On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA October-November 2016 | Page 18

MEMBER PROFILE

A N N E M A R I E VA N N E S T

Lois de Vries: Changing the
Way People Garden
With determination
and unwavering
vision, Lois de Vries is
on a mission to help
us all garden in a more
sustainable way.
She believes this is
necessary for our
survival: We need a
healthy planet to be
healthy ourselves,
so we must examine the long-term effects of
everything we do.
Lois wasn’t always interested in sustainability
and plants. She started in astronomy, working
in a planetarium for 10 years. Although she
eventually realized that her dream of running
a planetarium was unlikely to happen, the
experience would shape her life. “After looking
at the enormity of the universe, you can’t look
at the cosmos and then see things on Earth
the same way you always have. You have to
see the earth as a large, complex system. You
can’t mess with one part and not pay the
price later,” she said.
After changing careers, Lois developed a
varied set of skills and experiences that now
help her with her mission. She has served on
a local environmental commission, planning
board and open space committee. Lois is a
freelance writer and speaker, and was a field
editor and location scout for Better Homes and
Gardens and Country Gardens magazines. Since
joining GWA in 2004, Lois has been blogging
on Lois de Vries’ Garden Views and has launched
four websites: Sustainable Gardening Institute,
Sustainable Gardening Library, Lois J. de Vries,
and Cultivating the Inner Gardener.
HURRICANE SANDY AND FALLEN TREES
Lois and her husband Dan Freed live on a
rocky wooded property in Lafayette, New Jersey,
where they raise puppies for to be guide dogs
for The Seeing Eye. As a new gardener, Lois
thought she was a failure when her plants died,
but as her knowledge grew, she came to realize
that the site was the issue. From that point on,
her shady woodland garden, full of GWA trade
18

THE GWA SUSTAINABILITY
COMMITTEE
At the helm of the Sustainability Committee since 2011,
Lois initially wanted to connect
with others who felt a responsibility to the environment. The
committee grew over the years
and now includes a Permaculture Subcommittee.
Lois believes, “Gardens have a
big part to play in sustainability,
and garden communicators can
do a lot to educate people. One
garden is a piece in the whole
system. The more you make
your garden like it was before
humans developed the land,
the more likely you are to draw
in other natives of the natural
world.”
show offerings, would flourish—until Hurricane
Sandy arrived. The storm took down 45 trees—
a huge emotional blow. The most heartbreaking
loss was an 80-foot-tall ash tree that was the
centerpiece of the ornamental garden. When
uprooted, this tree took out 12 other trees,
including 30-year-old rhododendrons, and left a
sun-drenched, 30-foot diameter opening in the
canopy.
After 30 years of gardening in the shade, Lois
had sun. A friend predicted that the opening
would close in 10 years and suggested not
adding sun-loving plants. Sure enough, one year
later, the tree and shrub branches had already
grown 18 inches, and were starting to fill in the
opening.
Four years after Hurricane Sandy, Lois and Dan
are still cleaning up. In tandem with the cleanup,
Lois did a tree inventory and found more ash
trees than she thought she had—a risk because
the emerald ash borer is now encroaching on
New Jersey. Lois is looking forward to restoring
her forest using Land for Life: A Handbook on
Caring for Natural Lands from the Natural Lands
Trust.

THE SUSTAINABLE GARDENING LIBRARY
With growing frustration from sifting through
the information on sustainable gardening
scattered across the web, Lois took on the
challenge of starting an online resource. She
found that some of the online information was
based on science, some was hearsay and some
was just hype. She was wasting precious time
looking for elusive nuggets of scientific facts
for her own articles, and she knew others felt
the same way.
Lois envisioned a central repository of
accurate information vetted by respected
organizations, which writers, researchers, and
the public could access—giving them reliable
information that could be verified. So, she
launched the Sustainable Gardening Library—
a one-stop resource for reliable information
on sustainable gardening and farming.

Anne Marie Van Nest, a past president of GWA, is a
freelance writer and a greenhouse grower for Niagara
Parks in beautiful Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
She also teaches classes on tropical plants.