Taking on an environmental stewardship project as a hobbyist is a rewarding task but it can also feel like learning how to swim by being kicked off the dock. My guest this week, author Paula Whyman, made a splash and went on to write about it in her recently released book “Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop.”
Paula was awarded an MSAC Creativity Grant and 2023 and 2024 Oak Spring Garden Foundation residencies and grants to support her work on “Bad Naturalist,” a blend of memoir, natural history, and conservation science. In it, Paula chronicles her attempts to restore retired farmland to natural habitat and what she discovered along the way.
Paula Whyman is the author of “Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop.” Here she is on her mountaintop.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
Paula had a different working title before her publisher chose “Bad Naturalist.” Paula says the title is great though it puts the focus on “the person before the land.” She was uncomfortable writing about herself, and often says she is “taking the ‘me’ out of ‘memoir.’”
“But at the same time, ‘Bad Naturalist’ is so apt because when I started out, I really knew very little,” she says. “I had done a lot of reading in ecology and conservation. I had worked in various volunteer aspects all my life, but I didn’t know anything about plants really. And for that reason, and also because of what I learned as I went along about conservation, about this process of encouraging native meadows, that everything is a trade off. And that wasn’t something that I knew before.”
That made her feel like a bad naturalist because as she was doing something good, at the same time she may have been doing something bad. “I have to choose which thing to favor,” she says.
My take is that Paula is a good naturalist because before she acted on anything, she did a deep dive. She learned as much as she could and weighed the potential consequences before making any decisions.
Mowed paths through Paula’s meadow.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
Seeking an Idyllic Lifestyle
Paula had been working on a novel while she was also preoccupied with her mountaintop meadow restoration project. It dawned on her that she should set aside the novel and write a memoir on her experience. She says she has to be completely obsessed with whatever it is she is writing, and when she was a few months into her work on the mountaintop, she was obsessed with the project rather than her novel.
“My husband and I had been searching for a place in the country — the proverbial ‘place in the country’ — for many years,” Paula says. “It was a plan and a fantasy at the same time.”
As they were raising their kids, it never felt like the right time. But around 2018-2019, they started looking in earnest in Virginia near the Northern Blue Ridge for their country place. It would be a change of pace and lifestyle after living in the suburbs for many years, and living in the city for many years before that.
“We were looking for a small farmhouse,” Paula says. “My husband is an Eagle Scout. He loves hiking and fishing and all of that, and he wanted a place where he could do that. And he also loves gardening, so he was very interested in doing that wherever we ended up.”
She wanted to have a small field to raise sheep in, and she wanted to plant a raised bed vegetable garden.
“At the same time, I had started reading about the importance of native plants and especially for pollinators for bees and birds and butterflies in general for wildlife,” she recalls.
Paula had also read around that time the book “Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm” by Isabella Tree, about how Isabella allowed her 3,000-plus-acre farm in England to go back to nature,” and “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard” by Doug Tallamy.
She decided that wherever they bought a place, she would plant a small native meadow. “And I’ll put my little writing shed in the middle of this meadow, and I’ll watch the flowers shifting in the breeze and the birds flying, singing around me, and it’ll just be very, like, ridiculously delusional, romantic.”
The luna moth is a giant silk moth that is native to North America.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
Finding the Perfect ‘Country Home’
In the middle of August, they went to see a recommended property that was up a steep unmaintained trail for a mile.
They walked up to an open area with a narrow mowed path that wound its way amid 6-foot-tall yellow flowers and dense growth.
“We got up to this high point and looked out, and there was rolling hills, steep slopes, open meadow as far as I could see, with all of these 6-foot-tall yellow flowers and so much else, and the bees are buzzing by, hitting me in the head, just ignoring me,” she recalls.
After having had a tiny meadow in mind, now she looked upon 75 or 80 acres of open meadow on top of a mountain. The whole property is 200 acres, with about 130 acres of forested slopes.
She admits that though she always loved nature, she didn’t really know much about plants. In fact, she had bad experiences gardening. “But meanwhile in the moment I thought, ‘I’m just gonna do this. I’m gonna do this.’” she says. And her husband was on the same page.
There was no house, no power and no water, so their work was cut out for them.
One of Paula’s first challenges was to figure out what those tall yellow flowers she had seen were. She was told they were “stick-weed.”
Curious why the yellow flower thrived there on the mountain, she questioned whether it was accurate or fair to call it a weed. Rather than continuing to research weeds, she looked up native plants and learned it is a native wildflower, Verbesina helianthoides, known as yellow crownbeard.
“Yes, if you have cattle, you don’t want it in the middle of your pasture because they can’t eat it,” Paula says. “But if you have a meadow that you want to make into a native meadow and you want to encourage native plants — it’s good for native bees, it’s good for birds, it’s good for all kinds of pollinators and all kinds of wildlife. So it’s not a bad thing to have. You might not want it in a small garden because it’s an aggressive plant, but in a place like this, it’s great.”
