Cutline Christina in her garden with a native Nannyberry.
Christina Rennich is a native plant and garden consultant using her expertise to help build beautiful, sustain-able gardens that contribute to biodiversity in Cavan Monaghan. Her objective is to help transform gardens into diverse hotspots for nature with plantings that attract birds, butterflies, moths and native bees. She brings more than twenty years of gardening experience to her work, as well as education in Restoration Ecology and Environmental Management at Fleming College.
Like all gardeners, she uses her own garden for experiments to see how things actually grow. She and her husband moved to the area four years ago and she is gradually converting existing gardens on their property to create more environmentally friendly versions that rely on native plants. At times the results look a bit unruly, so she has strategically planted signs in her front beds to notify neighbours that her garden’s looks are intentional, not the result of neglect. With the strategic use of native plants, she is creating gardens to foster biodiversity, inviting birds, pollinators and beneficial insects with plants which are sometimes considered weeds. Plants such as milkweed and goldenrod are magnets for many small creatures that provide benefits that are clear to the trained eye. One of her objectives is to coax gardeners to look at their gardens differently; to change their garden aesthetics from one relying on bold, exotic hybrid bloomers to see the beauty in more random, natural spaces filled with creatures that serve our environment.
This is easier said than done. Like all keen gardeners, Christina is eager to get to work in early spring and struggles with the unkempt appearance of her gardens after a long winter. She defers garden clean-up chores as long as possible, ideally until the May long weekend. This delay allows the leaf and brush debris to protect a wide array of beneficial creatures that over-winter in those unsightly drifts, including native bees, moths and caterpillars. Even when she cleans up a garden bed, she rarely removes anything. Dead leaves enrich the soil and provide mulch. Chopped up stems left on the garden surface provide food and habitat for beneficial insects and pollinators. Some tiny creatures live inside plant stems, so removing them also means removing these helpful pollinators. Emerging insects often lay dormant longer than expected, avoiding low nighttime temperatures, so delaying clean up allows them time to mature.
As a Native Plant consultant and Garden Coach, Christina offers advice, plant sourcing and delivery and will devise garden plans that will attract beneficial insects and birds. She is launching a series of free relaxing garden walk workshops to share her knowledge about native plants and their contributions to the environment. Most of them take place in Millbrook and will take about an hour to complete.
The first one is scheduled for May 30th at 11 am, where visitors will learn how to maintain a native plant garden, starting with spring clean up. The second workshop scheduled for July 18th at 10 am will explain how to establish a “soft landing” understory under a tree or large shrub which can provide critical shelter and habitat to support local bird populations. The third workshop occurs on August 22nd at 11 am where visitors will visit Christina’s own garden to see a prairie pocket, a hummingbird garden, a “soft landing’ understory and a woodland garden. Visitors to the last workshop will head to the Hazel Bird Nature Reserve, which is 30 minutes from Millbrook, Where they will visit a Tall Grass Prairie and Oak Savanna.
For more information or to register for one or more of these free workshops, email christinarennich88@gmail.com to sign up or visit www.christinarennich.ca.