Field Notes - New Look at Beautiful Shores

Bees buzz between blossoms of wild bergamot and spikes of giant-hyssop. Butterflies flutter from black-eyed susans to blooms of rough blazing star. A tiny frog hops across a path.

"That’s been the treat of this whole project, the creatures it attracts," says Sharon Streetar of her lakeshore renovation. "Last year I came down here one day and counted 28 caterpillars that turned into monarch butterflies."

When they bought their Sugar Lake home south of Grand Rapids in 1988, Sharon and Bob Streetar were thrilled with its neat lawn that extended down to the shoreline. "We continued to mow and fertilize until we started to understand the whole scheme of things," says Sharon. "We weren’t out to destroy the environment. We just didn’t know any better."

Their educational process began when their lot was among 11 selected for a cost-sharing lakeshore restoration project in 2000. The couple had lost a fair amount of shoreline to erosion from ice push; and although they had their shoreline riprapped several years earlier, they were still losing ground. The idea of adding native vegetation to stabilize soil at the water’s edge appealed to them.

The Streetars used a hose to mark out the area they intended to plant. After they killed the grass with Roundup on the lawn and Rodeo close to the water, Bob spread 22 cubic yards of wood-chip mulch on the ground. They chose native plants from a list recommended by the DNR, and they secured a DNR permit to gather bulrush and giant bur-reed from their lake. Their restoration included three zones: aquatic, transitional, and upland. They enlisted the help of neighbors and friends, who spent three days planting plugs of wild onion, big bluestem, and other native plants.

The Streetars’ project is one of four featured in an interactive CD-ROM, Restore Your Shore, produced by the DNR last year. Since the 1980s Jack Mooty, now-retired DNR nongame wildlife specialist, had been seeing one reasonably pristine shoreline after another being developed in the Grand Rapids area. Undeveloped shoreline was becoming one of the most endangered ecosystems in the state. In 1992, Mooty and nongame wildlife supervisor Carrol Henderson began the DNR’s lakescaping initiative to counter the trend. Henderson also helped write the book Lakescaping for Wildlife and Water Quality.

"Our main objective in producing the CD-ROM was to bring the lakescaping book to life," says Jan Wolff, DNR coordinator of ecosystem education. "We put together a powerful, searchable database so you can sit down at your computer in the comfort of your own home and generate lists of native plants that are appropriate for your property.

"It’s almost like bringing the experts into your living room and having them walk you through the entire process," says Wolff.

"We have this aesthetic cultivated in us that we’re good neighbors if we have a manicured, clean green lawn all the way to the water’s edge. We’ve got to shift our thinking and look at things a bit more naturally."

To help in that aim, the Legislative Commission on Minnesota Resources funded 14 one-day lakescaping workshops for private shoreland owners and six lakescaping workshops for nursery and landscape professionals (see Designer Lakeshores, left).

In the course of their restoration, Sharon Streetar acquired new language and perspective. "I always referred to anything green that wasn’t grass as weeds," she says. "Now they’ve each taken on an identity of their own. My favorite vocabulary word I’ve picked up is snag–a dead tree that functions as habitat. I like to throw that into conversations whenever I can."

For more about the CD-ROM, visit Minnesota DNR: Restore Your Shore. To order, visit Minnesota's Bookstore or call 800-657-3757.

Margaret A. Haapojafree-lance writer