One Garden at a Time

Master naturalist and island native Derek Wade, explains how to care for your island gardens to benefit all living creatures.

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Derek Wade describes his flourishing garden on Sullivan’s Island’s Ion Avenue as “a work in progress,” but it’s much more than that. It’s part of an expansive vision to link renewed landscapes from across the country into a system of Homegrown National Parks. Together these small and large tracts will comprise an area larger than all our national parks combined. They will multiply the amount of protected land in the United States and address some of our most pressing ecological concerns.    

Sitting on the immense screen porch of the Wade family’s beach house today, it’s hard to picture what it looked like in 1963 when his parents, Harold and Jean, came from Brooklyn and bought it. (“For $8,000, including termites.”) The house had no heat nor air conditioning, sat on the ground, and had a barren yard. The ocean breeze blew through, unimpeded by neighboring houses. They named it “Jubalee” to commemorate Derek’s mom’s role in a performance by local theatre troupe The Footlight Players.

Throughout his childhood, the family spent many happy summers in this “sleepy little place” until Derek began his mechanical engineering career in other states. After Hurricane Hugo in 1989, the house was left ravaged, and the city needed revitalization. At about that same time, Derek became disenchanted with life in the corporate world, so he and his wife, Kathy, moved the family in with his parents, and he joined his father’s company, Carolina Landscape. 

During the ensuing years, the company designed and planted landscapes at many venues ━ including Grace Church downtown, Bishop Gadsden on James Island, and more than 80 properties in the I’On community in Mount Pleasant. Derek became a master naturalist through Clemson University and followed the evolving science of regenerative gardening with increasing interest. By the time the company was sold in 2018, he was passionate about the need to “stop fighting nature and start using nature.”

Derek Wade's parents bought his family home on Ion Avenue in 1963 'For $8,000, including termites."

The Insect Apocalypse

Doug Tallamy, an entomologist and ecologist who is one of Derek’s greatest influences, points out that North America has lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years. He is alarmed by what he calls ‘the insect apocalypse.” But his idea for Homegrown National Parks has ways that any one of us can affect positive change through renewed landscapes. It’s fundamentally about supporting food webs: the symbiotic connection between trees, insects, birds, seeds, and water that have evolved over thousands of years.

For example, Tallamy and his graduate students have shown that each oak tree that grows along the East Coast can support 400 different species of insects. Since 7,500 caterpillars are needed to feed just one clutch of chickadees, oak trees are essential to sustaining the environment, a “keystone species.” Derek’s well-mulched beds are full of fallen leaves and ground-covering plants that provide breeding grounds for the insects that feed the birds that scatter the seeds that grow the plants that clean the air and perpetuate the cycle. He ignores dandelions and other “weeds” so they can anchor the topsoil that is being lost at an alarming rate. As root systems grow, plants capture carbon from the air, which addresses climate change. “Sequestering carbon in the ground is the most promising idea I’ve heard,” Derek says. Since grass anchors the soil, he includes some but advocates shrinking lawns to a smaller portion of a larger garden plan. He eschews the use of insecticides and enriches every hole with compost as he plants. Insects and worms are actually “the little things that run the world,” Tallamy says. So we must “suppress the wish to squish and stop the rush to crush.”

An essential part of regenerative gardening is the use of native plants and the elimination of invasive species. “Ninety percent of insects that support food webs can only develop on plants with which they share evolutionary history,” says Derek. So although our culture values tidy yards with lawns big enough for huge displays of Halloween decorations, ecological functionality is what really should matter.

Insects and worms are the little things that run the world. We must suppress the wish to squish and stop the rush to crush."

Grace and Modesty

Communities of native plants, selected for the insects they attract, work together by enticing pollinators that are responsible for sustaining food crops and flowering plants. Invasive species have no natural predators, so they displace communities of native plants and the animals that depend on them as they destroy habitat. Large swaths of land with diminishing numbers of native plants have created food deserts for birds and insects. Even in Sullivan’s Island’s lush accreted land, invasive species present a problem by threatening to overtake native plants that support wildlife, especially migrating birds.

Today, Jubalee is beautifully renovated: raised a bit, equipped with heat and air conditioning, surrounded by lush gardens, tall trees, and a show-stopping angel’s trumpet tree. Derek calls himself “a budding naturalist,” but he’s really much more than that. As he enjoys his busy retirement tending his yard, designing a few landscape plans, and sharing his passion for regenerative gardening, he’s part of a powerful vision that re-imagines the way we live with nature. It’s a mighty quest that he handles with grace and modesty: “My job is to make the world more beautiful, one garden at a time.”

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Four Ways to Become a Regenerative Gardener 

  1. Quit spraying herbicides and insecticides 
  2. Don't use synthetic fertilizer; feed the ground, not the plants. 
  3. Cover bare dirt with mulch or ground cover. 
  4. Get rid of invasive species. Some of the most threatening invasives in South Carolina include the Bradford pear/callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), tree-of-heaven (ailanthus altissima), Chinese wisteria (wisteria sinensis), privet (ligustrum spp.), kudzu (puueria lobata), Japanese honeysuckle (Ionicera japonica) and English ivy (Hedera helix).