Working Native Garden tour - Syracuse area

Addresses available in members' May mailing or by contacting info@flnps.org. Please do not arrive at the gardens outside of the designated hours. 

Kathy McGrath, Fayetteville (suburban half-acre yard) 10am-noon

When we moved into our house 19 years ago, the half-acre suburban property was almost entirely non-native vegetation, very nicely and typically landscaped with classic landscaping company/home improvement store plants. Over the years we have shifted our landscape with multiple goals, of reducing lawn area, removing a large periwinkle (Vinca minor) bed, replacing non-native perennials with natives, enhancing the property for wildlife and aesthetics. We continue to maintain some lawn area and include non-native plants such as garden vegetables and sentimental favorites, or because of cost practicalities. Or, we just haven’t gotten around to them yet. Gardening is a process!

John Gilrein garden, Syracuse noon-2pm
This garden is a 2 acre rural property surrounded by agriculture.  One acre is intensively gardened with a rock garden, perennial border, shady borders, and a vegetable garden.  Over almost 40 years the prairie like landscape was covered with a diverse array of tree species and includes a 1 acre woodland with trails.  Habitats vary from the dry, sunny rock garden, woodland type gardens, boggy area, swampy woods with bald cypress trees, and a pond with water lilies and buckbean.  The woodland is almost all native plants; other areas are a mix of natives and non-natives.  I'm still working on control of a few alien plants in the woods.  There is a collection of hypertufa troughs that are mostly planted with saxifrages, small rock garden plants.  The typical soil is a high quality limey loam with a pH around 7.5, but in a few spots was adjusted for ericaceous plants.  The plant mix includes some uncommon plants like trifoliate orange, Persian ironwood, Siebold magnolia (aliens) and umbrella magnolia, persimmon, pawpaw (native).

And if you have the energy, stop by one of our region's best parks.

Clark Reservation State Park
Clark Reservation is a geologic wonder of the last ice age and a botanist's paradise. It is a just outside Jamesville, NY, with easy access from I-481.  (Parking fee of $5, cash or credit.)  It’s almost 400 acres on a big slab of limestone.  Glacial meltwater created a small lake (mictic, i.e. the surface & deeper layers do not mix) surrounded by 3 steep sides.  There is some limestone pavement with grikes (eroded cracks in the bedrock) which make a nice habitat for Asplenium trichomanes (maidenhair spleenwort), which also grows in the cliffs heading down from the parking area toward the lake.  Clark includes the largest NY population of Asplenium scolopendrium (harts tongue fern), the biggest colony of which is well off any trail.  A. scolopendrium also grows in a few of the scattered basins which are found near the trails (when present it is always on the north facing side around mid slope), but in smaller colonies.  The other unusual fern is Asplenium rhizophyllum (walking fern) which is present along at least one of the trails.  Prickly ash (Xanthoxylum americanum, an American cousin of Sichuan pepper, toothache tree) grows in the low swampy forest near the outlet of Glacier Lake.  The dry rocky clifftop area to the north of the lake supports Quercus montana and Thuja occidentalis.  Other plant highlights are many woodland wildflowers, Micranthes vriginiensis, Dryopteris goldiana, Diplazium pycnocarpon, and Dryopteris marginalis.

Note the link for trail difficulty below. Descending to the lake level means coming back up!

Clark Reservation native plant gardens
There are two small native plant gardens adjacent to the Nature Center at the entrance.  One represents some of the natural ecosystems of the park such as rock outcroppings, glades and woodlands, and the other represents a demonstration domestic native garden.  They are limited to species that occur naturally in the Park, but no plants in the gardens were removed from the Park grounds.  Rather, garden plants were obtained from nearby native plant nurseries, donated by volunteers or grown from seed.  As of 2018, 58 species were present in the gardens!  The first garden was installed around 2008 by Janet Allen, president of Habitat Gardening CNY (Wild Ones chapter) while the second garden was added later. The Friends of Clark Reservation maintain these gardens; additional volunteers are always welcome!

Description of park:  Clark Reservation State Park - Maps of US
List of trails with difficulty rating:  Trail Highlights | Friends of Clark Res
Hiking map:  ClarkReservationTrailMap.pdf