Going Native with Bill Shanabruch

by Charles McGuigan 03.2022

We bought the house in Bellevue for a song, pretty much all we could afford. It was a mess, it was a nightmare; but it was ours, and we were determined to make it into a home. Here was the problem though: for over seventy years, previous owners had added things that subtracted from the understated grace of a classic arts and crafts bungalow. It seemed an invasive act like someone painting over a Matisse to bring it up to date. Pink plastic tiles covered the walls in the bathroom, and the same kind of plastic tiles, in a mint green, adorned the kitchen walls. All brass hardware on doors and windows were choked with ancient paint. Even the mantelpiece, which turned out to be mahogany, was coated with seven layers of old paint.  And this: hideous linoleum secured by an asbestos-bearing mastic compound hid the quarter-sawn heart pine floors in the kitchen.

The project was overwhelming. We had no idea where to start, so Joany and I might chisel away at tiles for a couple of hours, then move to the dining room and scrape paint off the mantelpiece, sand a small portion of the bedroom floor, scrub the bathtub with a lethal solution that required gloves, goggles and a respirator to apply. And then Joany came up with this genius idea. “Let’s attack one wall,” she said. “Just one wall.” Which is exactly what we did the next morning. Armed with two five-gallon buckets of soapy water and a pair of sponges the size of footballs we tackled one wall in the living room. We would apply as much water as possible, wait for fifteen minutes or so and then begin peeling away the wallpaper with the flexible blade of a six-inch spackling knife. Sometimes it came off in satisfying sheets that went clear up to the ceiling.

Other times certain sections were more stubborn and required additional attention. We removed five layers of wallpaper and then sponged away the residual glue which was the color and consistency of honey. It took all day, but by nine that night, the wall was ready, and we could move to another wall the following morning. We had learned that though an entire project can seem overwhelming, you can focus on one part of it and see results.

Which brings me to Bill Shanabruch, who owns Reedy Creek Environmental. When I ask about his business, he smiles, and says, “Restoring watersheds—one plant at a time,” which happens to be the tagline of his company. 

As staggeringly complex as the environmental catastrophe is, by tackling one small space at a time, we might be able to bring back entire ecosystems, these intricate webs of life that are on the verge of collapse because of human intrusion and defilement. It can all start with that single small plot of land that surrounds your home. After scraping away the monocultures of turf grass, along with the invasive bushes, trees and plants, a homeowner can replace them all with truly native species, which, among other things, can help restore our streams and rivers—even the Chesapeake Bay. 

For most of his life, in one capacity or other, Bill has been immersed in the wonders of the natural world. After earning undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry from Notre Dame, Bill attended graduate school at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) where he studied life on its most fundamental level.

“I’m a molecular geneticist by training,” he says. “I just loved being able to understand how things work at a molecular level. It’s just amazing. My area was DNA repair in mutagenesis.“

After spending a few years in a lab at MIT doing post-doctoral work, he took a teaching position at Tufts. Four years later he went to work in the biology department at University of Richmond where he taught and conducted some research in molecular biology. 

When he left U of R, Bill took a position that would alter the course of his professional life. “I ended up working for about three years with a non-profit called Greater Richmond Area Health Education Center,” he tells. “This program was really ahead of its time in recognizing that the long-term way to deal with underserved areas was to actually improve STEM education. We focused on science education.”

The water quality course he taught put him in touch with volunteer water monitoring efforts and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). “So I ended up taking a part-time job with DEQ,” he says. When a full-time position as an environmental specialist opened up at the agency, Bill got the job. A couple years later be became regional biologist for the piedmont. 

“It was a great job to have,” Bill says. “The major task of the regional biologists was to assess water quality by collecting macro invertebrates—aquatic insects, mollusks and crayfish.” 

For the next thirteen years he would study the intricacies of water quality. He monitored the water of the Chickahominy and the pristine Dragon Run which downstream becomes the Piankatank River. He slogged through swamps and was mystified by the variety of flora and fauna. And then something that affected the stream running through his own backyard would end it all. 

“The polite way of saying it was I had a disagreement over what constitutes environmental quality,” says Bill. 

