Jim Tolstrup is the Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, CO, a unique model for preserving native biodiversity in the midst of development. His past work experience includes serving as Land Stewardship Director of Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, CO and running his own landscape design business in Kennebunkport, Maine where he installed gardens at George and Barbara Bush’s “Summer White House.”
Jim spent an hour with us talking about his life experiences in professional gardening, his deep fascination with native plants in the landscape, and his optimism about the future.
Marshall Cutchin: Tell us a little about your dad, who sounds like a remarkable character in his own right. Would you say he was your primary influence in connecting with the natural world, or did he not push that on you?
Jim Tolstrup: My dad had a series of fascinations throughout his life. There was always some interest that he was passionate about and they were wide ranging. He was an electronics engineer and then after he retired he went back to school at Harvard and got a zoology degree. He worked at the Peabody Museum at Harvard and at the Boston Museum of Science until he was 82 years old.
He made marionette puppets. He was part of the New England Magicians’ Society. He cut gemstones. He learned to read and speak Mandarin Chinese—taught himself basically. He was really fascinated with collecting wild plants at one point,, read the Euell Gibbons books and could identify all the plants. That’s the part that I really latched on to, taking walks with my dad and identifying all kinds of wild plants. That definitely stuck in my brain.
Marshall Cutchin: You did a graduate program at Harvard yourself at some point. I believe in landscape design?
Jim Tolstrup: Yeah, it was really like a technical school for gardeners and garden designers and it was jointly hosted by the Arnold Arboretum—which is owned by the city of Boston and is the oldest public Arboretum in North America—and Harvard University. In European countries, I think this is more common where there’s a school of garden design that professional gardeners will go to. But this was sort of along those lines. The instructors there were amazing, like Michael Dirr, who’s really one of the ultimate authorities on woody plants in North America. So there were amazing instructors at the Arnold.
One of the cool things about the instructors at the Arnold is they were people who were directly involved in horticulture and landscape design. So it was maybe not as theoretical as a lot of other programs.
Marshall Cutchin: So at that point in your life had you been working in the summertime in the gardening and landscape business, or was this sort of still a continuation of your academic career?
Jim Tolstrup: I actually had a landscape business while I was doing the program at the Arnold. I had always done landscaping work and then started a nursery where I was growing field grown flowers and perennials.
Marshall Cutchin: Were your parents supportive of that?
Jim Tolstrup: As my dad had his own kind of serial fascinations, he encouraged that in all of us. I see it as a strong family trait. I see it in my grand niece and my grand nephew. When they get into something, they are really, really into it. I definitely see that as coming from my dad, who encouraged our intellectual eccentricities. In a way, and I didn’t realize this until I moved to Texas, I really grew up steeped in something that was like an offshoot of the New England transcendentalist culture, like Thoreau, Emerson, and all that. And one thing my dad really impressed on us was that, regardless of your economic situation you can read the same books the most wealthy people can read. And so going to that library in Malden was exciting. It really was an amazing Library. The landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. And H. H. Richardson was the architect. It was built in 1879 and it had incredible books, like the entire collection of U.S. Bureau of Ethnology reports, from the time that the federal government was sending ethnographers out to Indian tribes and writing down information about the cultures in these original volumes.
Marshall Cutchin: So you’re working as a landscaper at that time, but did the program at Harvard change your trajectory, or did you just take what you learned and go back to doing what you were doing?
Jim Tolstrup: Yeah, definitely it did. It deepened my knowledge of plants, it deepened my knowledge of principles of landscape design. Before that, I was just focused on designing perennial borders. That program at the Arnold Arboretum actually led me to my next job too, and I moved to Austin, Texas, which is about as far away from Maine as you could possibly be culturally and geographically, and I managed a private estate garden. Which, if you can picture it, was a five-acre estate in downtown Austin, about 10 blocks from the capital.
How it actually happened was that the client asked the director of the Arnold program if they could recommend somebody, and the fact that I had been Barbara Bush’s gardener probably made this a kind of a feather in the cap for this wealthy family.
Marshall Cutchin: So you had been gardening for the Bushes prior to that?
Jim Tolstrup: Yes, because I specialized in perennial gardens and flower gardens. But Barbara Bush’s garden was really a cutting garden. She would go out and cut armloads of flowers from the garden and bring them in the house. In a way in her mind it was about wildflowers. But not in the way that we would think of wildflowers in terms of native plants. She meant a profusion of flowers and flowers that will grow without a lot of care.
