Sometimes It's Simple - And the Issue Is Perspective


I gave a tour recently to a garden club at the USF Botanical Gardens which is always nice; speaking to folks who already love plants. Around us were a great many atala butterflies which were released here about 2 months ago as caterpillars by a Friend of the Gardens. One woman in the group was not familair with its host plant - Zamia integrifolia, Florida coontie and so I showed one to her - a plant across the path from this swarm of butterflies. It was clear from her look and her tepid response that she could not fathom why Florida coontie would be such a great plant to add to her landscape. Ours are getting ratty as they get consumed. The reason, of course is obvious as is the result of that herbivory. The Gardens now have hundreds of these butterflies. To me it seems an easy compromise. I firmly believe that if your plants are not being eaten by something, they are useless additions to your landscape. When we plant only for aesthetics, for what we see as beauty alone, we are missing the real point of landscaping. The world around us is full of wonderous creatures that should share the world with us; not just in preserved natural lands, but in the places where we live and work. If we are to live on this planet wisely, we must accept that we are part of nature and our landscapes do not exist solely for our pleasure.

The story of the atala and the coontie make the simplest of tales. When I arrived in Florida in 1987, the atala was thought to have been extirpated. Although the natives before us made arrowroot starch from the swollen stem/root of this plant, they did so with some reverance for it. Simply put, they used only what they needed. When early white settlers arrived they used coontie for profit and they dug up so many of this plant in South Florida that the plant all but disappeared. With it went the atala butterfly that required it for its host. I got a call in 1989 from a friend near Ft. Lauderdale telling me that atalas had shown up in a patch of coonties planted purposely in a road median. That was the beginning of the rebirth. One plant, one butterfly. It was that simple.

While not every conservation story is that simple, it can be.  The choices we make in our landscape are significant to the rest of the living world.  What might not seem beautiful on the surface - like that ratty looking coontie in the Gardens, becomes beautiful when we see its purpose and the outcome of its addition.

Plant your landscapes with purpose and every bit of it will be aesthetically beautiful. The rest of the world is waiting for us to accept them around us.



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