Episode 21: Poet Theta Pavis, Pollinator Conservationist Heather Holm, Author Paula Whyman

Welcome to The Wild Story, a podcast of poetry and plants by the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. I am Anne Wallace, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey. The Wild Story is hosted and produced by Master Gardener and NPSNJ Director of Programming, Kim Carrero, and myself for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. Today's featured poet is Theta Pavis, who speaks with me about her new chapbook, The Red Strobe, which just came out from Finishing Line Press.

Theda's work is marked by grief and pain, but also love, family, protection, and a fierce kind of resilience. as can be seen in the garden her mother created many years ago, a garden which is now Theda's in her Jersey City yard. Next up in this episode, Randy Eccle returns for a brand new Ask Randy segment about NPSNJ's upcoming BioBlitz.

Randy describes how volunteers, scientists, and naturalists collaborate to document as many native species as possible in a specific area within a set time frame. Kim is joined by Bobbi Herbs, co-leader of the NPSNJ Southwest chapter. Bobby has played a crucial role in establishing the IGC committee, which aims to encourage independent nurseries throughout New Jersey to stock native plants. Together, Kim and Bobbi talk with award-winning author and pollinator conservationist Heather Holm.

Heather is an expert on interactions between native pollinators and native plants, and she will teach a four-week course for NPSNJ beginning in April. In our final segment, Kim and I speak with Paula Wyman about her new book, Bad Naturalist, One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, which was released this winter by Timber Press.

Blending memoir, natural history, and conservation science, the book chronicles her efforts to restore a former mountaintop farm to its natural habitat. If you enjoy the book, you can continue following Paula's journey by signing up for her popular newsletter, Bad Naturalist, and meet her on March 13th. during a live conversation with Kim and me at the Museum of Early Trades and Crafts in Madison, New Jersey.

I'm really excited to introduce our guest poet for today's episode of The Wild Story. Theta Pavis is a poet editor and educator from Jersey City, New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Red Wheelbarrow, Mom Egg Review, Spill Words Press, Why Too These Rocks, 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers, from Hay Day Books. many other places. Her chapbook, The Red Strobe, was recently published by Finishing Line Press.

Her poems have also appeared on stage by Poetry Well in New York. She's received residencies from Arts by the People in New Jersey and the Bethany Arts Center in New York. She works in college communications and has taught journalism at several universities, including UCLA and Rutgers. She's reported for a range of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including Wired, Discover, and the Online Journalism Review. Hey Theta, we are so happy to have you here on The Wild Story.

Thank you for inviting me. This is really nice. I think you're our first poet that we've ever had from Jersey City, which as our listeners may know, Kim and I are from. So it's nice to have this. hometown interview. Yeah, for sure. I wanted to first say congratulations on the Red Strobe, the publication. It's that's super exciting. It's your first chapbook debut. You know, Kim and I were talking about your book.

before this conversation, and you and I have talked about it quite a bit as well. There's a lot of grief in this book. It's rather intense. There's pain, there's illness, there's poverty, abuse, emergencies.

divorce to name a few and that's all laid against this concrete city backdrop but even so the overriding images and feelings that your work leaves me with that I take away from it Some of those images include mothers and daughters, those bonds, family, and many iterations of family, but above all, love.

And lest our listeners wonder how the red strobe fits into the wild story, as I was reading, I kept returning to this powerful message that is sort of throughout the collection about the persistence of life. and the way that small things can flourish even in unlikely places and harsh conditions. I think that's one of the really beautiful things about the red strobe is that we're never just left with pain and despair.

hardship there's always life that's sort of burgeoning and we're gonna talk about that a little bit through your poems but could you talk to us a little bit about the collection itself and those sort of themes that you see Well, this is probably one of the first. conversations I'm having with another writer. I mean, maybe the second conversation I'm having with other writers in depth about. the work in this chapbook as a whole.

So it's interesting for me to hear the response to it and the perception. But while you were talking, you know, I was thinking about this poem that's not in the collection. It's a poem about secondary infertility, trying to have a second kid. which is something that's not talked about that much. And there's I think there's a line in there where I'm like, but life goes on, you know? Yeah. And there's so much about family and my mom.

And my sister and this sort of perseverance. And I think that's very much how my mom was, you know. We're going to keep going. We're going to push through. And it's sort of how she was about the backyard, which was the main garden, you know, for so many years. So I think your assessment of it is pretty spot on. It's good to hear it reflected back too. Yeah, that line you just said about, but life goes on. There's never a sense of just giving up.

There's a sort of grit is one of the words that I was thinking about, especially as pertains to your mother.

Her presence is so strong here. There's so many poems about her. We see that, as I said, grit as a young mother. But we also see her on trips to the beach. We see her ability to spin magic for her children, for you, as she's... making costumes for you which is a poem i love by the way um the halloween costumes yeah yeah yeah halloween costumes and then but then we also see who she is as a human that she's got shortcomings she is only human

And you just mentioned her garden. And maybe we could even just jump right into that now with one of my favorite poems from this collection, which is called New Season. Yeah. Would you be willing to read that for us? Sure. If you want to set it up for us, you can or you can just jump. It's after my mother has died. I mean, she had cancer and she fought it for four and a half years and I was her primary caretaker.

And I was also her executor, her medical health care proxy. It was a lot. My mother was also a poet. So I didn't know that. Yeah. So there's another level there of mother, daughter, writer stuff. But this is called New Season. And my daughter has only known this house. We moved all over Jersey City. raised in manhattan first and then we moved to new jersey and eventually we were in jersey city my daughter is only known

this home. And so the backyard was also extremely important in her childhood. She spent a lot of time in the backyard and I could watch her from the window so she could go out there and play and make mud pies and do all kinds of things. And your mother lived in the home, too. My mother lived in the home, too. Right. My mom was downstairs and we were upstairs. And, you know, there were years where I was growing lettuces and tomatoes and all kinds of things. OK, so this is called New Season.

Winter's ice has broken the terracotta pot. That sat in the backyard and finally destroyed your half-barrel planter. The one with the sage that grew out of control. Its shriveled leaves, once soft and long, cling to dead sticks. I watched the wood that splintered. I sit in the sun and lift my face the way you did. Nearby, early daffodils raise their fragile perennial heads, oblivious to your absence. I stare at the small yellow corona's six little petals. It's almost unbearable.

I imagine the gardener I will call to help me. What will she say about the short logs surrounding the little plot with the crocus you planted? How can I tell her you buried all the family's cats here and that it cannot be disturbed? It seems we could have just put your ashes here instead of in the ocean as requested. My daughter is collecting the dead brown leaves from the oak tree you tended, and she's trying on the now too small gardening gloves you bought her.

She's longing for the spade without knowing. She's longing for your hand on the handle. Wow, that ending, it gets me every time. It's so beautiful. Thanks for reading it. Thank you. Yeah, I saved those little gloves. Did you? Because my mother bought her her own set of little gardening gloves, which is just like so my mother. Well, if you're going to come out here and work, you need gloves, you know. Well, of course, I would expect no less.

It's so powerful how you feel her presence in that space in particular in the garden. Could you talk a little bit about that, about your mother and the garden and the presence of her that you still feel? Well, you know, my office was her bedroom. Although I tend to work mostly at the kitchen table. Her presence is everywhere. And up until recently, I was driving her car and she's been gone like 10 years. So we're all and my brother lives here, too. So we're all living in the house that.

was one of the homesteads for a very long time. And the garden was very important to my mother. I'm on a block in Jersey City, in the Heights, where every house... At one point, pretty much every house had a front garden and they've all been torn out for parking. And my mother refused to do it. So we have the only front garden. I mean, she had an interesting childhood. They moved around a lot. Her father wanted to be a writer and pack the whole family up at one point and move them to Paris.

but they had no money because that's what writers did, right? But they had no money, so they weren't actually living in Paris. They were living on the outskirts of Paris because they were so poor. But she spent a lot of time in the countryside, also in what we here would call upstate New York, Rockland County. And she really liked being outside. She really liked being outside and that influenced her.

