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Bird Ballet
“I choreographed my yard,” Holly Twining says, which makes sense when you consider that her background is in dance. After 10 years in New York City as a dancer, she completed a graduate program in ethics and environmental studies and is now the program naturalist at Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden.The dancing garden in question is a quarter acre on Bennoch Road in Orono, which has been Twining domain for something over two years. Husband Travis Baker—a writer and teacher—and toddler Zane, a bird enthusiast and all-around outdoor lover, help her.
As a former city girl, Twining’s gardening history was a blank slate. So was the garden she acquired. “I looked out the windows and—nothing there,” she recalls. By “nothing,” she means no birds, no movement, no untidiness, no fun. Just cut lawn and clipped foundation shrubs. Her conversion goal was to have it all become as natural, wild, diverse, and healthy as possible.
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There was significant precedent for this attitude along Bennoch Road. Four doors down is the home of Ray and Sue Owen. Former commissioner of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and professor of wildlife ecology, Ray Owen shocked the neighborhood 24 years ago when he encouraged lupine and assorted wildflowers to take over his lot. Now all along that stretch of the Stillwater River there are gardens of notable shagginess, as the appeal of a laissez-faire, wildlife-friendly attitude catches on.
Others may build bird-friendly havens, but that doesn’t make them garden choreographers. It is the artifacts and decorative quirks that make Twining’s garden stand out. Cruising auctions and yard sales in search of interesting relics, she has found old suitcases, baskets, boxes, boots, buckets, and a bathroom sink, plus a child’s desk and a statue, and set them up as props on her stage.
“I use the containers for nonnative ornamental annuals,“ she says. The artist in her wants exotic, improbable flowers like African daisies with purple, spoon-shaped florets. The naturalist says they don’t belong, so the choreographer allows them to dance isolated in equally exotic containers. Her husband is the set designer, building scenery that includes intricate twig fences and “Baker Brook,” the drainage rill in the backyard that doubles as a ground-level birdbath. It had been trapped in a drainpipe until he liberated it to run freely across the property.
Larger spaces in the yard are occupied by native plantings. With no experience of her own to draw on, Twining relied on other people’s advice to get her started. The Penobscot County Cooperative Extension provided much useful information, as did innumerable websites, books, and magazines on organic gardening and planting for wildlife. Once she got headed down the right track, successes came quickly. She planted swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), at the edge of Baker Brook for the monarch butterflies, and berry-bearing shrubs for the birds: serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis) for sweet summer fruit; dogwoods (Pagoda dogwood, Cornus alternifolia, and red-twig dogwood, Cornus sericea) for their lipid-rich fall fruit; and winterberry holly (Ilex verticillata) for its late berries. Mostly, she just stopped cutting the heads off the “weeds” that were begging to live in the lawns, and waited to see what happened. She got jewelweed on the wet clay, which the hummingbirds love, and crickets in the front garden.
“It was a triumph,“ Twining says. “The next spring, the yard was teeming with life. The lawn turned into a mini-meadow and lots of things live there now.”
She counts the hummingbirds and the monarch butterflies as her greatest successes, but also notes visits from rose-breasted grosbeaks and a kestrel (small birds of prey that learn to hang out near bird feeders, looking for their own fast food) as evidence that her wild “clients” have accepted her work. Along the tree line that separates her yard from the neighbors, she is ruthlessly removing Norway maple seedlings, invasive aliens that smother all other plants, and points to the resulting open shade, where mosses and ground covers are now growing.
Twining stands at her living room window and surveys her yard. Every window in the house looks out at a part of her little ecosystem, and she and Zane identify visitors, with the help of his favorite bird books. A bird alights on the bird feeder, checking out the offerings from Twining’s homemade bird treats.
“Blue jay,” Zane says, the first words he has spoken during a long afternoon’s visit. “We can stare for hours,” Twining says. “He knows a lot of the birds, and now we are really hoping for frogs.”
Perhaps they should look up Professors Calhoun and Hunter (read on).
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Lamb and Lavender
Plenty of gardeners grow vegetables, but only one household in Bangor grows a garden—and raises livestock—to feed their flock of bed-and-breakfast clients. Nonesuch Farm, owned and operated by Jim and Mary Louis Davitt, is Bangor’s first, and currently only, bed-and-breakfast establishment within city limits. The couple turned the 1865 farmhouse into an inn in 2004 when their successful application for a zone change broke through Bangor’s inhibitions concerning B&Bs—a zoning prohibition that had been on the books since the ’30s, apparently to prevent Bangor’s homesteads from being converted into a line of brothels and flophouses. Sitting on a sweeping slope that faces the Kenduskeag River at Six Mile Falls, surrounded by 65 green acres, Nonesuch Farm is instead a wholesome complex of gardens, pastures, and farmland. The Davitts, who met while teaching at University College in Bangor, are upstanding citizens dedicated to treating their guests, family, and themselves to Maine’s home-grown bounty by adhering to a set of ideals called the Slow Food movement.
