In blue jeans, white shirt, and wide-brimmed straw hat, Dr. Sara Tangren stands in an open field dotted with purple flowers. An expert and protector of plants native to the Bay, she explains that they’re much more than just pretty faces. Many were, and still are, used medicinally. “Colonials used this one for its oil, thymol, as an antibiotic ointment for the treatment of all sores, especially gum disease,” she says, pointing to a clump of spotted mint. “Later a man named Lister took the oil and put it in a mouthwash.”

Tangren, a forty-three-year-old botanist, founded the Chesapeake Native Nursery, located in Davidsonville, Md., more than five years ago with the mission to preserve, propagate, and sell only plants indigenous to the Chesapeake watershed. It’s one of the only native nurseries in the Mid-Atlantic region, home to about 60 out of 6,000 species that were growing in the Chesapeake Bay region long before the first English settlers came ashore. “What is important about natives, why it matters for as many as possible to survive,” she explains, “is that each is a part of a greater web of habitats for butterflies, birds, insects. When one native plant becomes extinct, the ecosystem loses something.”

While many homeowners and nurseries grow natives among other plants, Tangren concentrates on rescuing and propagating these natural wildflowers and grasses. It’s a labor-intensive business, finding an unusual plant while it’s blooming, getting permission from the property owners to collect seeds, and then figuring by trial and error how to grow them. Some perennials take two years and more to deliver seeds. And unlike seed packets at garden centers, natives in the wild do not come with instructions.

Now she and several part-time employees work at the nursery, its fields just a stone’s throw from a housing development filled with vinyl-sided homes and McMansions that stand in contrast to the collapsed tobacco barn on the nursery’s property. Here her facilities are still so rustic that she doesn’t even have electricity. (She runs her computer and seed-saving machines back at home in Takoma Park, Md., where she lives with her husband, Bill, an astronomer at the Naval Observatory.)

Tangren, who received a Ph.D. in natural resources at the University of Maryland in 2000, became interested in native plants while working as an environmental consultant. Her passion was kindled by her consulting work with developers, who hired her to find significant forests and wetlands, which by state law must be preserved. “There are laws to protect those parts of the ecosystem,” says Tangren, “but not the meadows…. I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach every time I saw the big meadows bulldozed out.”

She began asking developers permission to “rescue” the native plants, grasses, trees, and shrubs growing in fields destined for development. Ironically, it was the developers, whom many consider the enemy of land conservation, who became Tangren’s biggest supplier of natives. One actually assisted her in a daylong rescue. “As bulldozers were working all around to clear the land for a golf course, the developer had a backhoe go in and scoop up the plants we had tagged and take them to a safe spot,” remembers Tangren.

Tangren replanted the natives on two leased acres in Davidsonville that she had found through the Agricultural Extension office. She immediately began the propagation process, waiting for the flowers to bloom again in order to collect the seeds for replanting. Her native nursery was born.

That first circle of mint she planted has grown to many concentric circles in the initial two-acre plot, graced with full sun, loved by numerous annuals, perennials, and grasses. The area literally swirls with rings of color: yellow native black-eyed susans, frilly whitefrost asters, tall lavender liatris, shaggy blazingstar (a great monarch butterfly draw), and woodland sunflowers whose taxi-yellow blossoms this morning host several equally bright goldfinch. “They draw so many goldfinch,” says Tangren, “we have to chase them off!”

A walk down the dusty road leads to a second growing area, the “stable” garden (named for the original stables nearby), where the shade-loving plants reside. Tangren points out the delicate wild columbine that blooms in May and draws hummingbirds. “It’s also the only local host plant for the columbine duskywing butterfly,” says Tangren.

Heading through a thicket of trees to a third garden area, Tangren explains that fall is the best time to plant natives. She stops to pump water from a nearby pond into long, rectangular beds filled with a honeycomb of individual pots with seedlings. The native blue mistflower, wild columbine, and blue sedge, a compact, evergreen native alternative to popular but non-native liriope, will all be transplanted for market.

