense for the couple, and the property is always evolving. “She gets this look in her eye,” says Humphries, “and I say, ‘Oh, here we go.’”
“People ask, ‘What’d you do this weekend?’” Lewis says. “I say, ‘Oh, we gardened.’ We’re cheap dates. Our entertainment is built in.”
Have you heard the news? The planet is getting hotter and it’s a real problem. That was the simple but important takeaway from a recent event at The Paramount Theater, hosted by Piedmont Master Gardeners and Virginia Cooperative Extension. Hundreds of attendees learned about the impact of climate change in the natural spaces around them, and what’s yet to come as temperatures steadily rise.
Even for the most conscientious Charlottesville resident, acknowledging and planning for climate change can feel overwhelming. But activists at the Paramount event warned that it’s imperative to know what lies ahead for our region—and our planet—in the face of global warming, and take action.
One simple option is to plant more trees to sequester increasing carbon dioxide emissions. You could not only help the Earth but also naturally cool your home by planting deciduous trees on its east and west sides. “We probably can’t stop climate change rapidly enough, so we’re going to have to learn to live with it,” said Francis Reilly, Jr., of Washington, D.C., the emcee and a master gardener with more than 35 years of experience as an advisor on environmental policy.
Reilly also suggested mitigating the effects of global warming by creating landscapes with woody, carbon dioxide-absorbing plants, and in a way that minimizes mowable grass. (Most mowers still use fossil fuels, in addition to the other environmental issues, like water and pesticide use, associated with lawns.)
According to Reilly, warmer winters mean garden pests like pine bark beetles and corn earworms will thrive. That’s bad. And less snow equals a drier spring. That’s also bad. An increase in frost-free days will make crops more vulnerable to colder temperatures, so that’s also not good—unless you’re growing sweet potatoes, which prefer a hot, dry environment (and which you probably aren’t growing).
Another speaker at the event, Jeremy Hoffman, a climate and earth scientist at Richmond’s Science Museum of Virginia, said we’re now seeing earlier springs and summers at the expense of falls and winters. In Charlottesville, he said, the average last-freeze date each spring has moved up a week—from April 8 to April 1—over the past 120 years. While this technically extends the growing season, it’s still problematic, because if farmers decide to get a head start on planting, their crops can be killed by a surprise frost. Despite climate change, a crop-destroying freeze is still possible, because of the Earth’s tilt, and this raises the probability of food shortages, Hoffman said.
Hoffman also brought up another climate-change fact: Because of warmer weather, the local mosquito season is now 20 days longer than it was in 1970. It also means folks with seasonal allergies are reaching for their Zyrtec earlier than ever. In 2017, Hoffman said, tree-allergy season in Richmond peaked on April 15, about eight days earlier than 30 years ago.
As the evidence mounts, more people have come to understand that climate change is real. Seventy percent of Virginians—and 80 percent of Charlottesville residents—agree that global warming is happening, according to a study by Utah State University, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Yale. Also statewide, 80 percent of people agree that global warming should be regulated as a pollutant. Curiously, only 42 percent think it will harm them personally, and only 21 percent say they became aware of global warming through the media.
Those statistics would suggest that we have a long way to go, even when it comes to awareness of the global rise in temperatures. Hoffman admitted that it can be a hard topic to discuss. To help start those conversations, he gave his audience some easy talking points: It’s real, it’s caused by humans, and there’s hope. Echoing other experts, he ensured that we haven’t yet lost the battle against climate change: “There’s a lot we can do about it.”
Samantha Baars, a former C-VILLE Weekly staff writer, now works for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which was a sponsor of the Paramount event.
Talking about climate change isn’t usually inspiring, but experts at the Paramount event repeatedly stressed how everyone has the power to help mitigate it. The nonprofit group Piedmont Master Gardeners says small decisions you make while landscaping can make a big difference for environmental health. Here are some tips:
• Plant native species in your garden and remove invasive species, because natives save water and provide food and habitat for wild-
life, while invasives can out-compete them and reduce biodiversity.
• Reduce or eliminate your use of toxic chemicals for landscaping.
• Prevent soil loss due to erosion by covering bare soil with ground covers, shrubs, grasses, and trees.
• Grow your own food and support area food producers by going to farmers markets and spots that use local ingredients.
• Conserve water by collecting it in a rain barrel or cistern and using it to hydrate your plants.
For more resources, visit piedmontmastergardeners.org