Crown beard is great for pollinators like native bees but can be a bit aggressive for a small garden.
Photo credit: Amy Prentice
Virginia Working Landscapes
As her deepdive into native plants and her mountain continued, she leaned on the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and its state organization Virginia Working Landscapes.
Virginia Working Landscapes wants to learn which plant and bird species are living in the area to base their research around the population numbers and figure out why various species are in decline.
“I contacted them to see if they would want to do a study on the mountain, and sure enough, they came out that first spring,” she says.
The group did a plant survey and a bird survey that let Paula know what the dominant native plants are, what the non-native plants are and what bird species are present.
She soon found a web of organizations that were all happy to help her walk her property and learn about it and the wildlife there: “I had conservation biologists, ornithologists, foresters, farmers, arborists — every expert you can think of — botanists, horticulturists — coming out and walking on the land with me.”
Wild bergamot, or Monarda fistulosa, is a native beebalm that is a favorite of pollinators.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
Tackling Invasives
Mile-a-minute, tree of heaven, autumn olive, spotted knapweed, stilt grass, garlic mustard and multiflora rose are among the invasive species on Paula’s mountaintop.
The autumn olive, now considered an invasive shrub, was planted intentionally as a windbreak and for erosion control. The fruit is sweet, so birds eat it and spread the seeds — though Paula says it is like a Twinkie. It doesn’t have the nutritive value of native plant seeds.
Paula points out that when invasive plants proliferate because their predators are not present in the environments they have invaded, they push out the native plants that the creatures that live here need.
“Invasive plants have all those ways of reproducing without any predators. So they have a real advantage over native plants. They often don’t care what kind of soil they’re in. A lot of them are allelopathic: They release toxins into the soil that prevent other plants from going around them, and that helps them create a monoculture of just that kind of plant.”
Invasive species play a key role in 60% of global plant and animal extinction, according to Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, an international body that studies ecosystems.
“In this country alone, invasive plants contribute to the decline of 42% of endangered and threatened species and are directly the main cause of 18% of extinctions,” Paula says. “And they cost the U.S. about $34 billion a year.”
Non-native plants have it easy because their predators are not present. The insects that would normally keep them from spreading out of control are back wherever the invasive plant originated from. Meanwhile, the native plants that co-evolved with native insects get crowded out, and the native insects lose their food source and decline in population. Those insects are the food that birds feed their young, so fewer insects means fewer birds.
Insect decline, such as monarch butterfly decline, is something you probably won’t notice from one year to the next. But over the course of my lifetime, I have realized how rarely I now see a monarch compared to my childhood, when they were a common sight.
The other side of the coin is that we may not notice how our conservation efforts are paying off because the change can be gradual. But Paula remembers a bird specialist who came back to visit after being at her mountaintop a couple of years prior was wowed by the progress. Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to recognize what we’ve accomplished.
Large milkweed bugs on a milkweed seedpod.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
Habitat for Birds and Mammals
The Smithsonian team put nest boxes up on her property and asked her to look out for kestrels hunting for nesting grounds around this time — and sure enough, just last week she saw one fly past her office window. She also has bluebirds and tree swallows nesting in bluebird nest boxes.
Her property also has its share of voles, which she learned play a role in white oak regeneration. Their tunnels interfere with the mycorrhizal networks that help trees grow. More directly impacting oak trees, voles collect white oak acorns, and they prefer acorns with an acorn weevil larva inside. They save those infested acorns for winter, bringing the acorns away from the trees, which mitigates the pressure acorn weevils put on the trees. Voles also hoard healthy acorns, which they may forget about, and those acorns may grow into trees.
“One of the most fun things and the most engaging things for me here is just constantly discovering the interconnections among the plants and the creatures that live here,” she says.
Another beautiful view from Paula’s meadow.
Photo Courtesy of Paula Whyman
I hope you enjoyed my conversations with Paula Whyman on”Bad Naturalist.” If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
What ecological restoration projects have you undertaken? What did you learn? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 103: How to Create a Backyard Meadow: Simple Steps for Success No Matter the Space
Episode 142: Why Our Plant Choices Matter: Nature’s Best Hope, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 147: Monarchs and Milkweed: A Precarious Struggle Between Life and Death
Episode 365: Tiny and Wild: What To Know To Build a Small-Scale Meadow Anywhere
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Paula Whyman on Instagram | @paulawhymanauthor
Paula Whyman on Bluesky | @paulawhyman.bsky.social
“Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop” by Paula Whyman
“Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm” by Isabella Tree
“Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard” by Doug Tallamy.
Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Proven Winners ColorChoice – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
