Carolyn Summers To Speak in Horticultural Alliance Lecture Series February 9

As a growing number of homeowners and gardeners tune into the need to incorporate more native plants into their landscapes to support the local ecosystem, advice on how to go about it in a visually appealing way is cherished.

The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons will welcome garden designer and native plant expert Carolyn Summers to the Bridgehampton Community House on Sunday afternoon, February 9, to share her presentation “Native Plants: From the Wild to the Garden,” which will detail both why and how to use native plants. She will discuss which native plants are best suited to traditional gardens and how to design and maintain an attractive native garden that keeps the “weed police” at bay.

Summers is the co-author of “Designing Gardens With Flora of the American East” and the co-founder of Flying Trillium Gardens and Preserve, a nonprofit native plant demonstration garden and arboretum in Sullivan County. She formerly worked with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy nonprofit, to initiate a project to preserve and restore wildlife habitat and public access in the New York-New Jersey Bight. Before that, she was the first director of natural resources at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where she implemented a native plants policy for the agency’s construction and restoration projects.

Flying Trillium Gardens and Preserve includes more than 300 species of trees, and the number is growing. Counting cultivars that are distinct from the straight species, the number is even higher.

The trees are all native to the Northeast, most of them native to the southern Catskills, where Flying Trillium is located, while some are native to areas slightly farther south, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In her book and in her talk, Summers explains the importance of keystone plants — plants that support the most species of wildlife.

“The reason behind planting with native plants is to make the whole landscape more resilient, and that carries over into the wildlife populations, particularly insects, because it is the plants themselves, the native plants, that form the basis of the food chain,” Summers said during an interview this month.

Her book explains this in detail because it underpins the purpose of planting with natives.

“If you don’t really understand that, then the whole concept of, ‘Well, why should I do this?’ is very mysterious,” she said.

For example, it’s widely known that monarch butterflies require milkweed plants to live, she pointed out. The rest of the Lepidoptera — the butterflies and moths — also have specialized relationships with plant species they count on for survival. The same goes for many bee species and other pollinators.

“So it’s just really important for people to understand which are the best plants for them to plant,” Summers said.

The book gives tips on how to find those plants at nurseries or elsewhere and how to design with them.

“It goes through all of the different types of situations, from where you would want tall trees, where you would want flowering trees, shrubs, and then all the way into flowers and wetland plants,” she said.

Because she realizes that a naturalistic garden look may not appeal to all gardeners and may not be permissible in all neighborhoods, Summers offers advice with traditional garden aesthetics in mind.

“I’m well aware that people like neatness, and they have this idea that native plants can only be used in naturalistic situations — and nothing can be further from the truth,” she said. “It’s all about, basically, how much you want to spend to keep the plants looking in a certain way.”

She noted that native plants can be used as hedges, they can be sheared, they can be shaped into meatball topiaries, etc. “It’s just a way of thinking,” she said. “You know, you have to sort of wrap your head around the fact that, ‘Well, I’m going to substitute the native plants for these plants, but I’m going to treat my garden pretty much the same way, and I’m going to make it look neat.’ And that’s not impossible.”

At Flying Trillium, which is also her home, she has examples of how this is accomplished.

“I give people personalized tours all throughout the gardens,” she said. “I explain to them what we’re doing, how it works, how to make it work in their own home gardens.”

Though the insects and birds that rely on the native plants don’t care about maintaining a certain look, Summers is conscious of appearance.

“I try to make sure that our gardens reflect that well-kept appearance, so that people don’t go away from here and say, ‘Oh, my God, that place is in mess,’” she said. “I don’t want anything like that. Because they won’t blame me the gardener — they will blame the plants.”

Another purpose of Flying Trillium is to allow visitors from nearby and elsewhere in New York State to learn what trees will work in their own circumstances.

“If I’m trialing a plant up here that’s normally zone 6 — and we’re zone 5 — other people in other parts of zone 5 could also try that if it turns out we’re successful,” she said.

For example, Flying Trillium is growing papaws, which are North American native fruit trees papaws. Papaws naturally grow in zone 7, but she and others are having success growing them in zone 5. “Mine are fruiting, and the fruit’s delicious,” she said.

By using a mix of local native plants and near-natives from south of the Catskills, Flying Trillium is bracing for climate change.

“I’m not a fan of climate change, and I like our forests the way they are, but it is a fact that they will be changing, and the other change multiplier is deer,” Summers said. “We are overpopulated with deer, so a lot of young trees are not replacing the older forests because they don’t get past the sapling stage, or even the seedling stage, in some cases.”

She added that without some kind of control in the deer population, there will be radical changes in Northeast forests in the years to come. “An entire cohort of kids will grow up not even being able to recognize common ground wildflowers on the ground, because they’re completely getting like vacuumed up by the deer,” she said.

She and her husband, David Brittenham, have owned the Flying Trillium property since the late 1990s.

“It’s an old farm — an old hay farm — so there was very little growing on it because, literally, the fields had been mowed from stone wall to stone wall,” she recalled.

The only trees that had been allowed to grow were along the stone walls, and those trees were massive. Today, all of the trees and shrubs inside those walls are ones that her family has planted. And in other previously well-mowed areas, they let meadows grow.

“Some of these meadows are now going on 20 years old,” she noted. The meadows have accumulated some interesting flora on their own, and she has added plants too.

“The meadows are becoming a little more interesting,” she said. “At first, for the first 15 or 20 years, mostly what we had were goldenrods and asters, still a pretty good mix of those different species. But now we’re getting some other species in there as well.

She said that they never had to seed the goldenrods and asters, as the native plants arrived on their own.

“And that’s typical of the Catskills here,” she noted. “It’s a typical way you see old fields, over time, become woodlands again — that they start with the forbs, they start with the flowers, and then the shrubs will invade. And then over that time, the trees that come in quickly, they’ll come in. And then after a while, those will die out, and you’ll have a forest again.”

The areas that they intend to maintain as meadows are infrequently mowed — about once every three years — so woody plants don’t take over.

“We have old areas of forest, we also have a kettle hole bog,” Summers said. “So we have a lot of diversity, just in the holdings that we have. Everything from very low prairies in some of the very dry and sandy areas to the more mesic prairie areas, and on into shrub lands and then into the whole hemlock forest, parts of which are quite old.”

She says she has always envisioned Flying Trillium as a place to experiment and to trial plants, especially trees.

They decided that, in time, they would open it to the public, and they followed through on that plan. Flying Trillium incorporated in 2021, amid the COVID pandemic.

“We actually had quite a few people come because it was a time when people were getting in touch with the outdoors, because they really couldn’t do things that they that they would normally have done with their time,” she said. “So it actually worked out as a nice time to start.”

Carolyn Summers will present “Native Plants: From the Wild to the Garden” on Sunday, February 9, at 2 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Community House, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton. Admission to the lecture is $10 for the public and $10 for members of the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons. Learn more at hahgarden.org.