Photo: Tristan Williams
Martha Donnelly has found her passion: “pushing back against biodiversity loss.” A landscape architect who retired to Charlottesville in 2018, Donnelly says she was chagrined to find the land around her pretty new home in Rugby Hills was filled with invasive and nonnative plants (“I needed a truck to drag them out.”). But reading Doug Tallamy’s Nature’s Best Hope rocked her world—and now she’s got a business card that says “Native Gardening Support” and a calling.
While she’s not a trained horticulturist, “I do know more than the average homeowner,” Donnelly says. “I’ll go to anyone’s home and spend an hour or two walking your property for free” [after that, it’s consulting time], talking about creating an ecological landscape. She’s no purist; she knows we all have our favorite plants, native or not, and as a trained designer she agrees that grass has its role as a habitat for kids’ games, lawn parties, and sunset gatherings.
Donnelly notes that even Tallamy only asks that homeowners convert half their lawn to meadow or native gardens. “The sweet spot is 70 percent native plants,” she says, to foster native wildlife and protect biodiversity.
Check out the nonprofit Homegrown National Park, she says, which encourages people to add native plants and remove invasives in all our outdoor spaces—home, work, schools, faith sites. Even a native plant in a pot on your porch counts toward HNP’s goal of creating “the largest ‘national’ park in America!”