In what she did with work, her politics, but also with work, she didn't want to be in an office. She didn't want to be inside. She became a pipe fitter. at an oil refinery in New Jersey. And there's another poem in here, driving past the Bayway refinery. And my mother worked at the Bayway refinery for almost 14 years as a pipe fitter.

But then she would spend all this time, you know, in the backyard, in the front yard, especially in the backyard and made an extension of the house. You know, we had this like old wooden picnic table that finally like sagged so much. Yeah. There was always a backyard. Yeah.

And for our listeners who may not be familiar with Jersey City, it is a city, right? So the houses here are row houses for the most part in Theda's neighborhood and in my neighborhood and in Kim's neighborhood. That is the case. you know right up against each other or maybe have a small alleyway that you can walk through but they're they're narrow houses and

So a front garden is a small thing and even the backyards are small, but they're also so precious. What is... garden your mother's garden like now. Since it's been some time. It's funny because I was in a workshop yesterday and I wrote a new poem about the backyard. And I was just like, oh no, it's the backyard again. Because I feel very guilty about the status of the backyard. So the way it's broken down is like...

The backyard was sort of going to be my brother's domain and I would take care of the front yard. And I've been really influenced by this podcast, by the Native Plant Society, learning about that and the work that you and Kim have done, but also...

all of the things that started happening in Jersey City when the pandemic hit, a lot of our friends got super into like birds and bird watching and life and gardening. And I think that there is a part of me that's just like, I don't have time for that. grow some parsley and I like birds I used to watch birds with my dad and record them you know but I don't have time for that and it's really

It's actually really influenced me. I recently, you know, talked to Kim Carrero a lot about native plants and she helped me.

came and we did a planting in my front yard which also needed a lot of love and tending and so i'm very excited i'm gonna have native plants in my front yard and I'm you know part of the bandwagon now but the backyard has become a feral cat colony and that happened over a it's a long series of things but it is a different form of life So for a while, my brother was building these sort of raised bed boxes that he made out of the old wooden path. sort of stepping stones that my mother had.

And so he made all of these. Then he had to get wire to like wrap around them because squirrels were coming and eating all the plants. And. The folks next door who were taking care of some cats moved away, and there was a fire across the street. There was another cat that was abandoned, and it's become this feral cat colony. So my hammock is out there, but... The cats are usually on it sometimes. Not me. But we actually started trapping them. So they're going to get some help.

So the garden is evolving. And the poem that I wrote... was revisiting some of these themes about how important it was to her, how I would watch her from the kitchen window sitting in the sun, just soaking up the sun, even though she was very sick, my mother, and how... There's like all these visceral images about it and how I feel like guilty. And why haven't I put the same amount of time into the garden as she has? There's some.

And then it ends with like, but there is life there. And I think in some ways she would appreciate that. Right. Life comes in so many forms. I also have a number of feral cats in my yard that I feed and take care of and love. They live amid my native plants. You know, these things can sit side by side and I have birds and you might think, well, they're not.

These things are contradictory. They're not, you know. This one's gotten very big. It's a whole project. It is. And it's a big responsibility. Once you start doing it, you can't just kind of stop. You know, there's something about tending to life, which is something that you've been doing for many years in so many ways as your mother's caretaker, as a mother yourself.

And I think this is actually kind of an interesting pivot. We could talk about your sister a bit. And the next poem I wanted to ask you to share with us is, Passing the Orchards, which takes us out of Jersey City. So about 20 years ago, right after my daughter had been born, my sister, I'm the oldest of four.

My sister was in a very bad car accident and she suffered a traumatic brain injury. She wasn't expected to survive. She was in a coma for over a month. She was in a trauma unit, but she did survive. So this poem is about the grief and, you know, visiting her. But one interesting thing about my sister, this whole theme of like...

tragedy, resilience, grit, life goes on. She had a lot of things going for her when she had the accident. She was a dancer and a choreographer and an artist and a jewelry maker and had like, you know, five different jobs. One of them was actually, she was a gardening assistant, which I hadn't thought about for a long time. She was learning how to hunt deer with a bow. I mean, she was just a total badass and she still is. And she...

was super strong because of her dancing. And I think the fact that she was young and she was so physically fit helped her come out of the coma, but she suffered a traumatic brain injury. So she lives in this small place. It's like a little suburb of Albany. And there's a lot of people there. Everyone that lives where she lives has an aid of some type. But my sister's spirit... is very much intact. Her little apartment is filled with art, flowers.

just beauty. She always had I think a much greater respect for beauty than I did. You know, I was a journalist and she didn't buy a newspaper until like the day after 9-11. She called me out, but she's like, I bought the New York Times. And I'm like, you know, she was just art. She loved plants and flowers and all this kind of stuff. And so when you go to her, her little place where everybody lives.

It's like a little housing complex and everything's made handicap accessible, right? But when you get out front of my sisters, it's bursting with life. There's a raised bed. little planter that's got all of these herbs and stuff. There's flowers, there's garden gnomes, there's fairies, and it gets blasted with sun. Everything's growing like nuts.

She's growing more right now in her little unit in front of her little unit than I am in my entire backyard. Right. I will read Passing the Orchards. Okay. Driving back from you, I pass silent through blanched winter landscapes. It's late. The bare apple trees seem angry. Their spindly branches raise bristling fists into the gray afternoon sky. I know they'll blossom and it will be a miracle.

I try to see us in the future, slowly struggling through the grassy lane at some farm, a bag of apples in one hand, your walker making ruts in the green earth. Like pie crust and cold butter, I want to be that person with her hands in the dough, working it and making it mine, laying each slice down for the oven's warmth, the succulents of life. I imagine a bright kitchen, an orchard, the highway is a place to get to and must be better than rolling my eyes to the past.

to the rearview mirror I love so fiercely all the time. I'm moving through the present in the slow lane, letting the cars pass me, but the present is still a place I struggle with. I visit, I kiss your cheek, I try to stay calm when you get frustrated. But there seems no place to lay down my grief. I've tucked it in the trunk. It comes with me everywhere.

Again, another ending that gives me chills. Yeah. There's so many lines in this poem, so many images that I, I mean, I... love the entirety of it, but then there are lines in it that just really make me stop. I know they'll blossom and it will be a miracle. feels such a metaphor for your sister's life and recovery, that that faith, I know she'll blossom. I know I just changed the pronoun there from they, meaning the trees, to her.

And then I want to be that person with their hands in the dough, working it and making it mine. And then in this turn to the past, the desire to sort of stay in the past. needing to be in the present and move forward. Could you say a little bit about the idea of wanting to be the person with their hands in the dough? Yeah, I think I have. a tendency to, I mean, like a lot of writers,

just kind of like stare at the tragedy, you know? I mean, it is the way I have been a writer and my writing is changing. But those moments that just stay with you, you know, and I like there's another poem that I wrote about my sister where I say. something like but that's just me sucking on my sour ball of grief I have a hard time.

sometimes being in the present. I'm better than I used to be. And I'm like, you know, revisiting this stuff, revisiting this stuff. And I want to be in the moment. There's a thing that happens when somebody has a traumatic brain injury in my sister's case. There's plenty she remembers. She will correct you.

Like, oh no, I was in Montreal when that happened. And you're like, what? But it's hard maybe to have a conversation with her about a movie you've just watched. Right. So there's cognitive impairment, but there's this thing that happens. She's here and she's with us and she's a totally different person than she used to be. So there's this thing that happens when you're with her, where I think part of your brain is like, where's my sister?

You're remembering the other person. Yeah. Yeah. So that's me wanting to just like, let's go to the orchard. Let's make a pie. Let's be in this moment. Yeah. And that struggle of like trying to accept. Yeah. About trying to accept. Yeah. But that is also the influence of my mother because, you know, my mother's response to the traumatic brain injury was sort of like.