It’s really interesting because when I look back, it was filled with Purple Loosestrife, which is the scourge of the Eastern seaboard, right? I mean, it’s invasive clear out to the North Platte River here. It’s moved all the way from the East Coast.
Marshall Cutchin: And yet it’s still being sold on Amazon and in big box stores.
Jim Tolstrup: It’s amazing. But she loved that flower and it was all over Walker’s Point and was starting to show up out in the wetlands. It delighted her, because it was just more pink flowers. We didn’t really think about invasive plants in the same way then. She even gave me a children’s book about “Miss Rumphius,” a Victorian lady who scattered seeds of lupines everywhere. Lupines grow all over Maine. They’re so common that they have become kind of a signature plant and in Down East Maine particularly. People there love them but they’re arguably invasive.
Marshall Cutchin: So you really weren’t thinking in terms of native plants then? What about when you were in Austin?
Jim Tolstrup: I was in Austin for six years, but I would say I wasn’t interested in native plants. One of the programs that I did at the Arnold was Wildflowers of New England, which was taught by Paul Martin Brown. He could give you the street address of these plants. Like liverworts, or some kind of wild orchid, he would say, “So if you go to Nashua, New Hampshire, to the Shaw’s parking lot, just look off to the east.” He could tell you exactly where these plants were.
I definitely was very interested in native plants and wild plants. When I was a kid I didn’t distinguish between native wild plants and introduced wild plants. A lot of things that I loved when I was a kid and was excited about knowing and being able to identify were things like mullein and curly dock and a lot of the plants we’re trying to kill now in our restoration programs. Or coltsfoot, which is a European medicinal plant that grows all over New England. I was just excited about knowing those plants and being interested in the herbal lore connected with them. I never really thought of these plants as being invasive, just sort of like cool wild plants.
But I don’t think that the wild plant concept really permeated my thoughts about landscape design. I did use some native stuff like Ilex verticillata and a deciduous Holly that grows in New England, and Clethra alnifolia, things like that. So I did use some native shrubs, but I think at that point it wasn’t a big part of my focus. I was primarily interested in English perennial borders with the six foot tall Delphiniums and all that kind of stuff, which do incredibly well in New England, with much less bright sunlight than Colorado and that ocean humidity. In a lot of ways that climate is very similar to a European climate.
Marshall Cutchin: Did you feel as though your menu was limited to what you could buy commercially at that time?
Jim Tolstrup: Yes, definitely.
An interesting thing to note about Austin also, is that at this private garden they did have a lot of native Hill Country plants. There were a series of landscape designers who worked for this family. James Turner was one of the first ones and his landscape concept was really driven a lot by Hill Country native plants. Penelope Hobhouse, the famous garden designer from England, was the primary landscape designer at the time that I was hired. Native plants were being installed, like Sophora secundiflora, what they call mountain laurel in Texas. It’s endemic to Texas and it has amazing flowers that look like wisteria and smell like grape Kool-Aid. The idea of native plants was pervasive in that garden. It also had a lot of Southeastern species and some introduced plants as well like camellias.
Marshall Cutchin: So there was some idea on the part of the family or among the gardeners that you sort of inherited the landscape from that locally appropriate plants were valuable.
Jim Tolstrup: Yes. A lot of live oaks and magnolias and things like that. Yaupon holly was another one.
Marshall Cutchin: What happened from there?
Jim Tolstrup: After six years I got tired of the Texas climate, but really had become enamored of western landscapes. And so I was looking for what is “west times north.” And I had actually come to Fort Collins to go at that time to what was called the Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. Later on it was called Shambhala Mountain Center, now, it’s called the Drala Mountain Center. But I had been there and just fell in love with that landscape and was amazed by it. I remember the first time I went up to Red Feather Lakes. I took a shuttle from the airport and just remember being impressed how we just kept going higher and higher and higher. And it was a great wildflower year. There were more and more flowers like penstemons and just fields of wildflowers. I was incredibly impressed by that and fell in love with that montane landscape.
