Choosing Plants - What's the Criteria?

I spend a lot of time watching my plants to see how they are being used by the wildlife that now visits my landscape. More than most, I suspect. It's really the only way to evaluate what I've planted. Over the many years that I have been planting what I call "living landscapes", I find that plants don't always perform in the way I envisioned. The plant choices we make have to perform or they are nothing more than the plastic nonnatives that blanket my neighborhood. 

Too many view plants as aesthetic considerations - a way to improve property values or to cheer us up with their color and novelty. Those concepts are anathema to everything we need to think about when it comes to landscaping. No one wants their landscape to be ugly. Aesthetics are important. We need to see beauty around us, but beauty HAS to include the beauty of living creatures living around us too. As I peruse the many social media gardening sites that I am a member of, I see far too many posts from folks that seem to miss the mark. There are numerous posts showing flowering plants installed simply for their flowers and others that only ask about a plant's nativity; like being native is all that is required to secure a permanent place in their yard.  

The firebush (Hamelia patens) that I added nearly a year ago is an example of how I evaluate a plant for my landscape. It is an attractive plant, no doubt, but it's not its beauty that makes it a worthy addition to what I'm trying to do here. As I watch it daily, I see a variety of pollinators using its blooms. The bumblebees that I especially longed to bring to my yard use it daily. When hummingbirds are in my area, this is the plant they are attracted to. A wide variety of butterflies visit it.  This is a flowering plant with a purpose behind its blooms. What makes a firebush especially important, however, goes way beyond its usefulness as a nectar plant. Pollinated flowers make fruit and that fruit is an essential food source for the songbirds that visit and don't use the seed in my bird feeder. Firebush serves a dual purpose.

We need to choose plants that do. Flowering plants are beautiful. Many are used as nectar sources, but the best plants serve a dual purpose by also providing other types of needed habitat. The viburnums I've added flower in the spring, but I've added the ones that I've found to also produce fruit for birds. That's true for so many of the woody plants I've planted here. The serviceberries (Amelanchier arborea), the haws (Crataegus spp.), and the plums (Prunus spp.) to name a few are gorgeous plants when in bloom, but they produce food as well.  If they didn't, I wouldn't have planted them. I don't have acres to work with here so every plant really needs to serve a dual purpose. The American basswood (Tilia americana) that serves as my anchor/canopy tree in this developing woodland, produces flowers in the spring that bees adore, but it also will be an important nesting tree someday in the future. I could have chosen a great many other canopy trees for this place. I chose this one for its valuable dual purpose.

Pretty plants are great in making us feel good - I've added a few that are there mostly for that purpose too, but I've focused mostly on others. The pretty faces are those that are basically inconsequential to my overall purpose here. They are not the dominant plants. If we are to create living landscapes in suburban/urban spaces we rarely have the acreage that allows us to not maximize the habitat value of the space we have. The living world is counting on us to share our yards with them and many of the plants chosen around me (and in the many landscapes I see in social media posts) have been selected solely for their intrigue, their novelty, or the beauty of their flowers or foliage. With each, valuable space that could make a difference is lost. It's not solely about pleasing our eyes or those of our neighbors; it is a very real question about life and death for the rest of the living world. It's not about nativity or not. Many native plants do not really serve an important service or they do not serve the dual purpose of others that could have been chosen.  

As we move forward in this movement that seems to gain momentum each year to make a difference, we need to more seriously consider what the role of each plant is that we add to our landscapes. Choose ones that do more than flower attractively - especially the woody plants that we decide to add.  When we have limited space, consider all the attributes that each possible plant possesses before you make your final choices. That will go a long way in truly rectifying a bit of what our runaway urbanization is doing to the rest of the living world.