What We're Really Attempting With Natives
Since publishing his book, Nature's Best Hope, this quote by Dr. Doug Tallamy has made its rounds seemingly everywhere on social media and on various internet sites devoted to native plant landscaping. I find it to be too simplistic though I agree whole-heartedly that we as a species need to make deep changes to how we approach the landscapes that we live and work in. Landscapes of non-native plants, chosen only for their aesthetic attributes, has brought great harm to the rest of the living world, those forced to share this planet with us. For far too long, we have looked at plants only as window dressing; they add monetary value to our property, advertise our economic status to our neighbors, and make our homes and offices "look good." For some reason, we have divorced them from the living world. We fail to make the connection that wildlife live where they do because of the plants that also live there and that the foundation for all of the life we may have empathy for - birds, butterflies, bees, etc. all are dependent on the plants we landscape with. Historically, it may have been sufficient to merely attract these creatures from outside the boundaries of our landscapes as natural areas were never that far away, but this is no longer true. The natural world is fragmented to a degree I could not have imagined during my childhood and many of us live completely divorced from anything resembling nature. What we do now in our landscapes has far greater impact than ever before and what we do, or don't do, is significant.
My issue with the above quote is that it misses the mark that I believe we must ascribe to if we are going to have an impact. Simple statements are easy for us all to digest and react to, but they are too simple to achieve the ends the living world looks up to us for. In a sense, it is an extrapolation of the concept Dr. Tallamy first espoused in Bringing Nature Home - that we should eschew all non-native plants and plant and promote every native one. On the surface, it makes some sense, but like everything else in life, it is really more complicated than that. My problem is that far too many of us that have come to realize that our landscapes need to change, are content to simply eradicate the non-natives and to let whatever materializes secure a home around us if it's not. The question I so often see is "Is this plant native? If it is, I'll leave it." No questions about what role this plant will play if I leave it be. Simple messages allow us the complacency to choose this as a satisfactory endpoint and it is not. It is a small first step on an expedition that extends much further down the road.
As I've written many times, being native confers no special property to the possessor. All plants possess properties that they bring to a landscape and none of them fulfill all of their potential outside of the structure provided by the other plants around them. It's the context of community that gives a landscape its real habitat value. Plants may be individuals, but they form a community of interacting species. That community extends beyond our landscapes into the yards beyond us. A live oak by itself is not sufficient to create habitat; it can only add to the area's habitat value - the rest of the plants surrounding it. What's around the live oak is more important in many ways than the live oak alone.
The quote at the beginning of this post seems to tell me that we will create "National Park"-type lands if we simply eliminate the non-natives from our landscapes and replace them with native plants. This is not true no matter how much we wish to believe it. Those landscapes I see so frequently posted to social media that are virtual monocultures of one pollinator magnet or another do not come close to a National Park. The lawns where turf grass has been replaced by a monoculture of a native ground cover do not either. The "freedom lawns" that arise from well-intentioned folks pulling out the non-native weeds and letting the native ones remain and expand also do not. They all fail because we fail to recognize that landscapes are communities of plants evolved to function as a community. They are not plant collections. All of these potential "National Parks" fall far short of being one because we are reticent to think a bit deeper into the problems we are wanting to solve.
Collections of native plants are not the same as a community of them. Letting whatever comes up from our seedbank thrive will almost never result in anything resembling a native plant community. Our yards will never be new "National Parks" until we take a deeper look at our landscapes and put together the missing elements that will approximate habitat. To be sure, doing anything better now than we did in the past is positive; it just falls far short of what we need to do if we are to really make a difference. The world's biodiversity is imploding around us. There is precious little time to fail by falling short and being complacent. Landscapes need to be purposely planted and the role each will play needs to be factored into the landscape plan. Together, these plants will then function as a community and we may someday create real "National Parks" of habitat.
Deciding what 'plant community' I could construct in my landscape is proving to be quite a challenge. I have to suspect that many people will find it so.
ReplyDeleteI started by looking at what would have been the original landscape, before people turned up. It was, I think, a sandhill. Certainly it's sandy here. But so much has been altered along the way. Around the area, large trees include oak and hickory. Plenty of sabal palms are sown around by the birds, as well as Carolina cherry laurel. On our lot, previous home owners added some privet and dwarf male I. vomitoria, along with some lower growing evergreen azaleas. And lawn, which we let go -- away.
So my plant community started pretty much from scratch, but I don't aim to replicate a sandhill. I consult library books, gardening and wildlife experts like yourself, and internet resources such as the Florida Native Plant Society, the Florida Wildflower Cooperative and the Florida Wildflower Foundation. As well as the Extension service, since I'm a volunteer master gardener. I suppose I may be overthinking the whole enterprise, but my point is that it's neither easy nor economical to pull together something resembling an ecologically balanced system to cater for all our wild life.
To your point that we need to start somewhere, gardening for butterflies and pollinators would seem to be an entry level approach that would hopefully lead the interested gardener to more expansive projects, although I think I read somewhere that that approach is rather looked down on these days as too simplistic.
I write a 'gardening' article once a month for the Mandarin NewsLine here in Jacksonville. By mentioning my own shortcomings in the garden as well as my attempts to improve, and to garden for wildlife in general, I really hope I'm encouraging the readers to look at what they're doing in their yards.
People who use weed and feed on their lawns, and bag their grass clippings and fallen leaves need encouragement even to change those practices. I fear we are preaching to the choir if we make our salvation sound too difficult to even begin.