So in 1998 my wife and I moved to Fort Collins. I did landscape design at Bath Nursery for about four years. Then I moved to the Shambhala Center and was the land steward there for five years. A lot of landscaping there was very much driven by what can you grow at 8,000 feet in Colorado, some Asian introductions, but mostly native plants and we really were sort of committed to, and very consciously contributing to, the conversation about creating a vernacular of horticulture for the Rocky Mountain West. That includes the plants you would use, native flagstone, moss rock, and things like that. So that was very intentional, and it was the first time I would say I intentionally created a native plant garden was at the Shambhala Center.
But even at Bath Nursery we used native plants in our landscape designs, and this was the late 90s and early 2000 or 2001. I was also steeped in that landscape construction world where they were building all these new houses. At the time that I moved to Fort Collins all I saw all along Timberline in Fort Collins were fields of corn, and little by little those just became fields of houses. I saw a lot of development going on and agriculture disappearing. I remember walking around in some of these neighborhoods and looking at the runoff, and these stormwater ponds that were full of green slimy gunk and just thinking, “I wonder what the environmental impact of these landscapes we’re creating here is?”
I think people, vaguely in the back of their mind, knew this was an arid climate back then. Unfortunately now, 25 years later, we still act like we can’t get rid of the water fast enough. I’d love to say we’ve had an alteration of how we look at designing urban and suburban landscapes, but unfortunately, that’s really not the case. There is definitely a movement to create landscapes that showcase native plants that become habitat for other native plants and support our native pollinators and so on, and then there are people creating something that looks like the region that we live in and not something that was imported from coastal landscapes.
There is this movement that says that gardens need to be more than just pretty. But because we have displaced so much habitat , people are beginning to realize that our landscapes have to have ecological function. There are a lot of people who get that, from landscape installers and homeowners to corporations and developers who are very clear on that. But I think it’s still quite a minority compared to those who are creating cookie cutter landscapes with mostly exotic plants and thirsty turf.
Marshall Cutchin: So this was the time you began thinking more about that?
Jim Tolstrup: Yes, it really impressed me at that point. I think around that time I wrote an article for the “Colorado Gardener” on Gardens of the New American West, talking about how this region has not really quite found itself. And how Front Range communities were sort of growing out of being cowtowns into being big cities and finding their own identity. I can show you a California garden and you will instantly recognize it. Austin, Texas has a vernacular you can see in things like Hill Country flagstone. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center has done a lot to bring this out as well with all the native plants and the Hill Country limestone. You can look at it and say, “That’s a central Texas Garden for sure.”
The Northeast has a certain kind of look. Maybe it’s made up of plants introduced through the Arnold Arboretum from the explorations to China and Japan in the 19th century. And there’s a lot more water there. So you see a lot of those gardens that are really very much kind of like a forest understory. But in the Rocky Mountain West and the Central West we’re still struggling with our horticultural identity. I was definitely thinking about this even back in the late 90s. And as I said I took that concept to the Shambala Center. It just seemed obvious that at 8,000 feet there was this opportunity to do something with native plants, on the campus that is nearly 700 Acres of mountain meadows and forests.
Marshall Cutchin: Were you thinking at all at that time about the ecosystem historically, and plants and systems that had been displaced or removed? Not to suggest you were thinking about restoration, but were you thinking that there are plants that are regionally appropriate and that will do better just by virtue of the fact that they would perform better in these environments, even if they’re missing all the fabric of a true food web.
Jim Tolstrup: I was actually the first land steward on the staff at the Shambhala Center. And when I moved there there were people who had been involved with that land and that community for years who just flat out told me “you can’t grow plants here.”
Marshall Cutchin: But….
Jim Tolstrup: But I thought, “Can’t grow plants here?” Looking around we were in a forest and meadows with all these wildflowers and grasses. Generally, that’s what you can grow at 8,000 feet in Colorado.
We were looking to native plants there, but I think what we were really trying to do at the Shambhala Center was to create a kind of high-altitude botanic garden where we were going to use as many different plants that are native to the West. Some of the things I planted there might have been the furthest north and the highest elevation plantings of their kind. One thing that I can think of, and this existed there for years before it died a couple of years ago but lived for at least 15 years, was an Arizona cypress. Fort Collins Wholesale Nursery collected seed at Cook’s Peak in New Mexico and it was at about 8,000 feet, so it was taking an Arizona cypress much further north than it typically grows. But because it was growing at that elevation they figured it would be cold hardy in Fort Collins too, and I took one of those plants and I planted it up at the Shambhala Center, 3000 feet higher in elevation.
