Kathryn Majid

I appreciate the responses.  Listened to a Cornell lecture about Forestry and I now believe the mini-forest is bare below primarily because of the deer.  Not a worm invasion since the leaf litter is there, and not invasive plants.  So in addition to worrying about sunlight I need to consider the deer as well, lol.  

My suburban back yard in northern NJ is pretty tiny, around 40’ x 30’.  Between my yard and the neighbor behind to the SW is a band of shade trees.  In fact, this 15-20’ mini “forest” strip bisects the whole block and casts a lot of shade in my yard.  

All the forest foliage is 60+ feet up in the air so at eye level it’s a bunch of vertical trunks.  When the trees are in leaf no direct sunlight reaches the floor, but it is not a dark or dim area – there is plenty of ambient light.  However, nothing grows beneath these trees, except some white snakeroot that had been seeding itself around my yard for 2 years and just appeared in the forest.  There are years of leaves piled up on the floor plus fallen branches and trunks.  I’m so inexperienced I don’t know whether to consider this area poor & neglected or healthy & pristine.  I also wonder why there is no understory – no bushes, forbes, etc.   Perhaps the deer that go through there eat anything that tries to grow.

Anyway, I’d like to have a mixed border of native shrubs along the back of my yard to provide a sense of enclosure and food for wildlife.  The previous owner of my property had planted a hedge of lilacs and forsythia all around the yard, right on the property line.  Along the back edge they grow SIDEWAYS for 7 feet to what I’ll call the inner border that gets a bit but not a lot of direct sun.  There they branch out very sparsely to form a scraggly balding hedge.  He had even tied the bushes to iron stakes in the ground to hold them at the edge, but the plants pulled the ropes loose and stretched horizontally to the inner border.  Clearly, they are reaching for sun, and the very same plants do just fine and grow upright on the less shady side borders.

Forsythia & lilacs are rated for full sun.  I’m wondering if I replace them with woodies rated for shade will the new shrubs also grow sideways or upright?  In a perfect world, I’d have a screen of mid-high shrubs & understory trees in the same spot along the back edge, fronted by something like hydrangea along the inner border.  If I place the screen at the inner border then I’m shortening my already small yard and forfeiting at least 7’ of land.  

I should mention that all the forest trees are on neighbors’ properties, none on mine, so cutting or thinning them to increase light is not an option.  And even the inner border along the back is part shade at best.

I’d appreciate some advice from more experienced gardeners.

Hello, everyone. I’m planning a small woodland garden. I’ve been reading Gaia’s Garden and am trying to incorporate permaculture techniques, but I’m getting myself all mixed up, lol!

I’m in zone 6, northern NJ. This is a narrow side yard 6’ x 45’ facing SE and sheltered by the house from winds. I want to make sunnier the back 2/3rd part into a butterfly/bee/hummingbird garden. The front 15’ is under the shade of a neighbor’s Japanese maple that is pretty dense when it leafs out, so I thought spring ephemerals and other woodland plants would be best suited there. The future woodland is the area I’m focused on right now.

My goals for this woodland:
1. Beauty. This area is visible from the street. I’d like blooms for as long as possible. While I don’t expect a manicured look, I don’t like a tangled, unkempt look, either. Besides beautiful I’d like it to be interesting.
2. Low maintenance, healthy & self-sustaining. This is very important. I’m hoping that 2-4 times/yr. of mow/prune/chop & drop plus dumping leaves from the rest of the yard there would be sufficient input from me.
3. Regionally-native plants. Not trying to be a fanatic about this and I AM grandfathering in an old lilac, but for a start I want to add just natives.

When we moved in this side yard was an impenetrable tangle of bushes, vines, an ancient lilac, other unknown vegetation and at least 15+ Norway maple saplings. We cleared everything except the lilac, removed soda cans and other debris, and got 1-2” of topsoil applied. By the time all this was done, it was fall and the nurseries no longer had the plants I wanted, so – afraid of weeds and not knowing what else to do – I dumped around 6” of straw on the butterfly area and when that ran out piled leaves on the woodland section. All is now under 2-3 feet of snow.

The lilac, more tree than bush, is just outside the shadow created by the Japanese maple. My land is 3.5 feet above my neighbor’s, held by a retaining wall, so the maple’s roots are in soil well below my woodland. My wishlist of plants is:

-Pink swamp azalea
Ephemeral carpet of spring flowers:
-White flowers: Phlox, Foamflower, Trillium
-Blue flowers: Virginia Bluebells, Dwarf Crested Iris
After the ephemerals:
-Lady Ferns
-Showy Lady’s Slipper Orchids
Vines I hope will climb the lilac tree:
-Wild yam
-Rosa Setigera

Notice my “woodland” has no trees! I hope to “plant” a few bare pine trunks to create vertical lines and give the carpenter bees infesting the trim on my house a better place to go. The pines will be topped by either conical caps or birdhouses to keep the rain out of the bee’s holes. (I have no idea if birds would be willing to nest that close to bees, but I have an itch to include architectural follies like in those large British estates, only smaller, lol!)

Now my questions:

The book talks about succession and how land is always striving toward forest, and using nitrogen fixers and nutrient accumulators to accelerate the move to a forest biome, and then those plants can be replaced by others. My land was ALREADY a forest with all those Norway maple saplings, so do I still need to include nitrogen fixers and nutrient accumulators or aren’t I past that stage?

We didn’t dig up the roots of the saplings, bushes or vines, just left them. Does this mean we have hugelkulture?

I can’t tell if the soil is compacted or not. Other than leveling the ground we didn’t till. Beneath the topsoil we added, it’s black and seems pretty firm to me, not “fluffy”. But this soil had a lot of vegetation on it, so do I really need to do something to make the soil looser or can I not worry about it?

Worms. This has me very confused. I hadn’t seen any worms in this spot and went to research what kind I could import, only to discover that North American forests are destroyed by worms! Yet GG talks glowingly about worms, all the while urging a forest ecology. Since the plants I want to add are mostly native forest species which evolved without worms shouldn’t I NOT want worms?

Should I scatter twigs or ramial chipped wood as part of my maintenance? GG doesn’t discuss but elsewhere I read that the RCW is key to maintenance of forest soil

This is a small area – 6’ by 15’, and will have even less planting space when I add stepping stones. My plan has 10 species plus the lilac. Is this enough biodiversity?

Do I have a guild that can be self-sustaining? None of my wishlist plants are on the lists of guild members or – as far as I know – perform the guild functions described. Should I be concerned about this?