It's Not Because It's Native

Part of the USF Wildflower Meadow Post Hurricane Milton

Hurricane Helene struck the west coast of Florida but did very little damage to the landscape I've been working on at the University of South Florida Botanical Gardens.  We dodged that bullet, but Milton was another thing.  It made landfall just south of us and created havoc with both its 100+ mph winds and its heavy rains.  What had once been a vibrant and diverse wildflower meadow with at least 15 species of native grasses and 40 species of native wildflowers was submerged under several inches of water for 2-3 days with 2 large and toppled canopy trees lying on top of it and buried beneath 6-12 inches of pine bark mulch.  When we finally were able to remove the trees and rake off the mulch there was very little green poking out of the saturated soil.  It was a heartbreaking sight, quite frankly. We had spent nearly 2 years tending this area, adding plants from our own propagation or from native plant nurseries and it looked like we would have to start over from scratch.

What also exasperated me were the many sympathetic comments I got on social media assuring me that, because these plants were native, they would somehow reemerge from this mess.  Exasperating because nativity is not a measure that means much by itself. Few plants, native or not, are adapted to being inundated for several days and burried by foliage and mulch. Being "native" is not a magic quality and it confers no "get out of jail free" ticket if the plant itself has not evolved to withstand the extreme conditions it just met with.

Over the course of the following weeks, certain plants did, in fact, reemerge.  It has been a fascinating experiment to witness, but nativity has not been the overriding variable in determining what has survived.  A great many of our Symphyotichum asters came back as did the wild white idigo (Baptisia alba) and the giant ironweed (Vernonia gigantea).  The various species of goldenrods (Solidago spp.) were largely unscathed and the weedy, but useful pollinator plant, yellowtop (Flaveria linearis) hardly seemed to notice.  Many of the native grasses have survived as well. That said, a good number of species have seemingly perished.  After a month, it would seem that everything that was to survive would have shown itself by now.  We're getting some germination of wildflowers from the seedbank, but we're getting far more non-native weeds.

As we begin the process of replanting the wildflower meadow with what has been lost, we are met with first weeding the explosion of non-native plants that survived this event even better than the natives.  It makes sense that "weeds" would respond better than "natives".  After all, it is in their nature to thrive in disturbance.

Native plants, like any plant, have evolved to thrive in specific habitat conditions.  They are native only because the areas they are found in provide the conditions they require.  If you can provide those conditions in your landscape, you can successfully keep those species regardless of whether it is native to Asia or only native to a part of Florida 200 miles away.  We promote native plants because they lend support to the rest of the living world we landscape for - not simply because they are native.  Real restoration of native communities requires restoring what was once there or should have been there.  Landscapes, in my opinion, should be mostly concerned with maximizing the ecological value of your space.  They are different things but they both require us to plant those species adapted to the conditions found onsite.