Marshall Cutchin: Did you have a sense of native plants or gardening as having a connection to the Buddhist temple or tradition?
Jim Tolstrup: The Shambhala Center was started by Buddhist meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was a Kagyu lineage holder from Tibet. Panayoti Kelaidis, the senior curator and outreach director at Denver Botanic Gardens, used to come up to the Center when I was there and we did botanical horticulture programs. We had what we called a Botanic Garden Day and he gave a talk about the plants in that valley and how similar if not exactly the same species you would find in the high altitudes of western China. And he commented on the similarity of the landscape and the similarity of the plant palette, and how it made sense for a Buddhist Community to try to do something that was harmonious with the landscape rather than kind of aggressively pushing something alien into that space.
Marshall Cutchin: I think of that moment in Buddha’s life when he answers a question by touching the Earth, that there’s something very deep and symbolic in the relationship between ecosystems and spiritual health.
Jim Tolstrup: That specific story is from the moment of his enlightenment. He thought “There’s no way I could explain this to anybody,” but he started telling students about it. They said, “How do you know you’ve become enlightened?” And then he did what’s called the Earth-touching mudra, a gesture that proclaimed the Earth as his witness.
I think this is really interesting, because we can think that how a culture treats children, how culture treats women, or how we treat the environment, reflects a lot on how we work with aggression and instead contribute something beneficial to the world. I mean, if you live in a degraded and fractured environment that says a lot about who we are as people right? So the Earth is our witness. I think that’s true.
Marshall Cutchin: There’s something about humility and that relationship with the landscape and with non-human things that reflects I think either well or poorly on us.
Jim Tolstrup: Yes.
Marshall Cutchin: So after your work at Shambhala, what was next for you?
Jim Tolstrup: We left the Shambhala Center late in 2006, and I looked around at different options. Was I going to start my own landscape business? I looked into that. I applied to be director of the Botanic Gardens in Fort Collins. And then there was this “High Plains Environmental Center” thing…. I interviewed for the job. It was interesting because at build out it would comprise 76 acres of land and 199 acres of the surface of two reservoirs that we control through a perpetual lease, totalling 275-acres of open space. I lived at a retreat center for five years with montane forests and meadows and moose and bears in our backyard, so it was quite a change. I interviewed for the job and when I went home, my wife asked me “What did you think of it?” I just said “there’s nothing to love.” It was abandoned farmland, a hundred acres of weeds. Brimming with potential but really very raw.
In the time that I’ve been here, since 2007, the farm fields around the open space have been transformed into developed residential and some corporate office buildings. But the interior of it has been restored more and more, so that we’re really kind of getting to the very end of restoring the 76 acres to native shrubs and native grasses. In the midst of all this development and activity that has gone on here there’s an incredible diversity of wildlife in this space.
We had an entomologist, Paul Opler, who did a study of bees in our gardens and here and at the Chapungu Sculpture Park, which we manage. He identified over a hundred species of native bees here. . When I asked him, “Is that a large number of bees?” he said “that is an incredibly high number of native bees, and the reason is because of the density and diversity of the native plants that you have.” I’ve always said native plants equal habitat. But we never had hard evidence of “This is how many bees,” and “This is what plants specifically they’re going to,” so it was really cool to get that kind of a reading from him.
The thing I think is so exciting about the High Plains Environmental Center is that this is not a pristine wilderness. It’s not like we drew a line around it and said, “Don’t disturb this.” It was completely disturbed. It was once the High Plains, which was destroyed by farming and abandoned. It was just all weeds and it has turned into beautiful wetlands and grasslands, shrubs and trees. It’s a home for an incredible diversity of wildlife and all in the midst of a heavily populated and developed area. To me it’s really a very hopeful vision for what the future of the Front Range and development in general could be.
Marshall Cutchin: How do you compare what you see today to what you were seeing in 1998? We’re watching Fort Collins exploding outward and all this farmland being replaced, but with all of the things that HPEC has achieved, has it changed the way you look at it?
Jim Tolstrup: Like many other people, my knee jerk reaction when we see farmland being turned into suburban housing developments—well, it’s not a good reaction. You might think farmland is better, that’s open space. But it would be interesting to go back to this site historically, where our visitor center is— this used to be alfalfa and corn—and ask the question Is there more biodiversity here or less? Because when I drive through this neighborhood, I see red tail hawks and great horned owls sitting on top of the rooftops around here, and those kinds of raptors are apex predators. So they’re at the top. But you have to have the right grasses to have the right rodents to have the right predators. They’re sitting at the top of the pyramid of the food chain, and if we’re seeing so many raptors then we have a healthy ecosystem, arguably with more diversity than we had before.
