What is a garden? More than you think

By Barb Delisio

OSU Extension master gardener volunteer

I recently attended a workshop in Columbus with three other master gardener volunteers from Mahoning County. It was hosted by the Perennial Plan Association and OSU Extension.

There were five major speakers from different parts of the country, including “the perennial Diva” from Pennsylvania.

We were expecting the usual new and exciting plants and ideas to improve the garden and get us in the mood to plan our gardens.

But Debra Knakpke of Columbus surprised us with a program dealing with ecology in your garden.

“What is a garden?” she asked, then explained, it’s an idea, then a place, and finally an ecosystem of its own created by putting plants in an area where they will thrive.

An ecosystem is the interaction of living organisms with their environment. The interaction involves resources available for growth of the organisms.

Basically the ecosystem includes plants, which are producers; animals, which are consumers; bugs and organisms, which are decomposers, all influenced by light, temperature, precipitation, pollutants and soil (pH, texture, fertility) to determine the system’s “carrying capacity,” or the number of organisms it can support.

The various interactions that make this garden work include competition among species sharing a limited resource, such as weeds competing with desired plants and turf competing with trees; predation, in which one species feeds on another, such as hawks eating mice or rust fungus consuming leaves and grass; parasitism, in which one species feeds on another slowly, such as mistletoe growing on an oak tree, eventually killing the tree; mutualism, in which two species provide resources to each other, such as bean roots enriching the soil by providing nitrogen; and, finally, commensalism, in which one species receives a benefit from another species with no effect on the other, such as orchids and bromeliads on trees.

There is no pristine area on earth that offers all these things. They have to be created by someone, and it is a long and involved process.

Knapke urged gardeners to know what’s in your ecosystem and maintain it by adding what it needs and extracting what it does not.

Now, you have all winter to learn about the ecosystem you’ll be planting this summer, and how you’re going to alter your garden to create a functioning ecosystem.

Learn to make some slight adjustments to your yard, garden and landscape for a complete ecosystem in your yard at http://go.osu.edu/ecosystem.