Restoring Native Ecology Starts At Long Island Natives In Eastport

When he drives on the Belt Parkway with his family, Matthew Gettinger proudly points out to his sons that the trees they are passing by started out at the family’s nursery in Eastport.

Mr. Gettinger is the president of Country Gardens Nursery and Long Island Natives, which supplied more than 150,000 native trees to the New York City Parks Department over nine years for a reforestation project spanning the five boroughs. He is the third generation of the Gettinger family to helm the business.

His grandfather, Robert, started up the business as a landscaping contractor in 1947, working on large-scale projects, such as highway work for Robert Moses. His father, Brad, transitioned Country Gardens into a wholesale supplier to the landscaping and landscape design trades in the 1960s.

Mr. Gettinger spent summers as a youth in the nursery’s fields and earned firsthand knowledge of the work that goes into raising plants. After attending the University of Delaware and then working six years in product development for Black & Decker in Southern California and Baltimore, he returned to Long Island, and the family business, in 2008, right around the time that the business landed the New York City Parks contract.

Now, Long Island Natives, which grew out of Country Gardens Nursery, is at the forefront of the native plant movement in New York.

The 50-acre nursery fronting Old Country Road runs a mile north all the way to Sunrise Highway, and these days about 90 percent of the species of plants grown there are native to Long Island, or close by.

Mr. Gettinger recalled that one of the first books he read upon his return was “Bringing Nature Home” by entomologist Douglas Tallamy. The 2007 book explains how natives plants are required to sustain insect populations, which in turn support birds and the food web in general.

“Efforts like that are demonstrating to people with science why it’s important to restore the native plant communities,” he said.

The contract with New York City was for 16,000 3-foot-tall native trees in 2-gallon pots per year for eight and a half years, and it was extended for another year. The nursery grew 49 different species of trees, predominantly oaks — which are the most important hosts of caterpillars that feed baby birds — but also sweetgum, tulip and hickory, among others.

“What I found very quickly on a personal level was just how much more rewarding that work was to me,” Mr. Gettinger said.

In addition to their importance to the ecosystem, another upside of native plants is that they require little maintenance, if any, once established. Mr. Gettinger pointed to an old adage in the landscaping trade: “Put the right plant in the right place.”

The wisdom of the phrase is that a plant will thrive when it is planted in compatible soil, moisture and light conditions. The less ideal the location, the more intervention is needed to stave off the plant’s failure.

“I think it needs to be updated to ‘put the right native plant in the right spot,’” Mr. Gettinger suggested.

A plant grown in its native habitat will succeed where an exotic plant struggles.

“You shouldn’t have to amend the soil,” Mr. Gettinger said. “You shouldn’t have to add fertilizer. You shouldn’t have to spray with fungicides. You shouldn’t have to do all these things that we’re trying to force a square peg into a round hole.”

For all publicly managed lands, he believes that the use of native plants shouldn’t even be in question. But for private landowners, the case does need to be made. What’s great about Long Island, and the East End in particular, is the variety of habitats, such as uplands, wetlands and maritime forests, he noted.

“We have so many different types of habitat that there is going to be a native plant that is going to be suitable for use on your property, that is going to love where you're putting it, because it’s going to be used to those types of native soils naturally occurring,” he said. “It’s going to like those water conditions. It’s going to like the saline if it’s a saline environment. It’s going to be right at home as long as you are picking out the right plants. I think the challenge is not every native plant makes sense for every single property.”

Ensuring a plant will be right at home is one consideration, while another big one he identified is deer. Even a native-based landscape design needs to account for what plants deer will browse on and which they are likely to leave alone.

Deer pressure can limit options for native plantings in unfenced areas, but there are still a number of attractive flowering native species that deer tend to leave alone, such as Joe Pye weed and New York ironweed.

Some popular plants in native gardening, such as purple coneflower, are “near natives,” Mr. Gettinger explained. “It’s an adopted native,” he said. “It’s a plant that’s close enough in proximity that I think we just appreciate the plant itself and the wildlife that it supports.”

Purple coneflower, or Echinacea purpurea, is a favorite of bumblebees and birds. “It supports a lot of birds like the goldfinches, which all fall you’ll see grabbing the seeds on these,” Mr. Gettinger said as he gave a tour of the nursery.

However, there are many cultivars of Echinacea purpurea on the market that were selected and bred for their ornamental value rather than their benefits to wildlife. They are different than the native — or near-native — straight species that is naturally occurring in the wild.

The differences between natives and cultivars can lead to confusion. Bee balm, of the genus Monarda, is another example of a plant that is available in natives and in various cultivars. Mr. Gettinger recalled a time when Long Island Natives filled an order for native bee balms and the recipient did not believe they were actually bee balms — because the native plants look quite different from the cultivars most people are used to seeing in curated landscapes. But the native bee balms are the most valuable to pollinators.

A native garden can have color for months on end if planned out with sequentially flowering plants, according to Mr. Gettinger. Early-blooming plants like columbines will emerge in April and May, followed by ironweed and milkweed, and then Joe Pye weed and asters in fall, he said.

But there is more to a native landscape than flowering plants.

“I realize that color can be popular, but don’t sleep on texture, form, and the different subtle variations of the color green, because there’s where some really high-end sophisticated gardens go,” Mr. Gettinger said.

Ferns, he said, are a shade-garden plant that is superior at providing texture and form. Long Island Natives carries lady fern, cinnamon fern, Christmas fern, sweet fern, sensitive fern and the popular hay-scented fern.

Long Island Natives is experimenting with various ways to propagate native plants, including from cuttings that are treated with rooting hormone. But rather than taking the cuttings all from one specimen of a species, cuttings are collected from many different plants of that species. Mr. Gettinger explained that to maintain the genetic diversity of native plants it is important to propagate from a variety of plants.

He shared his excitement to see the trees that started out at Long Island Natives mature. “It’s nice to drive by it and say, ‘This forest, we helped build this forest,’” he said.

He grew up in Oakdale and now lives in Center Moriches with his wife, Laura, and sons Weston, 9, Travis, 8, and Marcus, 5. His father continues to work at Country Gardens Nursery and Long Island Natives, which have about 35 employees seasonally.

Long Island Natives does most of its business on Long Island or in the five boroughs; just last year the nursery was awarded a contract to supply 27,000 native plants at Jones Beach. But the nursery has also shipped plants to upstate and all over New England.

Though Long Island Natives is a wholesaler that serves municipalities and the trades, the business also fields many inquiries from individual homeowners who want to plant natives in their landscapes. The nursery offers a small retail component, online only with a minimum order of $250, to accommodate them. For smaller orders, Mr. Gettinger advises going to a local garden center and asking for natives.

The more consumers ask for natives, the more likely garden centers will be likely to stock them.

For more information, visit longislandnatives.com.