You can’t necessarily save the rain forest,” Diane Greenberg says, “but you can save your backyard.” As cofounder of Catskill Native Nursery in Kerhonkson, Greenberg has dedicated the last decade to sharing horticulture and landscape tips designed to conserve the diverse but fragile ecosystems of the mid-Hudson Valley.

Those gardening tips—helpful for the year-round resident and weekender alike—will be disseminated at the annual Wildflower Festival, to be held at Catskill Native Nursery in Kerhonkson, New York, on Saturday, May 23. The event is free and open to gardeners of all stripes, ecologists and nature-lovers. The Festival offers lectures and workshops, and will sell plants, pottery and garden art. Rare and limited stock will be offered.

Living green just became a little easier.

“The real thrust of the event is biodiversity,” says Greenberg. “As the area becomes more developed, a lot of our wild spaces get lost. The community needs to get back to our garden.”

Here is an urgency to the event, as well. The Hudson Valley population of wildflowers is quickly dwindling. There are several reasons for this systemic disappearance. The rising incidence of housing developments in this region is replacing habitats where these plants once thrived. In addition, local deer populations—exploding because humans have wiped out their natural predators—re mowing down woodland wildflowers for food. “They can go where developers do not,” Greenberg says.

As a result of both forces, once-bountiful species of native wildflowers such as ladyslippers, orchid trillium and native monkshood (aconite)—the mascot of the Wildflower Festival—are harder to find and may soon be officially considered endangered.

If you’re an avid gardener but disdain the hours of effort involved—whether you’re on your knees or paying a landscaper—the solution to the work is also the same solution to preserving wildflowers: Return to basics in your garden. Nature had an ideal blueprint for flowers and trees, so why not hew as closely as you can to the original plan? In other words, let as much of your garden grow wild, and add native plants to the mix.

It requires balancing the use of native and human-introduced flora into home gardens. Much of what we consider native plants, such as roadside forsythia and purple loose strief, are in fact species introduced by Dutch settlers which have since overrun the area to deleterious effect. While people carp about the great effort required to keep a garden thriving, Greenberg points out that growing a biodiverse garden needs less effort, since area-appropriate plants and grasses grow with greater ease.

Greenberg, a lifelong gardener with an encyclopedic knowledge of the growing patterns of this region, has numerous hard-and-fast commandments on how to be a good steward to this land. The first admonition is to put down the hose. You’ve been spending weeks watering the lush green lawn that stretches across your property. You’ve fed it bags of high-grade fertilizer and pulled weeds and you’re beaming like a house-proud suburbanite as neighbors ooh and aah. Well, wake up, Greenberg advises: your verdant oasis is nothing less than a toxic ecological nightmare.

A monoculture lawn is an enemy to biodiversity; establishing it means you probably tore out patches of native wildflowers that draw the birds, bees and butterflies that are a crucial part to a vibrant ecosystem. If you’re spraying pesticides, you’re adding insult to injury. Bug sprays and your trusty industrial fertilizer—also fortified with dubious chemicals—are simply becoming part of the runoff, and finding their way into the water supply. The maintenance of your monoculture lawn inflicts harm on the environment, the water table and, scientists have proven, also your own health.

In fact, the general way that people create lawns and gardens undermines the life cycle, to everyone’s detriment. People tend to flavor invasive plants like barberry, purple loosestrife and burning bush. While attractive in the short-term, they take over a garden and choke out the native plants, causing another homegrown Armageddon.

“We put in very few things that give back to nature,” Greenberg says. But there are numerous ways that home gardeners can begin to undo the damage. There is a growing interest in a movement called permaculture. A system developed in Australia by Bill Morrison, it dictates that land is utilized in way that is beneficial to all that grows there. That is, start with the natural configuration of the ecosystem and work to sustain it with minor human meddling. In fact, adherents will even situate the building of their house so that the plants on the property will get optimum sun. Many edible plants are grown in this instance.

“You can actually heal environments on a very small scale,” she adds. The classes at the Wildflower Festival offer alternatives to the scorch and burn approach favored by the enthusiastic but clueless everyday gardener.

Returning lawns and gardens to a more natural setting means less maintenance; natural ecosystems take care of themselves, require far less watering and attract the fauna of the area. Pull out the puffy landscape shrubs—“the green blobs in front of your homes”—and the big flowers that do not contain pollen and opt for replacing them with nectar plants. The butterflies who are crucial to the life cycle, and not incidentally brighten any backyard, will return. Plant fruit trees to draw birds. They, in turn, will eat the insects that you’ve been spritzing wildly with that cancer-causing bug spray.

Nature enacts a balance that man has been undermining for centuries. Returning parts of your property to nature will reinstate this balance and biodiversity, to the benefit of all.

“We feel that you can create nature corridors in a community—let an area go to meadow instead of lawn,” she says.

Instead, newcomers to the mid-Hudson Valley (and longtime locals) see the area as something to correct, change and tame by sheer force. For instance, people get itchy to tear down noble stands of pine and hemlock which provide important shade (and oxygen) because they consider woodland environments a barrier to successful gardening.

