Blundering Gardener: Here's the dirt on how to grow healthy plants in healthy native soil

Last week, I wrote about the annual Wild Ones conference on designing with native plants and the ideas of speaker Douglas Owens-Pike, founder of EnergyScapes, a St. Paul-based landscape and garden design business that Owens-Pike launched in 1989.

In those days, Martha Stewart was in charge of matters of taste, indoors and out. Her gardens combined traditional English flower borders with the more formal perfectionism of the French and Italian style, all clipped parterres and geometric shapes.

In the glossy pages of Martha Stewart Living and the comparably impeccable Garden Design magazine, the trend to a more relaxed aesthetic became evident in the '90s, as more of the gardens featured native prairie plants and grasses and more of the gardeners credited organic methods for their success.

There seemed to be less emphasis on chemicals and more on how to make compost.

We were advised to mulch our beds and let the organic matter decompose to feed the soil. We were told to ditch the leaf-bag attachment on lawn mowers and let the grass clippings stay put.

As to design, why slavishly copy European gardens? Why not implement an American style?

Garden design has always swung between man's penchant for controlling nature and nature's genius at painting the land with flora that suits the climate and topography and meets the needs of wildlife.

Owens-Pike all along had focused on the plants. An ecologist by training, he believed healthy native soils are best suited for growing healthy native plants.

The plants have a twofold purpose: They beautify the Earth because they are renewing it.

I've often wondered, what exactly is "healthy" soil?

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Blundering Gardener: Here's the dirt on how to grow healthy plants in healthy native soil