The Davitts’ Slow Food conversion came soon after they opened their Bangor B&B, while on a trip to Europe. “We found, or were assaulted by, ‘slow food’ in Italy,” Mary Louis reports.
The Slow Food movement is a grassroots campaign founded in 1986 by an Italian named Carlo Petrini, in response to the threat he perceived when McDonalds opened its first fast food establishment in Rome. Determined to save Italy’s regional foods and its small, local producers from being overwhelmed by a huge international food industry, Petrini set out to convince consumers of two things: one, that knowing where and how food is grown is essential to the experience of eating it; and, two, that tasting regional food should be part of every visitor’s experience.
The idea struck a chord with the Davitts. Never mind the balsamic vinegars of Modena and the cheeses of Tuscany. Maine has food that is just as fine, they thought, and visitors deserve the chance to eat local specialties. Unlike most people in the hospitality business, Jim and Mary Louis Davitt had the means to grow and raise most of what they needed, as well as the opportunity to serve it, and they came back from Italy with a Slow Food mission for Bangor.
The Davitts raise a small mixed flock that leans heavily towards Jacob sheep, the ancient, hardy, multicolored breed originally from Spain, whose rams sport spectacular double sets of horns. “They’re a perfect breed for raising in Maine,” Jim says. “Jacobs are low maintenance and don’t mind the cold.” These animals, raised also for their wool, graze the 10 acres that surround the farmhouse during the warm weather and feed on hay grown in the back fields over the winter.
The circle of life has an old-fashioned authenticity to it at Nonesuch Farm, though the property begins just 800 feet from a busy section of outer Broadway. There is a shrine to the family’s departed dogs, tastefully placed in the shade of a large clump of dogwood, to which friends are invited to add the names of their pets. Lambs that will eventually become food are still cherished and often named.
While the Davitts have been raising sheep for several years, 2006 was the first big year of offerings from their garden. “We had a huge tomato crop—20 pounds a day—and we didn’t know what to do with them,” Jim says. “We planted Amish Pastes (an old variety of dense, robust-flavored, late-season canning tomatoes) and had no idea they would yield so heavily.” They decided to both freeze and can the harvest. “What a project!” he remembers, laughing. Six months later, the freezer was still overflowing, and, if harvest patterns continue, rich tomato sauces will be on the Nonesuch Farm menu into the foreseeable future. The 40-by-40-foot vegetable patch is cultivated to strict organic standards.
Fertilizer is supplied by the farm’s sheep, and future expansion includes a crop rotation plan, so a piece of the garden can lie fallow every year—the best way to stay ahead of trouble from pests and diseases.
As every gourmet cook knows (and Mary Louis Davitt certainly is one), vegetables and meat are made tastier with fresh herbs. She cultivates all the culinary herbs she needs in a sunny garden that doubles as a place for guests to sit and relax. On the couple’s trip to Italy, she made sure to gather local information on pesto making. The critical take-home message: Pick the basil before the plants flower, and use only the lush, younger leaves. She reports proudly that, since following that advice, her pesto is now “the real thing.”
Not everything at Nonesuch Farm is about taste and smell: Some of what the Davitts grow is for the eyes. A big flower garden yields cut flowers for the house, focusing on easy-to-grow, Maine-friendly commoners like black-eyed Susans, lupines, and yellow loosestrife. The annual garden under the porch has reseeding heirlooms: four o’clocks, cat’s whiskers, and touch-me-nots, sent by guests from West Virginia. And two huge lavender patches—the hardy “Munstead” variety of English lavender—are harvested, dried, and made into sachets for the farm’s linen closets.
“We just took all kinds of, ’er, vigorous plants,” Jim says, being careful to avoid the word invasive. “They seem to thrive on the competition, and we have flowers all summer long.”
The Davitts’ plan to welcome visitors with a true Maine “slow food” experience seems to be working. On a brisk fall day in 2006, two guests, leaf-appreciators from the South, arrived for a weekend stay. They were ready to find what the inn’s website had promised—good food that would reflect the tastes and culture of Maine. They were treated one morning to fresh lamb sausages from their farm-raised lamb, pancakes with wild Maine blueberry syrup, and the ever-present Nonesuch tomatoes. A gastronomic weekend stretched ahead of them. Their plans included a tour of the local farmers markets in search of home-raised bacon, old varieties of potatoes, and some good winter squash, and a run to the coast on a quest for Maine lobster.