I often think that historically, since the first Earth Day in 1970, there has been this kind of dynamic tension between the business community and the environment. It’s as if on one hand you had money, and greed, while on the other is some sort of pure altruistic, moral high ground. Which is an overly simple view because we all need the goods and services that businesses provide to us.
But what about when you get those things that work together, so you get weedy disturbed farmland turned into a healthy functional ecosystem and that becomes a marketable amenity for the developer? They’re building houses and people want to live next to wildflowers and birds. The money from the development funds restoration which helps the developer to sell the development. To me that is a very dynamic situation because we are not chaining ourselves to trees or standing in front of bulldozers. We’re assuming bulldozers are going to push dirt around and then we’re asking, “What are we gonna plant?” And “what species can that support?” We’re not going to put antelope and buffalo back on this land. It’s not going back to some pre-Colombian situation, but I can show you an awful lot of toads and bull snakes and meadowlarks and pelicans that thrive here in an environment that we have essentially created.
Marshall Cutchin: So much of it seems like the vernacular around how you describe what you’re seeing. It depends on the viewer, doesn’t it, and what value you want to identify? You could use the word ‘amenities’ if you are a developer. The same phenomenon could be talked about as ecosystem services by a botanist or economist, or the community could just call it a community benefit.
Jim Tolstrup: I admit I have a fascination for those words ‘ecology’ and ‘economy.’ They come from the same Greek root word for “house”— ‘Oikos’— and they mean the study of the house and the management of the house.
There’s a great example that I can think of where vintners were switching to nylon wine corks instead of the corks from the cork oak tree. So in Portugal landowners who had cork forests were cutting them down and planting other things and it was having a devastating impact on the storks that nest in the cork forests. They were wiping out these storks because they’re wiping out the trees because people weren’t buying the corks. Around that same time the Green Building movement started getting interested in these renewable products, like bamboo floors and cork floors. I have cork floors in my house and they’re cool. They used to be linoleum and the cork feels warmer and it feels soft to walk on and if you dent the cork floor it’ll sort of recover on its own. It’s an amazing material. When they harvest the cork, they just take the bark off. They don’t kill the trees. It’s like shearing sheep. So they’re preserving this forest which is preserving the storks and that I think is really interesting how economics alters the environment.
We forget that economics completely shaped North America. There is a prairie because Indian tribes actively burned off the grasses because that was restorative and there’d be more bison. In the montane forests, historically, we had huge ponderosa pine trees with large spaces in between them partly because lightning strikes would cause periodic fires. But native people also actively burned those areas and we realize now with the fires that we’re having in Canada and the Rocky Mountain West. Climate change is a factor, but we’ve also suppressed fires for 100 years. So culture, driven by economics—as in the way people live—is what has shaped landscapes.
One of the things that tribes in the East used to do was to take stone clubs and beat around the trunks of trees, which would kill the cambium layer and subsequently the tree. They came back three or four years later when the trees were all dead and they planted corn, beans and squash underneath, where the dead trees were. They farmed in that deep forest soil. And when they started to exhaust it they’d move on. I can picture the wildflowers that would then move into that abandoned field, and the pollinators that would come in, the deer that would browse because they love that forest edge. Human beings were a “keystone species” creating these opportunities for other species.
In 1907 they created Equalizer Lake here within High Plains Environmental Center. They didn’t think, “This could be a great place for pelicans, and grebes will probably nest here.” They didn’t care about that. Lakes along the Front Range that were either dug as gravel and sand pits or intentionally created as reservoirs have created habitat. So much so that they’ve changed migratory patterns for some waterfowl species. It wasn’t the intention to create habitat. It’s just that the economy created the ecology.
People might say that more people and more development means less nature, but not necessarily. More alligators in Florida swamps doesn’t mean less birds, right? It means more birds. It all depends on what kind of habitats we’re able to create with what we develop.
