Going Au Natural
Whittier Moves Haltingly Towards A Native-Species Landscape
Professor Jeff Hanlon, a water policy expert, sits in his office on the second floor of Platner Hall and points to the luscious plants visible through his window. Across from Deihl Hall, the hills rising up to Wardman Hall is a browner hue. One of the interesting aspects of Whittier College’s campus is the mix of verdant lawns and more drought-tolerant landscaping.
“What do you think is the biggest agricultural crop in the U.S.?” Hanlon asks.
Being from Colorado, I guess corn. To my surprise, it is grass.
Hanlon has a small, native-plant garden on his mind — a place where students can escape urban chaos to connect with nature through experiencing a biodiverse habitat. It would have another goal, too, getting used to a built landscape that is different than the water-demanding, highly manicured ones we’ve gotten used to.
Whittier College has a beautiful campus that several years ago started incorporating drought-resistant gardens to go with the rolling lawns into its landscape architecture. Walking around you’ll find the buildings lined with native shrubs like the Arctostaphylos ‘White Lanterns’ Manzanita. At almost every turn you’ll come across the rich, deep-purple succulent Aeonium Arboreum ‘Zwartkop’, with old and wise trees to add shade to your walk. At Whittier College we are still in the midst of a plan intitiated five years ago to change our gardening practices. The goal was to create a drought-resistant environment in response to rising temperatures and climate crisis.
Starting in Fall of 2022, Professor Hanlon wants to show students the importance of a native plant garden in which flora can grow freely in their natural habitat. To avoid student and staff concerns about bugs and overgrowth, the garden will be located on the hill by the softball field near Worsham Canyon Trail. The catalyst for Professor Hanlon’s project comes from his love of monarch butterflies and coastal sage scrub. What is special about this coastal scrub is its ability to provide habitat for 150 different butterfly species and attract the largest diversity of 1,500 bees in North America. Southern California coastal sage scrub provides additional habitat for various native/nonnative insects, spiders, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Hanlon also aims to provide a space for a flourishing ecosystem to demonstrate how native plant communities look naturally. Positioned as it will be, where the built campus abuts the Puente Hills Habitat Preservation Authority, the space will also allow students to decompress while reflecting on how our urban habitats connect with he natural habitats around them. It might also quell some fears about bugs.
While this is a great start, how else can we make our campus, with its’ large swaths of thirsty grass, more sustainable?
Whittier College has a picturesque, 75-acre campus designed and maintained for student enjoyment and school promotion. It looks good in pictures! But following the pandemic, the campus feels sparse because there are fewer students hanging out on its 14-acres of turf. This year, students have been questioning the purpose of the grass, citing a climate crisis and a misuse of precious water.
In the United States, grass takes up about 40-million acres of land, almost two percent of land. If everyone in the U.S. kept their grass as green as Whittier’s, that two percent would use up 60 million acre-feet of water, which translates to a really big number: 1,955,105,660,000 trillion gallons per year.
Our campus, as beautiful as it is, or as we’ve perceive it to be, participates in this culture. To irrigate one acre of grass weekly in Southern California requires about 27,154 gallons of water. Going by these stats, Whittier’s 14 acres of grass could potentially use around 380,560 gallons per week.
Fourth-year Nona Golden is a major in both Environmental Studies and Anthropology who actively participates in sustainability efforts on campus. Golden formerly held the position of ASWC Senate’s Environmental Committee Chair, and is currently finishing up an internship with the Environmental Science & Studies Department and The Chain Collaborative. Golden advocates the campus’s move to indigenous vegetation.
“Planting indigenous plant species rather than grass can decrease urban temperatures while supporting animal life,” she says. “At Whittier College, I recognize that areas of campus like the North Lawn and Upper Quad are designed with turf to support recreational activities, but other areas of campus not used for recreational activity could be replaced with plant alternatives to grass that would decrease irrigation and create more diverse plant life on campus.”
About five years ago, Whittier College contracted Sequoia Environmental Services to begin its xeriscaping (landscaping that requires no irrigation) project at the school in response to the California drought crisis. This switch to a drought-resistant model helps to reduce water costs, energy usage and soil erosion to name a few benefits. This came after LA County’s Grass for Cash initiative in 2014, which, according to its website “offers customers a rebate for removing water-inefficient grass to replace with drought-tolerant landscaping.”
The introduction of xeriscaping is a positive, as Whittier College has cut water usage in half. Students get to enjoy the beauty of succulents on the campus paths. Or maybe zone off in class while admiring the flowering bushes and rustling leaves that bring some bees, some butterflies, and some birds. The xeriscaping, as great as it is, remains piecemeal. We still have 14 acres of grass. So, what more can we do? What is the next step?
Social bee colonies were fitter and their populations grew faster in more florally diverse environments due to a continuous supply of food resources.
The quaint town of Appleton, Wisconsin might provide some answers. Once a pinnacle of the erstwhile American suburban dream of a white picket-fence and golf-course grade grass yard. Rather than maintaining this outdated (some would say sterile) approach, many of the lawns in this town now look wild and natural with native ground cover and abundant yellow dandelions.
No Mow May is an initiative set by the city asking residents not to mow their lawns for the month of May. Anti-mowing became popular in the United Kingdom, which brought the attention of assistant professors Dr. Israel Del Toro and Dr. Relena Ribbons at Lawrence University in Appleton. These two professors brought their ideas forth to the Appleton City Council. In 2020, it became the first city in the United States to adopt no-mow practices.
According to a recent New York Times article, “Appleton’s No Mow May initiative had a clear purpose: to save the bees — and not just honeybees (which are European imports), but also native bees, such as bumble bees, mining bees and sweat bees.”
The appropriately named town of Appleton demonstrates a positive land ethic in the broader picture of biodiversity. The initial goal was focused on bee conservation as they are both charismatic insects and critical to pollination that benefits produce, but other species have also benefited from no mow. But we tend to forget that bees cannot exist without other species in a biodiverse lawn/garden.
A study on the sociality of bees in biodiverse places by the Scientific Report reaffirms this to say: “Plant diversity [is a] key driver of bee fitness. Social bee colonies were fitter and their populations grew faster in more florally diverse environments due to a continuous supply of food resources. Colonies responded to high plant diversity with increased resource intake and colony food stores. Our findings thus point to biodiversity loss as the main reason for the observed bee decline.”
Lots of people are scared of bees and bugs, thus concern about native plant gardens in which they thrive. Hanlon had to scout a suitable site for his native-species garden. The initial idea was the brown hills near Wardman Hall/Gym, but the worry was that it would compete with the more manicured parts of the campus. Another thought was to locate it behind the chapel, but once Halon started digging in the dirt, he came upon some dirt-covered AT&T phone lines that could not be interfered with. Eventually the tippity-top of campus near the softball fields was the choice as the garden could flourish in this space without competing with the manicured parts of the campus, and it is far enough away from lower campus to feel like you are getting away for a little bit… to embrace the bugs.
The importance of a native plant garden on Whittier College’s campus is that it offers the opportunity to plant in our imaginations the seeds of a new chapter in our practices. Whittier College is in the midst of what feels like a transition between outdated modes both in terms of its curriculum and on its grounds.
Projects like Hanlon’s native plant garden are examples of what makes Whittier unique. Through replacing some grass spaces on campus with native plant habitats, the college can offer students spaces to reconnect with self/nature/others; research biodiverse plant and insect communities in the sciences; as well as embrace/reinforce interconnectedness with nature through the native plant garden to inform an ethic of care when analyzing our own practices in combating climate change.
