Ferris Robinson
Jane's Garden on Lookout
Beautyberry at Temple Park on Lookout
Jane's Garden features both natives and ornamentals
A pollinator garden at the Commons on Lookout
Mary Leland Hutchison and her husband Kelly
“In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty. Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators and manage water.”
- Doug Tallamy
Dr. Tallamy’s plan, the Homegrown National Park movement, is a simple grassroots action to restore biodiversity. He calls us all to take part, no matter how much land you have access to, whether it’s fields after fields or a front porch stoop. You can learn more at https://homegrownnationalpark.org/
If you love your formal garden, don’t think you can’t take part in the Homegrown National Park movement; all you need to do is add a few native plants. The garden clubs all over the city are involved in this plan one way or another, and are gardening for wildlife, which results in gorgeous gardens that sustain our important creatures.
For example, if you’ve driven up Lookout Mountain, you’ve probably passed Jane’s Garden on West Brow Road. It’s at the intersection of North Watauga Road and boasts a charming little gazebo. The little pocket park’s namesake, Jane Davenport Jansen, grew up on Lookout Mountain before spending most of her life in California. Jane received many honors and awards for her botanical and horticultural work, and upon her death in 2000, her brother, Rodolph Davenport, honored her with a corner garden on the well-travelled road. He donated the 200- by 50-foot piece of land to the City of Lookout Mountain in 2003, and in the blink of eye, it was enhanced with a strolling path, water fountain and rockwork and filled with many of her favorite plants, including specimen Japanese maple trees and Chinese fringe trees from her beloved Quarryhill Botanical Garden on her California estate. The Quarryhill Botanical Garden is actually documented in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Gardens, which is no small feat.
When the lovely garden was first created, many of Jane’s favorite plants that she grew in her Asian garden were included. But the garden’s stewards, members of the Garden Club of Lookout Mountain, soon realized that the fabulous plants that made sense in California struggled to thrive on a Tennessee mountain.
Jane’s niece, Mary Leland Davenport Hutchison, actually has taken the garden under her wing. A member of the Garden Club of Lookout Mountain, which is part of the Garden Club of America, Mary Leland carefully tends the plants that are not native to our area, but she adds plants that are. She understands that the function of a garden as a habitat for wildlife is so important, and she feels smug when she sees evidence that the caterpillars have made a meal of a leaf. “Let them eat plants!” she says of the tiny creatures the park sustains. An advocate for mixing clover in with her grass seed to provide sustenance for bees, Mary Leland learned that practice from her grandmother decades ago, and grew up understanding the responsibility we humans have to be stewards of the earth.
Shunning neonicotinoid pesticides, Mary Leland carefully chooses native plants that will give a huge bang for their buck or are worth their weight in gold. In other words, she wants native plants that are rock stars as far as our tiniest creatures are concerned. If we all add a few responsibly-grown, hardworking native plants to our yards, our bees, butterflies and songbirds will soon be in the gazillions.
And Jane’s Garden on Lookout Mountain is a perfect example of adding important native plants to the most formal of gardens and maintaining the intended design. Check out Tennessee Valley Wild Ones, Reflection Riding Arboretum and Nature Center, Crabtree Farms and Bees on a Bicycle for more info on gardening for wildlife, as well as Gardening for Wildlife on Facebook.
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Ferris Robinson is the author of three children’s books, “The Queen Who Banished Bugs,” “The Queen Who Accidentally Banished Birds,” and “Call Me Arthropod” in her pollinator series. “Making Arrangements” is her first novel. “Dogs and Love - Stories of Fidelity” is a collection of true tales about man’s best friend. Her website is ferrisrobinson.com and you can download a FREE pollinator poster there. She is the editor of The Lookout Mountain Mirror and The Signal Mountain Mirror.