Marshall Cutchin: What do you think about the potential role of the average homeowner in this whole positive evolution? Is it possible for us to make change on an individual level, or does it require all the players to come together and agree? I’m asking from the point of view of the homeowner who may be feeling “Why would I make a change in my own backyard when they’re counteracting everything I do in the next neighborhood over, or in another country. Or my HOA is too restrictive and it’s impossible to do the right thing?” Whatever they see as an impediment to feeling enthusiastic about making change.
Jim Tolstrup: In the books Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope Doug Talamy writes about the fact that we have 40 million acres of turf grass in the United States. That it’s an area as large as our 10 largest national parks together. But if we put half of that into native landscaping we would be creating a 20-million-acre restoration, which is incredible to think about.
And people are actively doing that. In the midst of a kind of sterile landscape you can have some impact. It’s been demonstrated that native bees and hummingbirds do what’s called “trap-lining.” They’ll come to the same place every day. I see this at my own house. I have salvias and agastache in my yard, and I see that hummingbirds keep getting nectar off of them all day. They’ll keep coming back. And they’re going to other places where they know those plants are. They’ve got a route established. And bees do the same thing.
It also has some impact if along the way those creatures are coming to landscapes near neonicotinoid pesticides. We could be luring wildlife to their death. So that’s where it falls apart. Here at High Plains Environmental Center we have owls in our barn. And there are people around us who put rat poison out in their yards. So there’s a danger that these owls are going to eat a poison rat and die.
There is the possibility of a turning point. If we have a hundred species of native bees here in this four-acre garden around our visitor center, imagine if the entire neighborhood was landscaped in all native plants. Or the entire city. It would be incredible how much restoration we could do.
But conventional landscapes are lethal to wildlife. They’re lethal to pets, and can be lethal to children. I have to say HPEC is a science-based organization, we aren’t anti-chemical. We use certain herbicides in managing open space, but there are things that you can readily buy on the market that absolutely should be banned. When we use those chemicals it’s like we’re going after something that needs a fly swatter with a nuclear bomb.
Some pesticides should not be available for use outside of a sealed environment. Arguably you could use them in a greenhouse, but there’s just so much collateral damage. For a year and a half after you buy something that has been treated with a neonicotinoid pesticide, anything that feeds on it will die. So if you plant flowers that you buy from some big box store that have neonics, bees a year later can die from feeding on them. That is ridiculously toxic and far-reaching. The same is true for herbicides like Dicamba. There’s no reason that should be on the market.
Marshall Cutchin: So I’ll take from that that you do have faith that the average homeowner can make a difference.
Jim Tolstrup: There’s no question about that. I grew up in the 70s, and it used to be that when you saw “Save the Whales” on the back of a Volvo station wagon, you’d think it was one of those weirdos. People laughed about it until they heard recordings of whale songs or went out on a whale watch. When they actually encountered whales, everything changed. You’d be hard-pressed now to find people anywhere in the world who think that killing whales is a good idea. That’s where we need to go with this. A few people need to deeply understand the problem with landscaping and find a way to convince more people why this matters. With use of native plants and the understanding of landscapes as habitat conservation we are somewhere in the middle of that process right now. More and more people are becoming aware. Ten years ago this was kind of on the weirdo fringe, and now it’s becoming more obvious. People realize they don’t have to rake up all their leaves and or clean them up with a leaf blower, they can decide to leave those leaves because many species live in them all winter. We’re beginning to see a sea change.
Again, our landscapes need to be more than just pretty. They can actually have an ecological function and there’s value in having a living landscape that’s full of singing birds and fireflies and things like that. It requires certain concessions from us. But we need to understand why it matters first. We’re right in the middle of that turning point.
Marshall Cutchin: It reminds me of the most of the reading I’ve done where you have landscapes that have been returned to a biodiversity-friendly approach, usually by ending bad agricultural practices. It’s the experience people typically have when they put pollinator- and bird-friendly native plants in their yard. Just one plant, and they’re sitting outside and looking at that plant and going “Just wow!” when they see all the life coming back to their yard. It seems to me one of the wonderful things about native plants is that you just see over and over these instances of people suddenly feeling happy. It makes people feel hopeful.
Jim Tolstrup: We planted a chokecherry outside of our kitchen window and when it began to grow we began to notice the chickadees were going to that chokecherry tree and going to their birdhouse over and over and over again. Doug Tallamy had his students actually cover trees and then vacuum off all the caterpillars that they found and then count the species. They’d find one or two species of caterpillars on non-native trees and they’d find twenty or more on some of the native species.
