Meryl Smith Lawton

Native Focus | Patsy Cotterill is surrounded by Aspen Poplar trees in her backyard, one of many plants that are native to the Prairies.

Patsy Cotterill saves wild plants. Not just any wild plants, mind you. She feels the same way most of us do about dandelions and ragweed. But she’s passionate about native plants, like fescue and dogwood — plants that grew here before the cultivation invasion of alfalfa, smooth brome and Kentucky blue grass, the most common kind of lawn.

“Yes, in my mind, our lawn grass is like a weed,” she says. “It grows very fast and will take over everything else. I’m probably the only person in the city who grabs the Round Up when I see Kentucky Blue in my yard.”

But as Cotterill shows me around her yard, I understand why she does it. Her quiet Patricia Heights garden is a refugee camp for displaced native plants. She’s entirely plowed up her lawn and plants only natives, from trees and shrubs like aspen and dogwood, to parkland wildflowers, native grasses and other ground cover. She takes in plants about to be destroyed by development and cultivates for posterity rare natives that might otherwise disappear.

Cotterill has been working on her naturescape garden for the last four years, and although many native plants are slower growing than their weedier or showier cultivated contemporaries and take longer to bear fruit, her garden is a testament to the beauty of a natural space. Even though it’s early in the season, she has delicate prairie crocuses in bloom, and bright yellow buttercups dot her back yard.

With a degree in botany from Liverpool University, Cotterill has been living in Canada for the last 38 years, and in that time has become passionate and knowledgeable about our native flora. But despite this, the retiree is humble about her gardening skills.

“I’m really not a gardener,” she says, waving her hand at the very garden that belies her words. Her particular interest in native plants, however, stems from her scientific background as well as her conservationist creed. “I believe in taking care of our natural world,” she says. “In many ways, native plants are not as well adapted to our urban setting as many imports.”

And many are disappearing, due to the rapid development of our city over the last few years. So Cotterill has a close relationship with the City of Edmonton, as well as some property developers, who allow her to salvage what she can of the native landscape before it becomes condos and strip malls. The plants then go into preserved natural areas, like the river valley, and some make their way to her own garden or those of others who are interested in naturescaping.

Cotterill’s relationship to the city extends to her group, the Edmonton Naturalization Group, with whom she expends a great deal of effort to keep the natural areas of the city, well, natural.

Which means a lot of weeding. “Yes, we’re a large group of volunteers and we spend lots of time in the river valley getting rid of thistles and dandelions,” she says. Although many might think this is counterintuitive, she explains that the native plants in natural areas need a lot of room to breathe, and the more aggressive weeds, many of which were brought by European settlers as forage crops for their animals, run the risk of taking over. “We have some amazing native plants in this area, like bog orchids and shooting stars, that can’t handle the competition of more aggressive plants, so we try to give them room,” she says.

Despite her close relationship with the city, she is critical of some of the city’s planting policies. “They haven’t understood, I think, the true importance of growing native plants, which is, of course, that natives are an important part of our local ecosystem,” she says. “If you change one part of an ecosystem, you’re going to change another, as it’s all interdependent.”

“One of the great challenges of native plants is that many of them take a long time to mature, and city landscapers are, by and large, impatient,” she says. “They want hedges and trees to baffle sound, and ornamental plants for color. And they want it immediately,” she says.

But she adds, “Native plants are worth the wait and we owe it to our local ecosystem to take care of it.”
For those patient souls who are interested in naturescaping their own garden, Cotterill recommends the help of a good landscaper and a group like the Edmonton Naturalization Group to advise on the positioning of plants and to help provide access to seeds and seedlings. “It does take time to develop,” she says, “so keep your expectations in check for the first few years. But for gardeners who want to become more connected to the natural environment of Edmonton, there’s nothing like it. And you do become very emotionally attached to the little plants you coax out of the ground.  There’s nothing more beautiful than watching your seedling take root and grow, and you feel like you’re protecting something delicate and wild.”

“It’s a good feeling,” she says with a smile.