“But shade is a wonderful environment,” Greenberg says. “Many native plants want to be under oak trees. You can grow trillium and paddica. You can create woodland sedges and get away from the standard top 20 plants usually grown. People feel they have to create this southern France environment. But you can have this lush garden with trees.”

Yes, yes, yes, you are thinking impatiently, but let’s get down to brass tacks: what about defending your garden against that ubiquitous, obnoxious local forager, the deer?

There are ways to thwart these roving gobblers. Again, biodiversity is the key. Many homeowners plant their gardens based solely on deer prevention; therefore, backyards are full of deer-resistant ornamental grasses and catmint. Again, this creates the unfavorable monoculture situation. However, planting a meadow area means that even if deer nibble on some of it, the balance will recover. Greenberg favors natural deer repellent, which she finds effective, and recommends invisible fences over the obtrusive and unattractive Alamo fencing.

The Wildflower Festival provides sanity-saving tips for homeowners and gardeners, while making a fervent plea for a greener approach to landscaping and land stewarding.

“This is our crazy little mission here: to heal the earth on a small scale,” Greenberg says; “make butterflies happy, increase bird life.”

At the Wildflower Festival, gardeners of all stripes of ambition will have the chance to listen to experts in landscaping, herb growing and gardening, all of whom will stress the dire importance (and relative ease) of co-existing peacefully with the nature around you in the Hudson Valley. Among the lectures and workshops offered that day include:

Building a Small Bog or Wetland Garden
Newcomers to this region see a marshy area and their first impulse is to fill it in and create a garden. Not only is this harmful to the environment, but it betrays a lack of imagination. Local landscapers Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano can explain how you can turn a patch of backyard wetland into a showplace for bog plants and a few local ecosystem-appropriate creatures like frogs and salamanders.

“People do not know how to garden with bog areas,” Greenberg says. “They have a one fallback position, European gardening, even when not appropriate. A mini-wetland can be small and still beneficial. Not a mosquito pit—but a great environment.”

This workshop will explain the steps towards installing wetland plants in existing high water areas and building a small bog in a yard or garden setting where one does not exist. The focus will be on three types of bog gardens: a cranberry bog, a native carnivorous/pitcher plant bog and a decorative wetland perennial plant bog.

Creating a Woodland Sanctuary for Rare and Endangered Plants
What deer run amok and McMansion builders have torn asunder, the conscientious local gardener can begin to restore. Dr. Francis Groeters of Catskill Native Nursery will explain how many of our native woodland wildflowers can be grown and multiplied in the home garden, which you can transform into a majestic garden sanctuary for these native woodland wildflowers which are declining in population.

The Homemade Garden
Most of us have great ambitions for our garden, fueled by Martha Stewart TV show fantasies. But, Greenberg said, we have neither her fleet of gardeners nor her acres of Connecticut land. Why not create a garden that is commensurate with your modest reserves of time and energy? Ken Greene of The Hudson Valley Seed Library will sing the praises of the small personal garden. Whether you want to grow flowers or harvest vegetables for the dinner table, there are numerous ways to maintain a backyard garden. (Think of the mighty little “Victory Gardens” that Americans tended during the first and second world wars.) Greene will discuss ways to economically start a small garden, bypassing expensive tools, plastics and fertilizers that pollute, waste and break. He will share low-tech techniques for seed starting, plant support, weed control and soil health.

“Weekenders are not here all the time,” Greenberg says, “and they need something easy to maintain. Once the gardens are established, you don’t have to do much. These are plants that are meant to be here; they thrive on our rain, love the soil and do not have to be sprayed.”

Moreover, Greene will acquaint you with The Hudson Valley Seed Library (www.seedlibrary.org; also see the article in last month’s issue of the Guide), an innovative seed-exchange program which allows local growers to share with neighbors the seeds from their locally-grown heirloom and hybrid vegetables and plants. When you consider that commercial seed dealers are selling genetically-modified seeds (whose impact on the soil and on human bodies is still unknown), using native seeds—and organic ones, at that—is an environmental imperative.

“Monsanto has given the term ‘hybrid’ a bad name,” Greenberg says, “but there are still some good hybrids.”

The Festival
The Wildflower Festival began as a partnership between Catskill Native Nursery and The Catskill Center for Conservation and Development in Arkville, which was concerned by the rapid shrinking of wildflower populations in the area.

Eight years later, the event grows in popularity but also in relevance. But the message remains the same, Greenberg says: Conscientious gardening is a crucial step towards creating a better environment, and utilizing beneficial native plants is equally important to that goal.

“It’s an easy way to make the world look better.”

The 8th Annual Wildflower Festival at Catskill Native Nursery will be held on Saturday, May 23 from 10 am to 3:30 pm. The Catskill Native Nursery is located at 607 Samsonville Road in Kerhonkson, NY (4.5 miles off Route 209). Admission is free. For more information, call 845 626 2758 or visit www.catskillnativenursery.com. The Festival happens rain or shine.