When you walk in our landscape the life here is palpable. In many places you hardly hear bird songs any more. But whenever we walk through this landscape, it’s vibrant. You see birds. You hear birds. There’s always butterflies and bees. I like to look closely at the plants because you see there’s so much going on there. I don’t really see that in those pretty but sterile beds of annuals and exotic plants.
Marshall Cutchin: We’ve covered a ton of territory but I want to end by asking a couple of specific questions just for fun. First question: What’s your favorite native plant?
Jim Tolstrup: I don’t know if I can answer that….
Marshall Cutchin: How about this? What native plant do you feel most connected with?
Jim Tolstrup: I think the cottonwood tree. But that’s because of my affinity with the Lakota culture, and the Sun Dance through it. It’s interesting when you look at indigenous communities and the native plants that we know. There’s a whole different lens for seeing those plants. Think about chokecherries, plums, currants, and buffaloberries. They are good native shrubs and they provide habitat for wildlife. But to the Lakota those are sacred and they not only a food source, but they represent the protectors of the four directions. So there’s a different cultural lens there, and the cottonwood tree in the Sun Dance is like the center of the universe. And everything, in heaven and earth is connected through that tree, so I feel connected to the cottonwood tree for that reason.
Marshall Cutchin: Last question is this: If you could give one bit of advice or tip to anyone who wants to start making their yard a contributor to the local ecosystem. What would it be?
Jim Tolstrup: People will say things like “I have wall-to-wall grass. I bought a new house and our builder just put grass over the entire yard with a few shrubs in front of our foundation.”
I think an interesting and a viable thing to do is to carve out the edges. If you picture the backyard as a rectangle of grass, you could kill off a couple of the sprinkler heads on the outer perimeter. You can watch and see what areas dry up and then carve that out and plant native shrubs. Immediately that provides some forage for wildlife. There’s flowers. There’s fruit. There’s potentially a place for birds to nest and raise their young. So you’ve created habitat already. For some people it’s just the idea of getting from here to there feels like it’s just too much. They think, “I can’t take this on all at once.” So I think that that’s a great place to start because with a flat lawn it’s not like there’s no biodiversity, but there’s not a lot of biodiversity. As soon as you create the verticality of shrubs, it changes..
If you think about habitat on Earth, habitat is usually only a few inches or feet above the existing vegetation. In a rainforest that vegetation may be 200 feet high, and per acre you have enormous amounts of biodiversity. But on the prairie where you have grasses that only reach a foot or so tall, you need a lot of space to support a lot of species. Going from having a backyard filled with turf grass to having shrubs that are maybe four to eight feet tall you created a whole lot more biodiversity in that one simple step. More verticality and structure in the landscape means more things can live there.
It creates more visual interest too. As a landscape designer I like the feeling of seclusion, where you don’t see everything all at once. I’ve never understood why the conventional suburban landscape design is a lawn up to your front door and then a few shrubs in front of that house. If you took those shrubs and you put them out on the street, then everything inside between your house and those shrubs is the house’s landscape and it feels more private. It’s more like a courtyard. My house is very much like that. There’s a lot of plants out on the front edge of the yard. So you never see the whole house, you see glimpses of the house through the vegetation. There’s a kind of romance in that. It creates a more interesting year-round structure.
Marshall Cutchin: Those are great suggestions. Is there anything else that you want to add?
Jim Tolstrup: All my life I’ve considered myself a sort of an amateur sociologist. Asking questions like “How do you get people from here to there.” People may look at the issues that we have now and think this is impossible to solve. How can we ever make a change? Those people may not remember that the Cuyahoga River was on fire from industrial pollutants in 1969. We’ve already made a change. We desperately need to address some things now, but I think about the bald eagle. In 1970 the bald eagle was the prime example of the need for the Endangered Species Act. There were fewer bald eagles in the lower 48 states than exist on Colorado’s Front Range now. So I see eagles every day in the winter and it reminds me of our successes and that change is possible .
I think we need to have a long perspective. Younger people might think we’re doomed, like no matter what we do nothing is going to work. It does work and it has worked. We have new challenges now, but we have made tremendous progress and we’ve demonstrated our ability to have multinational collaborations and cooperation that has saved species and saved whole ecosystems.
We can do this. We have done this. I think that it’s important to remember that.