On the way back to a small barn, her center of operations for potting plants, Tangren points to a stand of easily toppled, non-native Bradford pear trees. “They just take over,”
she says, explaining that invasive, non-indigenous plants, like the Bradford, are the primary enemy of precious natives. Though not planted by man—birds deposited their seeds in droppings—these pears will overtake the carefully planted stands of southern red oak and tulip poplars that developers put in to restore a forest they had cleared for the nearby houses. “In urban areas,” she says, “it’s English ivy and porcelainberry vine that are most invasive, along with those butterfly bushes gardeners treasure.”

Kenneth Carr, an eighty-year-old farmer and Tangren’s landlord, was typical of most who look on these colorful fields and just see weeds. “For sixty years,” he says of the foliage on his rich property, “I did everything to kill ’em. Now I’m helping Sara save them.”
The former tobacco farmer loves the land so much that he has now done everything he can to preserve it, refusing multi-million dollar offers from developers, becoming a soil
conservation agent. “He does so much to help us,” she says, adding that he moves the mulch and soil around with his own tractor and mows so the edges of her garden beds look sharp and welcoming. He also engineered a contraption of a rusting, above-ground tank with hoses to give Tangren water for her ever-expanding nursery.

It’s after excruciating droughts, like the one in 2002, that gardeners and landscapers come to realize the value of natives. As well as being more drought-tolerant and winter-hardy, natives are more disease resistant, and they’re easier to establish.

Interest in natives has grown so much in recent years that individuals as well as garden clubs, landscape designers, and businesses seek out Tangren to help them. She offers meadow consultation and plant research as well as planting and garden maintenance services. Her clients range from homeowners to schools to U.S. military bases and
the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), where she oversees all native plantings in a sanctuary garden overlooking Black Walnut Creek. “What was once wild, wild, wild,” says Heather Tuckfield, CBF’s volunteer manager, “full of poison ivy and Japanese honeysuckle, is now a serene and beautiful place to sit. It’s so tranquil. You’re sitting there on a bench with native black-eyed susans all around you looking at blue heron along with many other species of birds and butterflies.”

A Silver Spring homeowner, Kathy Michels, had her traditional yard of grass and shrubbery transformed into a sanctuary of native plants including cardinal flowers, milkweed, and many flowering varieties, such as the elegant white foxglove beard tongue, fit for even the most formal garden. “I don’t have to mow anymore!” exclaims Michels, “and weeding is not a big deal because it’s so heavily planted. When you come home, you’re surrounded by birds and butterflies and insects. You feel like you are in your own little paradise, your own Eden.”

Tangren now has a computer-generated customer catalog of wildflowers and grasses, full of friendly icons to identify which plants are attractive to bird and butterflies, which are deer-resistant, or suitable for formal flower gardens. It notes the plants that are so drought tolerant they never need to be watered.

This year Tangren hopes to convert to a nonprofit status, so she can actively solicit grants and donations and develop internship and volunteer programs. “I can think of so many volunteer projects,” she bubbles. “Helping with photography of the plants, doing videotapes, weeding, harvesting. We need someone to help us with office work in the worst way and a couple who know about gardening and selling our plants at farmers’ markets as fundraisers.” Tangren also dreams of having electricity so she can run her computer and her seed saver machines on site instead of back at home.

“The main thing I see down the road,” she says “is teaching farmers and other nurseries how to grow natives so that they can sell them.” She would be supporting not only the nurseries but beleaguered farmers, who are literally losing their farms with corn and soybeans. They could grow acres of grasses as “alternative” agriculture, she says, selling them for plants or seeds, and turn a nice profit.

“Natives are our heritage,” says Tangren. “This is our heritage. We want to be able to hand it down.”

Resources

CHESAPEAKE NATIVE NURSERY
Aisquith Farm Rd.
Davidsonville, Md.

To order plants, call 301-580-6237 or visit http://www.chesapeakenatives.com.

Native plants are also available at Behnke’s Nursery in Largo (301-249-2492), Beltsville (301-937-1100), and Potomac (301-983-9200) or vistit http://www.behnkes.com.
 
Nursery tours are held every third Saturday at 5 p.m. from June through September; 3 p.m. in October and November. Open weekdays 9 a.m. to noon, by appointment only.

Kathy Hudson writes on gardening from her home in Baltimore, Md.