No, we're going to the apple orchard. Of course, we're going to go apple picking, even though she can't walk. And the rest of us are being like, what? What are you talking like? How? We're doing it. And, you know, my siblings and I, like last summer, we took her to a small beach town in Connecticut. And it is a lot of work to get somebody who is disabled into the sea and back out or into a lake and back out. But, you know, we do it. And there's a lot of argument.

So, I mean, they help me be in the present. Yeah. But the writing is always helping me understand and come to terms with the... you know, trying to accept. Yeah. And in poetry, you can let those things sit side by side. And that's not always an easy. uh companionship past and present grief and present the grief of the past

the joys of the present. But there's something very powerful in a poem like this, where you can take us into both of those things at the same time. There's power in holding on to. who your sister was, even as you're adjusting. And I love that anecdote you said about your mother. No, of course, we're going to go to the orchards. And this sort of, again, it's like that can do grit of your mother and just. Of course we're going to make that happen.

I have a mother who has a spirit that is very similar to that. So I know it very well of like, wait, what, what are we doing? But we need those people. I know this is somebody who was just like, I have. I have four kids. One is an infant. We're going camping for a week. Yeah. Yeah, she was a force of nature. And there's a lot of other painful stuff in this book where, you know, some of the decisions she made were not really good ones in terms of her kids.

You know, she was definitely a fighter. And I feel like, I mean, both my parents were, they were. And I feel like, you know, the current political climate, I'm sort of glad they're not here. Both my parents are gone to live through it. But I also feel this kind of like. Let's give back. Let's resist. Let's speak out. Let's make art. Let's dance. And it's hard to make art in a time like this, even though I want it, I need it. It's hard, I think, for...

you know, for all of us, like, what am I doing? I'm putting bird seed out. I'm planting this thing that's going to come up months from now when my country's on fire. But yeah, we need all of it. So yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the lessons that that I gather from your mother is in from your family, and we're going to get to a poem about your dad to sort of close things out. But that idea of persistence and hope and resistance that yeah of course we're going to put out bird seed of course we're going to plant these things because Who are we if we don't? What are we left with if we don't do those things? Yeah. So speaking of your dad, your father,

You have a poem that's not in the red strobe, but we actually featured it on The Wild Story. We had a contest back in season one when Jennifer Jewell was on. our show talking about her book, What We Sow. And so then we had a little poetry contest for people to submit poems about what they're sowing and seeds.

And so you submitted Growing Avocados in East Orange, which won the contest. And so we had you read the poem on the show, I think in episode seven, but we didn't talk about it. We just had you read it. That's all we aired. Now, if you would read it again and maybe talk to us a little bit about the poem. And I think it's a really nice one to close out this conversation with. Sure.

So this is another, when I wasn't in Jersey City, when I was really little, I was in East Orange. Possibly, I think it was even grittier than Jersey City, where my dad lived too. It was a lot of empty lots around him. Growing avocados in east orange, a jewel box of jam jars lined his windowsills, balanced in each a hard round nut of a seed.

My father would hold one clean brown pit in his palm to show me a proud heavy shape, more like a rock or a ball I could play with, but he tended them so patiently. Outside there was not one green thing. The wooden bird feeder he built swung from a line he'd strung. It was filled with a wild feast. The black oil sunflower feed glinting like tiny obsidian shards above our kingdom of concrete.

Inside, he gently coaxed toothpicks into the seeds, dense as a world. We waited to see what would come, a tendril. Then hairy, white roots grew floating and curious. Small, his collection looked like a teacher's science lesson. Later, tall plants were a green victory transplanted to pots. We could say they never once bore fruit, but in his small kitchen, I watched him turn what was dormant to me into a leafy truth. One night when I could not sleep, I found him.

staring at the small black and white television in the kitchen. Walter Cronkite's sonorous voice saying something serious. My father's sadness grainy and tactile, like the little picture in the semi-dark room. Just six and sleepy, I climbed onto his lap. I didn't know what was coming, but I knew that change was possible. He'd already taught me that. That is such a powerful poem.

I feel like it's also really powerful in this moment. I mean, obviously you wrote it about a moment when you were six and your father's watching the news. We, again, are in a moment where we don't know what's possible, but we still can turn something into a leafy truth. I'm turning back to that language you have here, that things that seem dormant have. Life within them and power. Yeah. Yeah. And power and potential. It's an important reminder.

I think, in moments when we don't know what's coming. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm talking about my family more than I am talking about poetry. That's okay. You know, my dad grew up in Indiana, basically. outside of the city of Evansville, where it was very rural and farmland. And there were orchards.

And his father was a very big gardener. There would be jokes in the family about, you know, the eggplants were this big, you know, and my stepmother would tease him. But we actually have photographs of my dad holding like things that they grew. And so after my parents split up, my father ended up after East Orange, he ended up in New Paltz in upstate New York and Gardner. For a long time, they had a massive garden. He lived on 99 acres near a lake, and he had a huge garden.

and I had a child's garden off to the side so I had this weekend thing of like we're digging for potatoes so that was going on So again, it's like the earth, you know, it was like this totally different situation from Jersey City. Yeah.

But this, you know, memory goes back to, again, this city thing, and we're going to connect to life no matter where we are. Exactly. And that's, it's why I... wanted to have you on The Wild Story, because I think it's really, really important for us to remember that cities are really vital places, but people don't generally think about the natural life that happens in them.

In your work, you find a way to bring these things together for us. You show us that. And you show us the grittiness of the city as well. The poem about the refinery and we see these things side by side, but that is literally what we live with in cities. And so we find a way regardless. I wanted to also mention, I should have said this before, that this poem, Growing Avocados in East Orange, was just published in a brand new literary journal, by the way.

W-A-Y-E in the inaugural issue. So if people want to find it, that's where that is. And that journal was just created by two people from Jersey City. That's right. John Turgonis and Marinelle Mantales. And I wanted to say just quickly, so the book, this is the book, The Red Strobe. And the cover has an image of the Pulaski Skyway on it. And it was created by a city-based artist. named Narushi Jane, who's a new mom. So life is continuing in the city.

Yeah, I really love the cover image. I also love that it's the Pulaski Skyway, but there's also a lot of green in the painting, which most people probably don't think about when they think about the Pulaski Skyway. It's a very... Yeah, industrial, industrial looking structure. I mean, it's a fascinating structure. But yeah, but I like how she brings that in to the painting. And I love that you chose it for your cover. It feels very appropriate.

Do you have any events coming up that we can plug, Theta? Well, ThetaPavis.com has everything. It has a link to the book where you can get it. And I'll be doing some readings coming up in March and April. May. And that's all on my website. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us here on the Wild Story Theta. Thanks so much for having me. I think, you know, the work of the Native Plant Society, I am learning from you how important it is and connecting it to writing is.

Just wonderful gift community. It's so nice to hear that. Thank you. Welcome to Ask Randy on The Wild Story. My name is Randy Eccle.

And I am the NPSNJ past president, board entomologist, native plant expert, and the owner and founder of Toadshade Wildflower Farm. At our wonderful annual meeting and spring conference this past weekend, Our NPSNJ president, Kazees Franelis, announced that NPSNJ would once again be sponsoring an iNaturalist BioBlitz for the month of April in honor of Native Plant Month.

A few folks, whose names I'm afraid I didn't catch, asked me about what a BioBlitz was exactly, how to participate. So I suppose, in a nutshell, that is this month's Ask Randy question. What exactly is an iNaturalist BioBlitz? Well, let's see. A bioblitz is when scientists, naturalists, students, and citizen scientists spend a period of time recording all of the wildlife that they can find. Some of the best BioBlitzes I have participated in have had different teams for different groups.

a botany team, an entomology team, a mammal team, birds, fish, you name it. The NPSNJ April BioBlitz will, of course, focus on plants, but you can record any wildlife that you see throughout the month of April, particularly wildlife interacting with plants. Now I say record, and I'm sure you are wondering exactly where you might do that. If you are not aware of it yet, you should make yourself familiar with iNaturalist.

