Column: Virginia Beach landscape designer has a native plant specialty

VIRGINIA BEACH — There are lots of good reasons for incorporating native plants into your landscaping.

Some local homeowners deal with challenging terrain, including soils that are too wet or too dry and sandy. Others are discouraged by the constant feeding and maintenance that some cultivated plants need. Or they want to attract more pollinators to their garden. They may just be bored with more traditional landscaping and want to add color and texture to their lawn and garden.  

Whatever the reason, Virginia Beach resident Trista Imrich is on a mission to help. Imrich, the owner of Wild Works of Whimsy, is a landscape designer who focuses on landscaping with native plants. 

Public gardens that Imrich has designed include the native plant garden at the Back Bay Wildlife Refuge Visitor’s Center, the Cape Henry Lighthouse and the Brock Environmental Center.  As a restoration coordinator for Lynnhaven River Now, she worked with the city of Virginia Beach to create living shorelines and rain gardens. She works with homeowners associations and private homeowners who want to incorporate natives into their common areas.

She works closely with Southern Branch Nursery, a Chesapeake native plant nursery, and buys some plants there.

On the day that I visited her, she’d returned from a home in southern Virginia Beach where she’d designed a rain garden to alleviate flooding. In her own colorful garden, Imrich checked on four young monarch butterflies that had just emerged from the chrysalis that day. The female monarchs lay eggs on her milkweed, she explained, but when they hatch she collects the caterpillars, puts them in a protective mesh habitat to keep birds or other predators from eating them and feeds them milkweed until they form the chrysalis. 

Imrich grows other native plants, including Joe Pye weed and the carnivorous pitcher plant, which she’s growing in her own rain garden. Among her favorite flowers she said, are asters and goldenrods. Obedient plants make a nice addition to the garden, too, she said, and so do the whimsical, dainty Carolina wild petunia.

Imrich said she’s partial to low-maintenance perennial plants that contribute to the ecosystem.  She also loves it when they have a direct local connection. Lynnhaven carpet flower, which was originally discovered on the shores of the Lynnhaven River, forms a lovely ground cover that flowers in the spring and attracts early pollinators.

Although the focus is on natives, Imrich isn’t a purist. She also grows non-native zinnia because they add color and texture to her garden, she said. She also isn’t afraid to experiment, and this year she’s growing Venus flytrap in her rain garden.

“It’s actually native to North Carolina, so we’ll see how it does in these winters here,” she said.  

This natural curiosity drives her interest in native landscaping, but it was an interest in environmental issues that first prompted Imrich to study horticulture. She earned a master’s degree in environmental policy while she was in the Navy, where she served for six years.  

Imrich became interested in local environmental issues after taking a class at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and, in 2013, she went to work for Lynnhaven River Now, where she worked until 2018. She’s also taken horticulture classes at Tidewater Community College, and she’s become certified as a horticulturist and landscape designer.

Imrich still works closely with Lynnhaven River Now, and she has taught landscape designs for them. Recently, she opened her garden to tours the organization has sponsored. She also continues to learn more about landscaping and experiment with new plants. 

“What I love about horticulture,” Imrich said, “is that you’re always learning new things.”

Learn more about Wild Works of Whimsy at its website.

The author is a contributor to The Independent News. Her journalism has also appeared in The Virginian-Pilot.

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