“They brought back little samples of everything they could carry,” Jim reported, remembering the bottles and bags that weighed down their returning guests.
An observer could ask whether she was witnessing the start of a new type of food-tourism in Maine. Who can say? The Davitts believe that, if they grow it and raise it, they will come.
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The Snakescapers
There are gardeners who plant and plan for birds, and there are even people who hope to attract frogs to their garden, but a garden designed around the needs of snakes and salamanders is a rarer thing. There is one such garden along the banks of the Penobscot River in Milford. It is the home of Aram Calhoun and Mac (Malcolm) Hunter. They are, respectively, professors of wetland and wildlife ecology at the University of Maine in Orono, and they share their three acres with as many life forms as they can entice to live there. To them, frogs and snakes and salamanders are not mere slithery things, but the beautiful and fragile creatures that are both their livelihood and their fascination.
“We just like them,” Hunter says, “and anyway, it’s the mark of a healthy property. Lots of creatures mean our yard is a healthy place.”
Mac Hunter bought the piece of ground, just upriver from the east end of Orson Island in Milford, in 1979. He built a log cabin, well back from the road, where he could see and hear the river rather than the traffic on Route 2. The property is a wooded slope, and the house fits into the woodland as unobtrusively as a human habitat can be introduced into a natural place. The path down to the house is large pieces of slate from Monson. The house is unpainted wood, and the roof tiles are developing an attractive camouflage of moss. Hunter had a policy of minimal disturbance and maximum observation of his fellow residents, but when Aram Calhoun and he joined forces in 1989, and the energies of two committed wildlife conservationists were combined, new projects to encourage yet more wildlife to take up residence with them were inevitable.
The first was a small pond, just behind the house, dug, lined, and edged with rocks (a birthday present from an understanding friend) by Hunter during Calhoun’s recovery from a bout with mononucleosis. This is called, of course, Mono Lake. (The first Mono Lake is larger, and in California. It is a mecca for scientists and bird-watchers, as it attracts huge and diverse populations of migrating birds.) A second small pool—Upper Mono Lake—followed, and the biodiversity program was begun.
At the higher end of the property, where it levels out and meets the road with a cleared area, Aram has planted her “suburban garden.” Suburban only by the standards of a backwoods ethicist, it houses a bed of flowering perennials for butterflies—gayfeather (Liatris), sedums, oregano, and assorted members of the daisy and carrot families. Above this, taking up much of an old trailer site, sits Mount Dewey, the central feature of the herpetologists’ garden. Built with the cooperation of a heavy-equipment-operating neighbor (Mr. Dewey Ellingwood), the large mound of dirt and rocks hides a secret labyrinth of polyvinyl pipes, set into the mound as it was built. Now covered by dense native shrubs, the mound looks unexceptional, but its piped interior provides hibernation sites for snakes.
Beyond this, a small vegetable garden occupies the sunniest piece of real estate. It produces salads and herbs, and is surrounded by large slates laid flat to create hiding places for snakes. Up by the road, they built a larger pond, with planting space for wetland vegetation—pitcher plants, leatherleaf, sedges, and sphagnum moss.
And the result of all of this diligent work? Where some would see an unkempt yard in need of some serious organization, Hunter and Calhoun describe uncountable successes and pleasures that are the result of their efforts.
The Mono Lakes quickly became home to spotted salamanders and wood frogs. To breed successfully, they need small forest pools that are free of fish—something that most passing humans see as things to be drained or filled. On this small plot, there is a reliable “vernal pool” and a safe breeding site.
Mount Dewey is home to garter, ringneck, and red-bellied snakes, with the possibility that milk and green snakes will also find their way there. Snakes in your garden are not something that should be celebrated only by wildlife professors and small boys with a yen for creepy things. They feed on all kinds of bugs and troublemakers, with red-bellied snakes relying heavily on slugs for food. Why, you ask, don’t we all make places for them to hide near our lettuces and hostas?
The top pond, more open and larger than the lower pools, provides breeding room for grey tree frogs and green frogs, and bullfrogs visit from the riverbank.
The payoff from this activity goes far beyond a biologist’s satisfaction with habitat protection.
“It has changed my spring,” Calhoun says, with a joy that is entirely unscientific, of the ponds and pools that Hunter made. “Now I have a calling chorus of frogs in the spring. I hold the phone up for my nephews in Utah. They don’t have frogs to listen to.”
