What Is "Florida Friendly"?

Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow

There is a great deal of discussion in the area where I live about what constitutes an ecologically friendly landscape. Over the past few years, the term "Florida Friendly" has entered the discussion - especially from our Cooperative Extension offices and emanating originally from our land grant university.  The concept seems to arise from the age-old concept of "first do no harm." It protects our economically powerful horticultural businesses to sell a wide range of non-native plants that do not become invasive and spread outside of where they are planted. It also gives ecologically minded folks the belief that what they are planting is fine for their landscapes. By planting "friendly" plants, we can lump together a large palette of non-natives with our native species and feel like they are somehow equivalent. It is my opinion that they often are not.
What "Florida Friendly" fails to address is the very real foundation of an ecologically designed landscape, for to create a living landscape requires much more than doing no harm. It requires us to choose plants with an ecological function. Doing no harm is a good thing, but it fails to address whether a plant actually benefits the living world around us. Florida Friendly too often focuses only on the aesthetic contribution of a plant and not its ecological role. It fosters the belief that a landscape's primary role is to create beauty and increase one's property value and sidesteps the very real need for landscapes to provide habitat for the rest of the world's creatures. If we are to negate the harm that most developed landscapes create, we must overcome this notion of beauty over function and this new concept that a landscape that does no harm is equivalent to an ecologically functional one.
Not all non-native plants are without function. I have left the yesterday, today & tomorrow shrub that I inherited in my backyard not because it is beautiful and has a wonderful fragrance. These traits are without question. I retained it because it provides a nectar source that is all but absent right now in my ecological desert. As I work and relax in my developing landscape, I see an assortment of pollinators nectaring from it. The monarchs and gulf fritillaries that are now laying eggs on the various host plants that I have added routinely use these flowers to fuel their metabolic needs. The rare honeybees that visit use it too as have other pollinators that surface from time to time. Other "friendly" plants that were installed by others before me do none of this and that is my issue with Florida Friendly landscaping initiatives.
Just as not all non-natives are without ecological value, many native plants fail at providing any substantive contribution in that regard. The native plant movement often fails to adequately address this in their zeal to promote them. Every day, I see posts from the newly converted expressing joy in the weeds they are leaving in their landscapes because they are native. Their questions to their group members centers solely on nativity, not function and that is as short sighted as those who promote "friendliness." 
If we are going to make a real impact on the general ecological devastation that modern landscapes have created, we need to look at plants for the role they will play and our landscape designs in the same way. Pollinator friendly landscapes are not "friendly" if all they do is provide nectar sources; they must also provide habitat so that those pollinators can reproduce and thrive - open sandy soil patches, for example, to allow burrowing bees to raise their offspring and hollow stems during the winter for species like long-horned bees to effectively overwinter; brushy composting areas for bumblebees and host plants for butterflies.
As I plan my new landscape in this mostly suburban desert, I am doing my best to add plants that have an ecological purpose. What I am adding will be largely native because that is my choice, but my selections are not made solely because they are native. My choices are made by considering each's attributes. If they flower, will something benefit from that and will I have a steady source of flowers throughout the year? If they provide berries and other fruit, will they be of value to my songbirds from spring through winter? It goes without mentioning that I will not be using pesticides, but not every plant attracts the invertebrate food that most nesting birds require. And, the landscape must provide nesting sites as much as it needs to generate invertebrates for nestlings.
We need to discard the concept that doing no harm is somehow ecologically our end requirement. We need a program that stresses creating life in our landscapes. This will be anathema to many in the horticultural industry as it will kick a lot of commonly used landscape plants to the curb where they belong, but it is the only way we can move forward to a future where we share the world with the rest of its biodiversity.