Time to “Make America Native Again” in the Garden?
June 12th, 2018
Here’s an article I wrote last year for the Patriot-News on an interesting native-plant talk by entomologist Dr. Doug Tallamy and author Rick Darke. I thought it would make a good follow to my last week’s post on why I’m not guilty over my Pinky Winky hydrangea.
Nice lawn or ecological disaster?
Entomologist and author Dr. Douglas Tallamy looks at the typical American yard and doesn’t see model green lawns and pristine rows of trimmed yews.
He sees “ecological disasters.”
The lack of diversity, our penchant for killing anything that crawls, and our heavy leaning toward non-native plants has created wastelands for birds, pollinators, and other less-visible but key parts of a healthy earth.
“If we keep doing this, we’re in trouble,” Tallamy said at a talk at Lower Dauphin High School, adding that it’s time to “make America native again.”
Tallamy joined landscape ethicist and former Longwood Gardens plant curator Rick Darke in a “Living Landscape” program sponsored by the local Manada Conservancy and Appalachian Audubon Society.
The two are co-authors of a 2016 book of that same name (Timber Press, $39.95 hardcover) that urges homeowners to rethink how they plant and care for their yards.
Their overriding theme is that our ideal of the bug-free, neatly tended, lawn-dominated yard is exactly the opposite of what nature does in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
Darke said we “like to whack off stuff to make things neat,” which destroys the food and habitat that the rest of life depends on to survive and reproduce.
“Leaves are not litter,” Darke said. “It’s a part of the regenerative process and very necessary.”
A prime example is the effect our neatnik yards are having on birds, said Tallamy, who teaches entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware.
“We’re losing birds in this country very fast,” he said. “And there’s no mystery why. We’re starving them.”
Are we starving birds by taking away their caterpillars?
Natural plants that once fed birds are disappearing to office buildings, shopping complexes, parking lots, and housing developments. Even the land that ends up as residential yards doesn’t help when, as Tallamy claims, 92 percent of it is in lawn and 80 percent of the plants are non-native ones of little value to our native wildlife.
The biggest impact on birds, though, traces to a little worm-like bug called the caterpillar.
This larval form of moths, butterflies, and skippers is a critical part of most birds’ diets. But Tallamy says we’ve done a great job of killing caterpillars with garden pesticides and selecting plants that don’t encourage them in the first place.
That approach is popular with homeowners who don’t like holes in their plant leaves, but it’s genocide to birds, says Tallamy.
“We’ve been taught to garden without insects,” he said. “Get rid of the insects, and you get rid of our baby birds.”
Caterpillars are the king of bird food because they’re so big (as much nutrition as 200 aphids) and packed with protein, fat and carotenoids.
Before legions of insecticide-toting homeowners occupied the land, birds, caterpillars, and the native plants that supported the caterpillars all evolved together in a mutually beneficial arrangement.
As natural land converted to yards, the native goldenrods, oaks, and milkweeds have disappeared, replaced largely by low-care, inexpensive, non-native azaleas, yews, barberries, burning bushes, and those oceanic lawns.
Tallamy has done first-hand research in which he counts the number and variety of caterpillars on various plants. Hands-down, he says, most native plants far out-pace most non-native plants in the supply of caterpillars.
As an example, he said a native white oak can house 557 different species of caterpillars while a non-native ginkgo can house four and a non-native zelkova none.
Tallamy says homeowners can do a lot to help birds, native pollinators and beneficial insects by 1.) not spraying to kill every crawling thing, and 2.) adding more native plants to yards.
He says that’s easier than you might think because a relative few natives are ecological “powerhouses,” or as he also put it, “hosts with the most.”
Oaks are a nutrition “powerhouse” when it comes to feeding insects and the birds that depend on them.
Some of these powerhouse species are native oaks, native cherries (especially the black cherry), native willows, river birch, blueberries, asters, goldenrods and native pines.
The National Wildlife Federation has detailed lists of the best caterpillar-supplying native plants, county-by-county, on its website.
Darke said it’s also helpful to rethink the way we design and lay out our yards, leaning more toward what nature does in wooded areas.
For starters, he says that means planting more trees and woody shrubs, especially native ones.
Then, he says, plan in terms of “layers” of plants as opposed to the isolated rows of plants and the single specimens planted in the middle of lawns that most yards employ.
Layering means planting trees that grow tall to create an upper canopy with smaller trees and mid-sized shrubs in an understory layer below, and finally, perennial flowers and groundcovers under those and along the edges of beds.
He suggests planting closely, encouraging plants to cover the ground (a plus for weeding and mulching work), and allowing nature to “seed in” useful (and free) plants, such as white wood aster seeds that blow in on wind or dogwood seeds that hitch a ride on bird feathers.
Darke says it’ll take some adjustment to get used to this look vs. the neat norm, but the two upsides are aiding ecology and reducing work for yourself.
Tallamy adds that more nature-like yards also enrich the soil, reduce storm-water runoff, and sequester carbon better than lawn-heavy yards.
“This can happen if we change yards that only had to be pretty before,” he says. “Plant choice matters.”
Added Darke: “We need to stop thinking about plants as objects but as living things that are an important part of the bigger ecosystem.”
Read George’s article on how to “put more buzz” into your landscape by helping pollinators.
Read how to plant a more “naturalistic” garden.