I use it all the time. It's a wonderful online social network revolving around folks sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. NPSNJ uses iNaturalist to host our BioBlitz. It really is the most common way to host a BioBlitz these days. iNaturalist is available as a free app for both iPhone and Android. You can also access it from your personal computer. It's a wonderful way to share observations and get confirmation of your identifications as well.

One of the great things about iNaturalist is that you can post photos of things that you don't know the name of, and someone in the network will almost always come up with an answer. Now there are different BioBlitzes. The Chrysler Herbarium Bioblitz, which runs from the 1st of March to the 15th of May every year, you can make observations anywhere in the world, but the observations must be of a wild population in that bioblitz.

But for the NPSNJ BioBlitz, we are interested in plants, plants, plants, and the creatures who use and interact with them. and all observations must be made in New Jersey. We are, after all, the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. But the point is, on one or more days in April, go out and about and record all the plants that you see and the creatures interacting with them. in your yard, in a park, in wild areas and cultivated areas, even along roadsides.

Believe it or not, some of New Jersey's rarest plants can be found clinging for life and habitat along roadsides. And if what you are seeing is a cultivated plant For this BioBlitz, that's fine. Just be sure to make a note of it in your observation. If it is a native or non-native plant that appears to escape from cultivation nearby, make a note of that too. As important as it is to document native plant populations throughout the state,

It is also important to know where non-native plants are beginning to escape, or where new invasive species are taking hold. All of this data, actually all of the vast data on iNaturalist, is incredibly useful. It is used by scientists and conservationists in so many ways. For example, the data can be used to track population growth and decline of species over time and across geographic areas. to help conservationists keep track of both native and invasive populations.

Even in previously unblitzed areas, BioBlitz data creates a baseline so that future population trends can be compared. The data can also be used to create conservation plans to preserve species and guide habitat management. Scientists tap into this data to contribute to ecological studies. and BioBlitz data often results in the discovery of new or unknown populations of both native and invasive species, creating both conservation opportunities for the rare species

and the quick development of eradication plans of new invasive species populations. On the subject of rare species, if you'll bear with me for a moment, let me tell you a few stories. There was recently a grasshopper thought to be extinct since the 1940s, the Appalachian grasshopper, Appalachia herbardii. But someone in Virginia posted a picture of one on iNaturalist, which alerted scientists that it still existed.

Similarly, the large chestnut weevil, Cerculeocerotropes, which relies on the nuts of the disease-devastated American chestnut, was thought to be extinct but was identified in Chester County, Pennsylvania just this past November. Again, from a series of photos posted on iNaturalist. And in 2022, two high school students documented two species of scorpion out in California.

Turns out they were new species that had never been described before. And again, these students documented these arthropods by posting their photos on iNaturalist. How cool is that? So thank you for letting me nerd off there for a few moments about insects and arthropods, but let me make one last point. Bio-blitzing is a lot of fun. I have spent many fabulous hours hiking and recording plants and insects and birds.

For the birders out there, you can think of a BioBlitz sort of like a birding big day. You can blitz alone, if that is your thing, or rope together a group of friends or family so that you can work together as a team to see what you can find and just how many observations you can make.

BioBlitzing is all about community engagement, an opportunity to get out the door, connect with nature, and increase your awareness and the community's awareness of local ecosystems and local conservation efforts and challenges. I am told that the MPSNJ website will have a page on the upcoming MPSNJ BioBlitz very soon. Keep an eye out for it.

I can't wait to see all the observations that pop up in April on the MPS Energy BioBlitz. And that is it for another Ask Randy. Thanks everyone for sending in your questions. Keep them coming. If you have any questions for Ask Randy, send them in to thewildstory at mpsnj.org, and I'll keep doing my very best to answer all of your questions in future episodes of The Wild Story.

Next up, Kim and special guest host Bobby Herb speak with Heather Holm. And after that, to close out the episode, Paula Wyman shares her experience restoring a mountaintop in Virginia. I've been looking forward to introducing our next guest. Heather Holm is a pollinator conservationist and award-winning author of four books. Pollinators of Native Plants published in 2014. Bees, published in 2017, Wasps, in 2021, and Common Native Bees of the Eastern United States, published in 2022.

She has won multiple book awards, including the American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her expertise includes the interactions between native pollinators and native plants. and the natural history and biology of native bees and predatory wasps. Heather will be teaching a class for NPSNJ on this topic in April. Heather, welcome to The Wild Story. Hi, Kim. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, we're thrilled to have you. And also joining us today from our Southwest chapter as a guest host is Bobbi Herb. Bobby, we spend a lot of time talking about native plants and what's happening in each other's gardens. So thank you for being here. I couldn't imagine a better partner for this particular episode today. Thank you so much, Kim. I'm really delighted to be here. Actually, we talk less about it and share our pictures, your beautiful pictures of birds.

And I send you lots of bees and bumblebees and butterflies. So it's not just talking about it. So I guess I'll leave with the first question. Heather, the Native Plant Society of New Jersey advocates for choosing the right plant for the right place. You write about this in your book, Pollinators of Native Plants. Can you elaborate on this and why people should be planting straight species?

that are particular to their area. Thanks, Bobbi. Yes, the concept of right plant, right place is really grounded in a gardener starting out and understanding the growing conditions in which they have, whether it's in their yard or... other place that they're stewarding. And that usually if you have that understanding, for example, of soil type, how much sun, the local ecology and that can be explored just by going to natural areas and reading up on

you know, the primary plant communities, for example, that occur in your region really helps to ground your plant choices. So we wouldn't want to pick a plant that thrives in mucky, wet soils and planted in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, right? That's a recipe for failure. So the right plant, right place. is not only about native plants, but it's about having success as a steward and gardener so that you're not losing plants over time by making the wrong choices.

Heather you recommend planting at least five of the same species together depending on your space or your garden size. Talk about the benefits to beneficial insects when clumping native plants together. Yeah, so the idea, and I am by no means a garden designer, but the idea with clustering like plants together, and designers always say, choose odd numbers so five seven nine and planting those all in a big cluster

is in theory easier for these pollinating and beneficial insects to find, right? It's when that cluster of plants is in flower. It's this huge color block. And if you imagine yourself as a tiny insect flying through the landscape, that big block of color is going to wow you and draw you in. versus having single species scattered throughout a site. So it may, in fact, make it easier for these pollinating insects to find the food resources they're looking for.

And then when they do drop down in a patch of clusters of like plants, They don't have to travel very far from flower to flower in order to get the resources that they need. So in a sense, you're helping them to save some of that important energy for other tasks that they have to do during the day. So there are 4,000 bee species here in North America, at least that's my understanding. We'd love for you to talk about the difference between social bees and solitary bees.

And there are different nesting sites. We're curious about those cavity nesters and those ground nesters. Yes. So most people, I always say, if I were to stop someone on a sidewalk on a random street and ask them how many bees they could name, most people would be hard pressed to name more than five bees. And just as you said, Bobby.

