Category: Principles and Practices
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Cultivating Relational Caring
Principle #5: Create space for humans to interact with your refugia gardens, to encounter wildness, and to instill reciprocity and kinship. For people to develop deeper relationships with nature, they need to experience connectedness with nature on a regular basis. This can and often does happen when people go on trips to places of profound…
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Enhancing Natural Landscapes
Principle #3: Design all-season refugia gardens with native and other desired species, making use of natural landscape features, microhabitats, and microclimates that facilitate ecological functions. Goal: Reduce plant stress and aid interactions with beneficial species. Garden Design: Include native species that help provide continuity with natural/wild landscapes in a way that enhances ecological functions and…
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Co-creating with Nature
Principle #4: Pay attention to ecological interactions in a spirit of reciprocity and nurture changes in your refugia gardens that facilitate adaptation over time. Goal: Nurture adaptation to new climate and ecological conditions. Ecological gardening: More and more gardeners today are shifting towards ecological gardening: growing plant species in clusters that interact together and with…
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Why Not Natives Only?
Some Challenges with a “Natives-Only” Approach to Gardening Native to when? Pre-European settlement? Before human arrival? Natural landscapes have changed and will continue to change over time due to climate change and to disturbances. While there’s a healthy debate among scholars about Native Americans’ impacts on natural landscapes prior to 1492, their hunting and agricultural…
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Focusing on Ecological Functions
Principle #2: Provide food, shelter, and breeding sites for insects and birds by planting biodiverse clusters of perennials, shrubs, and trees in refugia gardens that interconnect. Important Ecological FunctionsClick on each link for more details about each ecological function. “If a plant also attracts insects, butterflies and birds, it’s truly an ideal plant.” Piet Oudolf
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Diversifying for the Future
Principle #1: Using climate projections, enrich biodiversity in outdoor living spaces by converting lawn spaces to refugia gardens. Most refugia gardens will consist of trees, shrubs, and perennials. Because trees are long-lived species, pay special attention to their vulnerability and adaptability to climate change. Refugia are suitable for vulnerable species, but you will likely want…
Refugia Gardening 