At that time the General Assembly created a grant called the storm water local assistance fund (SWLAF), which DEQ could distribute to local governments to address storm water issues. “It was a perfectly fine program,” says Bill. 

Over the next couple years, Richmond would become the recipient of a number of these grants. One of them was for Reedy Creek. 

“But instead of actually determining whether it was a good site to do a restoration, what the city did was they simply chose an area that the city owned so they would not have to get any easements or work with property owners,” says Bill.  

Well over half the area the city had targeted needed no restoration at all. “It was a really bad project,” Bill says.  “They would have devastated the lake downstream (in Forest Hill Park), and they were going to take down hundreds of mature trees. They were going to do so much damage in the process.”

Being a considered citizen who owned property along the creek, Bill voiced his opposition publicly. At community meetings he pointed out the problems with the proposed creek restoration. And then, just hours before he was to attend another public meeting, Bill was at his DEQ lab sorting insects when the deputy director entered the room. 

“He said something to this effect,” says Bill. “‘There were complaints about you to central office, and if it happens again, you can expect to hear from central office.’”

Bill was stunned, and for the next couple weeks he considered his options. Then one afternoon as he and his wife, Diane Pendleton, were heading down 64 to Williamsburg for an overnighter, he made his decision.  “I just felt like I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t do everything possible to stop the Reedy Creek project,” he tells me. “My interpretation of what happened in my lab with the deputy director was that they were trying to silence me.”

So Bill quit, but was now armed with volumes of knowledge he had acquired over the years working for the state agency, and understood the integral role native plant species play in the health of streams and rivers. 

“To improve water quality, you have to worry about what you’re doing on the land, and how to improve uptake of nutrients and increase infiltration of storm water,” Bill says. “To do that, you need native plants and trees.”

But not just any native plants. You need to use native plants that are adapted specifically to your region. As Bill considered what he might do after leaving DEQ back in 2015, he became increasingly intrigued with a company called Earth Sangha that operates in Northern Virginia. 

“They’ve been around for over twenty years now and my nursery is totally inspired by what they did,” says Bill. “Earth Sangha is a native plant nursery that only handles local ecotype plants. They collect the seeds locally and grow them out. Which is what we at Reedy Creek do.”

Even while Bill was still working for DEQ, he often thought about an Earth Sangha-like nursery. “I recognized that we need this local ecotype nursery in Richmond,” he says. “I actually created a business plan of sorts back then.” 

In the summer of 2016, after he had left DEQ, Bill was strolling through his own yard which sits on a little less than half an acre. That’s when he decided to start a native plant nursery in own. All he would need were seeds. But these seeds would have to be harvested locally. And there’s reason for this.

Bill invites me to think about the so-called native plants that are frequently sold at Big Box garden centers. “Let me address cultivars,” he says. “So the horticulture industry will change upon demand. More people started to want native plants so they’ve starting to handle native plants, but the problem is a lot of them are handling what they’re now calling ‘nativars’, which is a cultivar of a native plant.”

The problem with a nativar is that it may have originated hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live.  “For all you know a cultivar they’re selling originated from a native plant that came from a population in Minnesota,” says Bill. 

And the problem with this is that nativars are not specifically adapted to our area. “They come from a different population and may not be able to take our climate or our soils,” Bill say. “Their genetics are a little different from a true native plant, so there’s a good chance they won’t thrive here long-term.”

There’s another problem with nativars. “A local ecotype plant that’s part of a local population has coevolved for thousands of years in this location,” says Bill. “And those plants are going to have full ecosystem services. And what I mean by that is that it’s going to have all the interactions with all the other plants and the animals and the soil microbes and the fungi. And the nativars won’t have these kinds of interaction.” 

The key to a native plant nursery then is to have access to local seeds, so that became Bill’s first quest. 

During his work at DEQ, Bill had met a couple who have a conservation easement property along the Chickahominy River in eastern Henrico. On this tract there is a massive wet meadow, home to scores of native plants. Bill asked them if he could collect seeds from their property, and they granted him permission. 