I think most people are just largely unaware that we have that many species. And in New Jersey, I'm just gathering a guess here, but I'm sure you have over 350 species alone just in the state of New Jersey. And so the general breakdown of these species that occur in a given area is most have a solitary nest. And that means it's a single female bee. who is actively looking for a place to nest either in the ground or above ground in some kind of cavity. It could be in plant stems, holes in wood.

and other sort of opportunistic pre-existing cavities that these above-ground nesters would select. And then a small minority of bees, including our native bumblebees, have social nests and those nests are annual. So a new queen bumblebee emerges from hibernation in early spring. She establishes a nest. She produces offspring. And then that nest is annual and it seizes activity and ends at the end of that growing season. But the main difference between social and solitary is

In a social nest, there's usually one primary egg-laying female, sometimes called a queen, and then multiple generations living within the nest working together. So you think of a honeybee colony. You have a queen and you have workers. And the workers are the daughters, and this is the same for a bumblebee colony. And they are helping the queen to rear more offspring and to do...

tasks such as going out to flowers to collect the pollen and nectar to bring back to the nest. I'm curious about what, Heather, you think about bee hotels? Oh, great question. I get that question a lot. I generally sort of steer people away from creating B hotels. And instead encourage people to leave sort of natural, mimic natural materials and situations in which these above ground nesting bees would select. So that can include.

ways in which you're managing your garden when you cut back your perennial plant material, if you leave stem stock stubble. That can provide nesting opportunities for some of the tinier pith and stem nesting bees. The way in which you prune some of your shrubs, just the act of you pruning off the end of a growth tip and creating a cut opening may provide a nesting opportunity.

Similarly, putting a log on the ground in your garden. So the pre-existing holes that are in wood are typically created by some kind of beetle. And the bees use those old cavities and holes as nesting sites. So I tend to tell folks, Do those things rather than put up a B hotel. A B hotel is concentrating. many bees in a close space and that's sort of an unnatural condition.

And it can facilitate the transmission of diseases and pathogens because they don't naturally nest in that clustering in close proximity. And wild bees have a very short life cycle and window to find food. Can you explain why it's so critical to always have something native flowering in your garden? Yes. So Kim, for the solitary species, you're correct. They really have a short lifespan. Males live for just a few weeks.

and their primary role is to mate with a female, and that's about it. And then the females live a little bit longer, three to four weeks. And so it's a very short window of time in which they have to find this nest, do all of the collection of resources from flowers, do all the egg laying. And then they form individual brood cells for each larva, close them off. And then the adult female or the single mom perishes before ever seeing her offspring emerge as adults.

So let's take the 300 plus species in New Jersey, for example, and each of those has a very specific window of time that they are active. So some species are... maybe just active for the month of May and others July. It's very critical to have a variety of different native flowering plants blooming. What I like to say is the flower restaurant open is 24-7 throughout the growing season, right? So this continuous succession of flowering plants.

And one reason why native plants are so important is Anywhere from 20 to even 50%, depending on the state you live in, of these solitary bees. are pollen specialists of native plants. So that means a single female bee may just be collecting pollen from a very narrow range of plants, even just from a single plant genus.

or perhaps just a few genera that belonging to the same plant family. So we have goldenrod specialists, for example, and we have bee pollen specialists of some of the spring flowering plants, such as spring beauty. And so across the growing season, these specialists are seeking out very specific native plant pollen.

Bees are also red blind, is that right? And can you talk about that a little bit? And what are some of the important colors that people should be thinking of in terms of floral resources? Right. So bees have a different color. They can see a different color spectrum than humans. So you can think of their vision as being shifted. And that shift makes them blind to red, red colors. But then they can see ultraviolet markings on flowers.

And parts of the plant. So flowers, parts of the flower tissue can either reflect or absorb ultraviolet light. And that is a completely invisible trait that we humans cannot see. But these invisible patterns and also the visible patterns that humans can see. are often called nectar guides, and they are ways in which the plant advertises or draws a particular pollinating insect to the flower.

And it also helps indicate where the floral resources are located on the flower. I would encourage people to plant red flowers in their garden because I think you both can volunteer that. The organism that prefers red flowers are hummingbirds. So they're a treat to attract to our home garden. But for bees, what I would call their sweet spot would be yellow and blues and purple flowers as humans see them. And that's...

Often, you know, yellows and oranges and purples are a fairly common suite of colors. So that's, I would say, the sweet spot for bees. And we talked about color. What about shape? I mean, I have penstemon. I have cardinal flower. I have rubecchia. What about all those shapes? What does that mean? The shapes are really important as well. So we talked about having things blooming all the time through the growing season, different flower colors.

But then you want to start to evaluate your garden or place you're stewarding for the different flower shapes. So those simple flower forms, like the black-eyed Susan that are flat and almost dish-like. They have very shallow florets and easy to access nectaries. So they are going to serve both the extremely tiny bees that have very short tongues.

all the way up to your big bumblebees with long tongues. But then when we have more complex flowers, such as the penstemon you just mentioned, Bobby, then there are typically more resources. available because fewer bees can access when the flower becomes more complex in shape. And then the extremely complex flowers that require manipulation by a bee such as prying them open. Think of squirrel corn or Dutchman's breeches, right? That's a pretty...

complex flower that requires a bumblebee to pry open those petals. And then that bumblebee also has a tongue long enough to reach the nectar, which is way up in the top or spurs of that flower. So you're providing resources across a spectrum for a variety of bees when you have different flower shapes as well as flower colors. Yeah, I have some gentian in my garden.

And it's very cool to see the bumblebees trying to get in there. Yep. And that's, you know, there's that cost-benefit analysis, right? if they're expending all that energy to try and pry open your gentian flower and get inside, the reward hopefully will be higher because fewer bees are able to actually do that. Well, we have a good friend of the wild story. Her name is Shima Kuntas. She knew that we were going to be talking to you today.

Yesterday, she found a two spotted bumblebee in the middle of the ground. It wasn't dead, but it wasn't moving. Is it too early for them to be out? And what should people do if they... see a bumblebee on the ground not moving yeah if they find a overwintering queen um it's best just to leave them where they found them if you disturb them such as they were underneath heavy layers of plant debris, then put that plant debris back over them.

They are using different phenological cues, day length, in some cases, soil temperature. become somewhat active, but they're going to go back into their hibernation or diapause until they're ready to come out when things are starting to bloom. So it's best not to disturb them or relocate them. Just try to put them back in the conditions that you found them.

and heather your research on pollinators is extensive i mean i bought pollinators of native plants because i actually wanted to learn more about butterflies and then i noticed there's moths and flies and beetles and all sorts of insects that you cover in that book. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of these specialists, these interesting insects, other than what we expect to be pollinators and how they help form a diverse, sustainable ecosystem?

Sure. I could talk for hours, I guess, on that question. But to be brief, The Pollinators was my first book. And the intent was really just to provide a... overview of the amazing insect diversity that one could find in a home garden, right, by planting some native plants. I really wasn't going to focus on that many different insect groups.

But in working in my own native plant garden and native landscapes, the reason I included some of those really interesting other insects is because I started to see regular patterns year after year where this particular wasp, whether it be a great black wasp, which is a common garden visitor.

it would consistently be going to certain native plants. And I thought if I don't highlight those interactions, and show people that many of these insects, like bees, can be fairly plant-specific in their preferences for which flowers they visit. then I think I felt like it was going to be a missed opportunity. So the beetles and the moths and the butterflies and the wasps, they do get called pollinators. But I think it's important for people listening to understand that

they're not very effective pollinators in a lot of cases, right? They're not purposely moving pollen around from flower to flower. But they have, in some cases, other reasons for going to flowers. They're interested in consuming either the pollen and nectar, but many are predatory or parasitic. So they're utilizing the flower buffet in a sense to find their prey that they want to parasitize or take back to their nest to feed their own offspring.

And you're also known for your photography. Your books are fascinating. Your photography is amazing to look at. We heard you spent years trying to capture some of the images that appear in your book. Patience like that requires a special skill because you have to find the insect and you have to find the insect on the right plant and the right flower. Can you talk to us a little bit about the photography process when you're putting one of your books together?

took three to four years to write and in large part because of the time that I needed to do the photography and it really was being in the right place at the right time so for highlighting a specific native plant in the book. I would have to find populations of that plant in different contexts and get there at the right time when that plant's blooming. in order to successfully document some of the interactions. And so that's why it takes so long to hold together all the photography for a book.

