Paula Whyman’s New Book Is About an Ecology Project From Hell

In August 2020, Paula Whyman–a writer who lives in Bethesda—stood on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge foothills, just east of Shenandoah National Park. Her kids had gone to college, she’d always been fascinated by the natural world, and she’d been reading about ecological restoration—the process of ridding land of invasive species and returning it to its native state. This mountain, which was for sale, seemed like a prime location to try it; the plants had grown taller than her head, and a mist of yellow flowers wafted as far as she could see. “Leaving aside the fact that I was terrible at growing things and I really didn’t know anything about plants, I felt like, okay, I’m just going to do this,” she says. So she bought the land and began to transform old fields into a 75-acre meadow of native Virginia plants.

The process has not been smooth. In her new memoir, Bad Naturalist, Whyman describes the unrelenting labor of stewarding her meadow. She can’t simply let it grow, since invasive plants tend to, well, invade. Their seeds lie dormant in the ground for years. They migrate on the backs of deer, blow over from neighbors’ fields, or drift down the river onto Whyman’s land, where they proliferate and choke out her beloved native plants. In the book, Whyman spends many days trotting around her property with an enormous metal weed wrench, pulling plants that don’t belong. She experiments with controlled burns and meticulously applies pesticides to encroaching invasive trees. By now, she’s accepted that she’ll never fully rid the mountain of invasives: “I’m trying to get the meadow under—‘control’ is the wrong word, but I’m trying to calm it down and manage things, at least.”

Centuries ago, native meadows like Whyman’s covered huge swaths of Virginia. “When we think of prairie, we mainly think of the Midwest,” she says, “but there was prairie all throughout the South.” These grasslands were maintained by lightning-induced fires and managed through indigenous controlled burns. Then came European agricultural practices. Settlers leveled the prairies to plant row crops and deluged the ground with nonnative seeds. The soil was so altered—and the settlers so strident about fire suppression—that eventually, when farmers abandoned their fields to nature, the land wouldn’t revert to prairie; it became closed-canopy forest instead.

Virginia’s ecology has been irrevocably changed, so a true native meadow is impossible to create. But Whyman still thinks it’s valuable to try. Native plants support a fragile ecosystem of birds, insects, and other wildlife—including humans. Many foods we eat (tomatoes, for example) depend on native pollinators, which require native plants to survive. Protecting her meadow from invasives, Whyman says, will be “ongoing and endless”—a project for the rest of her life. But she doubts she’ll ever grow weary. “I’m never going to learn all there is to know about this place,” she says. “Every day, I discover something. A giant beetle flies up out of the grass and I’m like, ‘It’s the size of the Hindenburg!’ So I have to find out immediately what kind of beetle that is and why it’s here and whether it’s native. That’s my favorite thing.”

This article appears in the January 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Sylvie McNamara

Staff Writer