He begins describing the variety of plant species that call this wet meadow home. “The diversity is impressive,” he says. “There are at least fifty species of grasses. There’s New York ironweed, and coastal Joe Pye weed, five or six species of goldenrod, mountain mint, meadow beauty, yarrow, royal ferns, cinnamon ferns, wing sumac, viburnum, strawberry bush, and so much more.”

Through a permit, Bill also collects native seeds from James River Park, Forest Hill Park, Larus Park, Powhite Park and other parks in the Richmond area. “It’s a really conservative permit,” he says. “I’m not allowed to collect seeds from the same population in consecutive years, and I can only take a small percentage of the seeds.”

To date Bill has more than one hundred different species of plants available, everything from paw paws to spice bush, from cardinal flowers to lizard’s tail.  

Invasive plants ultimately destroy the environment. Bill mentions the flawless green, crew-cut lawns that demand constant watering and fertilizing. These monocultures do virtually nothing productive for the planet. He mentions a study done several years ago. “It revealed that ten percent of the Chesapeake watershed is in grass,” he says. “That’s about 6400 square miles, and that is more than all the row crops produced in the same watershed. You have to have deep roots to capture carbon. Grass doesn’t. Natives have deep roots and they allow the infiltration of the water.” Additionally, this monoculture stymies any sort of biodiversity. “It’s a biological desert,” says Bill.

If you look out your own front door and up the street, chances are you’ll see scores of invasive plants and trees and bushes and vines. And they are all detrimental to a healthy environment, causing a sort of domino effect in the collapse of an ecosystem. 

“The invasives are crowding out the natives.” Bill says. “And that crashes the entire ecosystem because the mass that’s produced by plants drives the whole system. The plants are food for things that eat plants, and those herbivores become food for things that eat animals.” 

Chief among those herbivores are insects which are fed upon by birds and reptiles, amphibians and small mammals. “The insects don’t recognize non-native plants as food so they have nothing to eat,” says Bill. “The more you decrease the native plants, the less food you have to drive the ecosystem.”

He mentions the seminal work “Bringing Home Nature” by Doug Tallamy, who will be speaking on April 30 at Dorey Park.

“Doug’s argument is that insects coevolve with the plants around them,” says Bill.  “He studies butterflies and moths. The adults lay their eggs on plants that the caterpillars will then eat. Monarchs and milkweed, zebra swallowtails and paw paws. Almost 90 percent of the insect herbivores are specialists. They’re species specific. These insects have coevolved with these plants.”

The conclusion is simple.  “Every time you put a non-native plant in the ecosystem you’re making a tear in the fabric of the ecosystem,” Bill says.

Many of the practices we use to maintain our yards are utterly destructive to the environment. 

“On most residential lots, I don’t see why much storm water should ever escape to the street,” says Bill. “In a healthy forested system less than ten percent of the water gets into the stream. The rest of it is infiltrated and then it’s either stays in the upper zone and is taken up the plants, or it goes into the aquifer.”

Lawns, completely unnatural constructs, do not permit this. “Lawns are semi-impervious because people scalp them,” Bill says. “You get a draught, and it behaves like concrete when the thunderstorm comes.”

The wisest thing to do is follow Mother Nature’s lead.  “The best thing you can do for water quality is to plant a tree,” says Bill. “It’s cheap, the roots go deep, and it does an incredible amount of infiltration. And don’t rake the leaves. Let them decompose and build the soil which makes it more permeable so infiltration’s better.”

Bill considers what human beings have done to the biosphere. “What we’ve created is this downward spiral,” he says. “When you plant trees and natives you create an upward spiral because you’re going to improve the soil which improves infiltration, you store carbon, you create the habitat for wildlife.”

And then Bill Shanabruch says this: “If you have a native plant, you understand the pollinators that visit it and how it’s pollinated, you understand what adult insects are laying eggs on it, you now see birds coming to eat seeds or caterpillars or insects on it, and you understand what’s going on and you watch it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the most inconspicuous little white flower in the world. That plant has value.”

To learn more about Bill Shanabruch’s business visit: reedycreekenvironmental.wordpress.com