I've always had a really avid interest in photography since I think I was a young teenager. I worked in a dark room in high school. So photography has always been sort of a second love of mine. I actually almost went to... college to do a four-year degree in photography and then diverted into natural resources. So I feel fortunate that I can still

use that sort of hobby that I really love as part of my work now. The challenge with photographing really tiny flying and moving insects is that it does take a lot of... time and skill set and anticipation and experience of many hours of observation to really know where to be. to know where the bee may be coming to you versus trying to find, you know, chase it off and unsuccessfully. not being able to get a photo of it. So. I just encourage people to keep practicing.

And with cell phones, I think, The world is endless for the type of photography that people can do now. Most people are carrying around a pretty sophisticated computer in their pocket that actually takes pretty good photos. Heather, I have to talk about climate change a little bit because everybody is, I think, that has a passion for wildlife and pollinators and insects of all types. I saw a...

Picture the other day of how the jet stream used to just pretty much hover straight around the top third of North America. And, you know, it didn't change a whole lot. And now it's wobbling. down to Florida and the Gulf and back all the way up to the Arctic and wobbling. How is... climate change as a whole affecting the life cycles of the pollinators, the bees, the wasps, etc.

that you study? Yeah, that's a really hard question to answer because so much is unknown. And I don't, you know, I don't do research on that. But from my own sort of monitoring of different populations, I would say that it's. particularly hard on some of the species that come out really early in the spring. So we have a cellophane bee here where I live, and it's also in New Jersey. One of the first solitary bees to emerge in spring.

And it has ways and adaptations to withstand periods of time of inclement weather, given that it's emerging in March and early April, depending on where you live. And even periods of snowfall, which force those bees to hang out in their nests. The challenge is for the solitary bees, they don't have food stores that they have in their nest to weather these long periods of inclement weather.

So when we have crazy warmups or fast warmups, I don't know if both of you recall the spring of 2012, for example, we had an extremely fast warmup in March and then a very... And I'm sure that many of these pollinating insects almost, you could say, were coming out too early and then caught in that the plants weren't catching up to provide.

adequate amount of resources during that, just like you talked about, that oscillating sort of pattern of temperatures. As I mentioned, bumblebees are able to sort of go back into diapause if they come out too early, if they can find a viable site to do so. But some research is showing that bumblebees aren't adapting. So the populations aren't necessarily moving northward as the climate warms. There's concern for those that are in more alpine or high altitude environments that

They're also sort of staying put at that same latitude rather than moving up to higher latitudes where it's cooler. And so you can think of those scenarios where the plant... aren't catching up to the weather conditions, right, and to the other phenological cues that these bees may be using.

Heather, what do you say to people who are afraid of bees and wasps, afraid of being stung? Well, I think most people should know that The vast majority of bees, other than a handful of social bees, including honeybees, have no interest whatsoever in stinging people. Stinging as a defense mechanism is typically by a social insect, whether it's a social wasp or a social bee.

And the venom is being reserved for nest defense. And that's the same for wasps as well. So the reason I wrote a book on flower-associated wasps was really... to showcase to people that there's this amazing diversity of different wasp species that are nesting in gardens, nesting in landscapes, hunting prey, pollinating flowers. And they don't pose any risk to people. They wouldn't sting you. So for the wasps, it's actually less than 2% of the nest-building wasps that are social.

So 98% of wasps out there in your garden and landscape. They have a sting or stinger, but they are not going to defend their nest or actively want to sting people. So I try and parse it out for people like that. The second thing is... At the flower buffet or in the flower garden, while these insects are visiting flowers, They have no interest whatsoever in stinging people, right? It's only if a social nest is disturbed by something.

then they will defend it. So it's more than safe to have flower gardens and flowers that attract bees and even wasps along walkways and so on. because the likelihood of somebody getting stung is very, very low. I think that's important to know. I've had people say, oh, I don't want to plant because I'm afraid of being stung. Thanks for taking that question. Well, it's been lovely to have you with us on this episode of The Wild Story.

We're so excited to have this class with you coming up in April. Heather, thank you so much for being with us. Is there anything coming up that you would like to promote or talk about? Well, my new project, which may not be 100% applicable to folks in New Jersey, I'm working on a State Bee website. So this will be a free... online resource profiling all the genera and families and many species of bees that occur here where I live in Minnesota.

But there's plenty of overlap in the information for the Midwest and Eastern U.S. So... That is a nonprofit endeavor that will probably go online sometime in May or early June. So stay tuned. Well, thank you so much. And Bobby, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much. Kim and I are so excited to speak with our next guest. Paula Wyman has a new book, Bad Naturalist, One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop. which came out this winter from Timber Press.

Blending memoir, natural history, and conservation science, the book chronicles her attempts to restore a retired farmland mountaintop to its natural habitat. Her first book, the linked short story collection, You May See a Stranger, won praise from The New Yorker and a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

Paula's work has appeared in countless journals, including McSweeney's Quarterly, The Rumpus, Plowshares, and The Washington Post, and has been featured on NPR. Welcome to the wild story, Paula. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. We are very happy to have you here today Paula and we've got a lot to talk about. So we're going to just get started. You fulfilled your dream of buying a plot of land in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The restoration process has not been smooth.

Did you know what you were getting into when you purchased 200 acres of farmland? No, not at all. Not really. No, it was four years ago. And at the time, we had been looking for, my husband and I had been looking for many years, really, for... a place to move out to the country, initially part-time, and then later we planned for it to be full-time. We were looking for a small farmhouse with a small field, a small farm field of some kind or a small wooded area.

something outdoorsy and wild where I could plant a vegetable garden and my husband could, you know, commune with nature. And Maybe I could have a few sheep. And it was more in recent years that I... had been thinking when we started looking again in earnest about six years ago, I had been reading all about the importance of native plants and bringing native plants back to your yard.

Doug Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope and the Homegrown National Park. I had been reading, I had just finished reading Isabella Tree's book Wilding about her project. bringing, you know, allowing her 3000 plus acre farm to go back to nature. And so I had this idea in mind about, you know, wild places and native plants. And I had a long history of interest in ecology and nature and so on, coming at it from an interest in insects and wildlife rather than a focus on plants.

So when we came to this place, I was thinking about planting maybe an acre of native meadow to help the local pollinators and birds. really my understanding of it didn't go much further than that, just that I thought of it from a wildlife and ecology perspective. I'm going to plant wherever we end up, I'm going to plant this. And so I never anticipated anything of this scale. Yeah. So, and even that's what we were, we've been sort of marveling at the scale of the project. So even with.

the reading you'd been doing, the research, the knowledge that you came in with, it must have been daunting. Can you tell us a little bit about how you even approached removing invasive species and restoring the land to it? natural state and it was it was daunting because when i started out i mean just despite the fact that i decided to jump into this

project with both feet and headfirst and all of that, all of those cliches, I guess. I didn't, like I said, I really didn't know much about plants. And I was a terrible gardener. I really had no history of talent with gardening or interest. Again, it was more from an ecology standpoint. So the first thing I needed to do... was figure out what was already happening here, what was already growing here.

And the other thing I needed to do was figure out what other people were doing with similar projects. So I did two things. I started contacting experts. Fortunately, There is a wealth of nonprofit and government, you know, who are willing to come out and talk to me. and walk on the mountain with me, walk through the meadow and teach me things. I basically got a crash course in plant ecology and forestry and, you know.

ground nesting birds and so many, you know, grasslands, so many things that I learned from all of these experts who were so generous with their time and advice. And the other thing that I did, there is a group in the county, this is Rappahannock County, Virginia, and there's a very active conservation group here. that was holding walks every month on different people's farms.

where the farm manager or the farmer would talk about what they were doing with regenerative agriculture, what they were doing in their struggle with invasive plants, what they were doing to bring back native plants. So I took pages and pages and pages of notes. I asked.

incessant questions people thought started thinking i was a journalist and that i was secretly going to write an article and really i didn't have that in mind at all i just really i that's how i get i sort of I choose a topic that I get really preoccupied with and I have to know everything I can about it.

And I don't like, I sort of grab on it and don't let go. And I ask an annoying number of questions. So that is what happened to me with the mountaintop. I wanted to know everything I could about it. a division called Virginia Working Landscapes. They're interested in doing research on species that are in decline in this region. They start by surveying plants and birds and various species. They're specifically interested in private lands.

because private lands are such a large percentage of the landscape. And a lot of people didn't realize that, and I didn't realize it, because we think about our national parks and state and local parks. which are obviously so important as like doing the job of preserving nature. It turns out that

something like 85% of grasslands and more than 50% of forests in this country are privately owned. It just brings me back to thinking about the title of your book, The Bad Naturalist, because Though you discuss many of your misadventures and the things that you learned along the way by...

learning what not to do right i i we just kim and i were chatting before we spoke with you and we're thinking we don't think you're a bad naturalist we think that your approach of researching doing the work trying it and learning as you go feels like that's That's a really good, solid process. How did you come up with this title? Well, anyway, thank you. Well, first of all, my publisher came up with that title. Funny thing is that I originally had a title that sort of was about the land.

my working title all along was something pointed at the land. And I was sort of joking that I wanted to take the me out of memoir because I was kind of uncomfortable. It's like, who wants to know about me? Nobody wants to know about me. And then they made this title that like totally pointed at me. I was like, oh, okay, I guess it's about me now. I think it actually does fit in a...

in a couple of important ways. And one is that, like I said, when I started out, I did not know anything about plants. And even what I thought I knew was really just scratching the surface. And I learned so much from, you know, from people at these various organizations. And the other thing is that as I went along through this process, I learned important things about conservation.

at least when it comes to ecological restoration that I didn't know. And one of those important things was that everything was a trade-off. So I was always trying to decide between helping something when it would harm something else and or when it could harm something else. And that made me feel bad. And I didn't, you know, I wanted the perfect solution. that wouldn't hurt anything.

And I wanted somebody to come in and say, okay, first you do that, then you do that, and then you do that, and then you're done. And there's no such thing. It doesn't exist, does it? No, it doesn't. I had to take in all of this advice. coming from these various different experts in different fields who had different maybe slightly different advice based on their goals. And then I had to figure out what my priorities were and how, you know, I wanted to go about trying to direct things here.

And so much of it was going to be trial and error, the more I saw that. And that's what made me feel like a bad naturalist. And also I did make some big mistakes, or at least I did things that I felt like. made things worse. I think we want to know more about the methods, some of the methods that you did use to control the growth of the ecologically harmful plants.

And then learn about the native species that started to populate the meadow. Well, so one of the things that came out of the Virginia Working Landscape Survey was I got an initial sort of baseline list of here are the most dominant. plants in the meadow. Here are the bird species we're hearing. So the most dominant native plants I had were yellow crownbeard, milkweed, and dogbane, I think was the third one.

So those are plants that can make it up through all these layers of thatch because this used to be a cattle pasture for decades. And before that, it was an orchard for over a hundred years. There was all of this buildup of fescues and hay grasses, orchard grass, a lot of non-native plants in addition to the native plants and the invasives. And the only native plants that could really do well here were the ones that could fight.

those dense grasses and bramble and stuff like that and and work their way through and so there was a very good reason why those plants were dominant so my goal was to try and make what may be the more sensitive or delicate native plants would come up when I eat.

cleared things out. So one of my dilemmas was how to clear things out because I was also told that because this is a highly erodible slow you know steep hilly area that seeding was not going to be a good idea in most of the most of the landscape here there are a few level areas but Not nothing, nothing really significant. So fortunately in Virginia, we have a lot of native plants in the seed bank.

and you know despite the years of plowing and so on when you clear a space some native plants will usually grow, at least in this area, but you're also going to get those invasive plants. So I had to decide, but there wasn't really anything magical about the choices that I had. You know, it was mowing or bush hogging or forestry mulching. There was burning. There was spot spraying with pesticides. There was broadcast spraying with pesticides, whole field.

And then there was hand pulling. And that was really, those were my choices. Those are my options. What I decided to do where was about what plants am I dealing with in this spot? What do I think could happen here? You know, so for instance, if I wanted to burn a field, I had to look at it first and make sure that there was a good concentration of native plants there already and not

a concentration of certain invasive plants that are actually helped by fire. You know, the native plants here are fire adapted. They evolved in the presence of fire. They will be encouraged by fire and that's wonderful. But I also have spotted knapweed. I also have autumn olive and both of those plants like fire. When I decided to burn a field, I had to sort of

you know, change the boundary of it to skirt the thicket of autumn olives that was on the other side of it. And I had to deal with those a different way. So it was very dependent on, you know, and I think those autumn olives I decided to treat directly with. I didn't do any broadcast spraying. because I just wasn't comfortable with it. I don't like using all those chemicals. So I limit the use of chemicals to directly treating invasive trees like tree of heaven, autumn olive.

polonia and to spot spraying, you know, plants like Japanese honeysuckle and mile a minute vine. I wanted to ask you kind of to follow up on what you were just saying before about handling the non-native species, the invasives. There's also the question of the wildlife.

the creatures that live on your land and could you tell us a little bit about some of the wildlife that does live there and and how you've been cohabitating with it how you've been um handling how the actions that you take with restoration impact the wildlife. Sure. Well, one of the things that I learned early on was You don't ever do one thing to the whole meadow. If the meadow itself is 75 to 80 acres and the rest of the land is forested slope.

So I would never say bush hog all 80 acres because then, um, Because first of all, normally that happens in the winter. And then you've sort of destroyed the winter habitat for the insects that... are in the leaf litter, that are in the hollow stems of the dormant plants. You know, the creatures that are overwintering don't have a place to go. Birds use the, you know, the winter.

uh detritus from those plants to you know make their nests and so on so you never want to do that to the whole place at once and uh, the standard advice was, you know, do it in thirds, you know, do a third. this year, the different third next year and so on. And we may have done a little more than that just because things were so out of hand. But for instance, I've started seeing a lot of woodcocks.

this year. And they like those sort of shrubby areas. So if we had eliminated all those shrubby areas, I don't think we'd have the woodcocks and we now have kestrel nest boxes courtesy of something called the grassland bird initiative which is studying grassland birds because they are in such severe decline and the kestrel the small raptor is one of those and um they're going to be watching our nest boxes to see if we get

You know, if we get any, anyone in residence this spring, which I hope, but I saw a kestrel a few weeks ago flying over. And last spring I saw one hunting over the meadow. And if everything was just overgrown, you know, they like. sort of short grass and tall grass, and we wouldn't be seeing that. So it's really important to have a mix of landscapes. There are some animals that will use, say, the forest for shelter and the meadow for food. So a term I heard a lot was the feathered edge.

So you know how in the suburbs, we all have like, if we have trees in our backyard, or if we have a little cluster of trees, it's like, it stops and then there's flat grass. And that, I learned, is the wrong way to do it. You want to have a gradual edge. so that there's a transitional space for wildlife who go from like short grass to tall grass to, you know, brush shrub land.

forest. And I think you can reproduce that if you have, you know, if you have some area in your backyard, you can do that same thing. And so that's something that I learned a lot of like. I think turtles like that. I mean, there, there are a lot of, a lot of. wildlife that needs that, you know, ground birds and birds that forage on the ground, but they, you know, they don't live on the ground or whatever. We also have some important oak trees, which From reading Doug Tallamy, I know the oak.

supports hundreds of pollinators and caterpillars and therefore supports lots of birds. We also have lots of black cherry trees, which I learned support over 400 species of caterpillar. It's because everything is kept in balance. No, the birds eat the caterpillars. The caterpillars then don't devour the tree, but enough of them make it. you know, to the butterfly or moth stage that then they go on to pollinate the tree and so on. So all of that balance and the interconnections.

That was some of the most fascinating stuff I learned about. The vole, for instance, which I talk about in my book. I know a lot of gardeners hate voles, and I know it can be a real problem when you have a garden. But when you have a meadow, the meadow vole is actually really important. Creature and we literally have thousands of voles here their tunnels are like these little humps, you know raised humps in the ground and They, they store acorns.

but then they forget where they put them, sort of like the Blue Jay, and that's how we get some oak regeneration. So I found out about the importance of all of these. species. Now we do have bears and bobcats and coyotes. and foxes and, you know, possum and raccoon and all that. We also have all that and we have thousands of deer, which is probably the biggest problem because none of those predators I just mentioned will.

hunt deer, really. I mean, the coyotes might take an occasional fawn, but they're not going to hunt adult deer. One of the first pieces of advice I got from both the foresters with the Department of Forestry and an independent certified forester who wrote a forest management plan for me both said, you need to control the deer.

because they're destroying the understory. They eat native plants, which is what they're supposed to do. But when there are too many of them, they eat all the native plants and then they clear out. the native understory. So then when you have stilt grass and garlic mustard, as we do here, that stuff makes its way into the forest and you end up with an understory that's all invasive.

The independent forester told me when, you know, he said the best thing you can do for the forest is to take care of the meadow. So that the invasives that are in the meadow don't make their way into openings in the forest. I wanted to pivot to ask you about more about yourself. You write about in your in Bad Naturals about. the fact that you have a gi disorder you have osteoporosis you're also afraid of height

You live on top. And what can you just talk to us a little bit about these physical limitations and how that is, you know, intersected with the work you're doing and how it limits you or. or how you work around it? Well, the food thing has been, I guess I've been dealing with that for about 18 years. So I'm kind of used to it. I always just carry some kind of snack that I can eat with me.

But it's very limiting in a lot of ways. The osteoporosis was probably a direct result of the food thing. I can't be sure, actually. I don't really know. I've broken things that... I mean, I fell and broke my kneecap a few years ago. on I hid it on concrete so maybe it would have broken anyway but it's like one of those things you know I was running and I tripped on the sidewalk it was So, you know, I do, I am conscious of not wanting to fall down, which probably...

you know, sort of goes hand in hand with my fear of heights, although that's something I had forever. And I started challenging myself, like, I guess when I was a young adult. to just find the tallest structure wherever I was and go up to the top and make myself look out. Bad Naturalist is your first nonfiction book. And it takes some emotionally unexpected turns.

that are beautifully expressed and heartfelt. Were you surprised with this book that your writing turned so often to the personal? Well, it was something that was hard for me at first because I was used to writing, at least in the long form, I was used to writing fiction. I'd written a lot of short nonfiction or short memoirish pieces.

And usually with humor. First of all, I had to get past the idea that like, would anybody even care about this? Would anybody even be interested in this? I'm not that interesting, you know. And so once I got past that, I just kind of did a lot of reflecting and thinking about things I remembered from my childhood and trying to sort of get back there and imagine.

myself back in those places and what I could remember, you know, the feelings of home, I guess I talk a lot about like what what home meant to me in different ways. And when I got into it, if I didn't think about anyone reading it, it was easier for me to write it. I just thought about like, okay, what am I trying to convey here? What am I trying to express?

And I just describe things. I tend to try not to describe feelings, but just describe like a scene that... that I remember, or a place I remember, a situation I remember, because I think describing feelings is always It's better to let the reader have their feelings, react. And you talk a lot about your relationship with your brother in this book. And I found that.

thank you thank you for telling us a little bit about that process of the writing itself paula one thing that kim and i were both really curious about how you manage to carve out time for writing while you were doing this actual work, right? These are two profoundly different activities. Writing is very reflective, it's sedentary. And the work you're doing on the mountain is very physical and all-encompassing. So how did you balance that?

yeah that's a great question one of the hard things about writing this book was that i was doing the work i was writing about while i was writing about it and i was always sort of um I would always sort of go back. I had these journals that I would carry around with me, and I would make lots of notes.

Sometimes I would write down conversations I just had or something I just saw. I would write down my observations in these journals and then I'd go back at the end of the day or whenever it was that I could stop and get back to my desk. And I would sort of type that up and flesh it out while it was still fresh in my mind. I did that quite frequently. And then there were times when I was waiting for things to happen. And of course, I had, you know, an outline.

which is something I never do for fiction. But I had a general idea of the framework of the book. So I knew, for instance, that I wanted to write about doing a prescribed burn. And I wasn't sure if it was going to happen. So at one point I... I said to my agent, what do I do if there's no burn? And I was trying to think, you know,

I could go to somebody else's farm and watch their burn. So at least I could describe it accurately and everything because I thought that was really important that, you know, for the reader to be able to see it. And she was like, well, if it doesn't happen, you write about the failure. I was like, oh, I can do that. It makes me wonder, at what point did you decide that you were going to write a book about this? Was that?

sort of from the get-go or no it wasn't i didn't think so yeah no i was writing something too i was writing a a novel actually while i was working on this but obviously i wasn't that attached to it because i can't remember what it was and and uh I was I get when I'm working on this project, I was Like I said, I sort of latch on to things and I have to know everything about them. And that's how I was with this mountain, you know, still am. I have to learn everything I can.

And it was the only thing I could focus on. I couldn't think about any other creative project. And when I'm writing a book or a story or something, I have to have that feeling about that creative work. I have to be totally focused on it and like obsessed with it. So it's going in my head all the time. And since the only thing I was thinking about, that's how I was, you know, with the mountain, it became clear that that's what I was going to write about.

So that's how, you know, I just, so it was a few months in when I realized that this, you know, this, was really the only thing I could write. Yes. Well, that makes perfect sense, right? That it took over your entire life and writing and work. Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting. Well, Paula, we have come to the end of our interview and we want to thank you so much for joining us. Our guest in this episode has been Paula Weinman.

the author of Bad Naturalist, And we want to let our listeners know that there is an event coming up on March 13th in Madison, New Jersey. with the Madison Environmental Commission and the Nature of Reading Bookshop at the Museum of Early Trades and Crafts. Paula will be there in person and Anne and I will be moderating a live conversation with her. So please come out for that. You can find more information and sign up for that event on npsnj.org. Paula, thank you so much for your time today.

Oh, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation. And I look forward to our in-person conversation as well. Oh, we do too. Thank you so much. We would like to thank today's guest, poet Theta Pavis, whose book The Red Strobe was published by Finishing Line Press in 2025. To order it or to learn about upcoming events, visit ThetaPavis.com. Conservationist and author Heather Holm. and writer Paula Wyman, author of The Bad Naturalist, recently released from Timber Press.

To subscribe to Paula's monthly newsletter, also called Bad Naturalists, visit PaulaWyman.com. The Wild Story, a podcast of poetry and plants, is produced by Jersey City Poet Laureate Emeritus Anne Wallace and Master Gardener Kim Carrero. It is an independent project of the Native Plant Society of New Jersey, a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to the appreciation, protection, and study of the native flora of New Jersey.

We would like to thank our team. Kazis Barnalis is President of NPSNJ. Dr. Randy Eckel is the NPSNJ native plant expert and entomologist. Our sound editor is Lynn Barry. Our theme music is composed and performed by Tara Sullivan. Our closing music is Life Can Be Sweet by Kate Jacobs. Our logo artwork is created by Vicki Katzman Illustration. Our graphic designer is Bobby Herbs. And web support is provided by Michael Jacob, Kazis Barnalis, and Bill Thorne.

Learn more about The Wild Story and about the NATO Plant Society of New Jersey at npsnj.org and follow The Wild Story on Instagram at thewildstory underscore podcast.