Hi, it's Alex!
Today I want to talk about
how people approach gardening,
and I want to talk about something
that I see going on in our society
that I don't like,
and what I think the solution to it is,
how I want to improve this.
I see a lot of talk about
ecologically sound gardening
and native plant gardening
and people are starting to get
really excited about this.
There's this book
that I know a lot of people who've read
called "Bringing Nature Home"
by Doug Tallamy.
A lot of people are reading this book,
and it communicates the importance
of native plants for promoting biodiversity,
so it talks about things like how
when you plant a native plant,
there are more insects that eat that plant
than if you plant a non-native plant.
And, that in turn supports birds and spiders
and other things in the food web,
so you're protecting biodiversity.
A lot of people are getting on board with
this,
and they're like:
"Okay, native plants are good."
But, they are approaching this
with a really simplistic understanding of
ecology,
often, very little understanding of ecology
at all,
like it's become almost like a buzzword,
people are like, okay,
I'm gonna get a "native plant"
and I'm gonna grow "native plants" in my garden,
and if something is "native" then it's good.
And like, this is being exploited
by the nursery industry,
the commercial nursery industry,
and the nursery industry is doing next to
nothing
to change their whole supply chain,
their whole way of doing business.
And the way that nurseries do business,
commercial nurseries do business nowadays,
for the most part,
is really damaging ecologically.
And I think that we need a fundamental shift
in how we garden,
not just saying "I'm gonna buy native plants."
Like, I want to illustrate some problems with
this.
If you go to the nursery,
and you look for a plant,
first of all, the whole concept of "native",
it's not agreed on by consensus
what it means for something to be native,
and it's not necessary a legally protected
designation.
And, also, a lot of times, like,
I've talked to salespeople, and they'll say,
I'll ask them: "Is this native?"
and they're like: "Oh, yeah, this is native."
and they'll say that stuff like Hostas are
native
to North America, it's not true.
I've heard people say things like
Lily of the Valley, native to North America.
There are some plants where there are
native and non-native versions of it,
like a good example is the red raspberry.
There are native red raspberries
in North America,
there are ones native to Europe.
If you get one at a nursery,
it might be one from Europe,
it might be a hybrid.
A lot of times, the staff don't know.
And this is another problem,
like even if you talk to the people
who are in the know at the nursery,
like in terms of the people who run the business,
who order the plants and stuff,
they typically are ordering their plants
from this business far away, like
and sometimes this stuff is produced
the whole way across the country.
Like if you go to local nurseries
here in Delaware or Pennsylvania,
this region,
you will find trees that are grown
in Washington State!
Like I've asked people:
"Where do you get your trees from?"
and they're grown in Washington state,
and they have no idea
what the source population is for that tree.
And this is important, like
take a sugar maple as an example.
A sugar maple is an important tree
in the forests of Eastern North America.
And it has a really wide geographic distribution.
It occurs, it's really common like in Vermont,
up in New England, it goes into Ohio,
it goes the whole way south to Florida.
It's very uncommon,
but there is a sugar maple native to Florida.
And I say "a sugar maple" because
although it considered this one continuous
species
and it can interbreed,
if you take a sugar maple from Florida,
and you plant it in Vermont,
or vice versa,
probably not gonna grow very well.
It might not grow at all, it might die.
Because that's a completely different climate,
Florida and Vermont.
I think this illustrates the problem.
Plants that have wide distribution
have genetic diversity,
and they have localized adaptions,
they have adaptations to grow
in different climates, in different soil types,
things like that.
When you go to a nursery,
you're getting mass-produced plants
that, for the most part, are standardized,
in many cases they're standardized
across the entire country,
or they might be standardized across
a broad geographic region.
You are not helping to preserve
that local biodiversity.
So like, you buy a sugar maple
to plant in your yard.
Who knows where it's from?
It might be a named cultivar,
it might be like a cloned.
Cloned plants introduce another problem.
I've seen this happen.
There will be a certain cultivar of tree
that is planted along a street,
and every tree will be genetically identical
because they're cloned.
And it's like, that's great
if you want to have
predictable characteristics of the tree
like which people kind of like for gardening,
but then when a pest comes,
some sort of like beetle or caterpillar or
whatever,
like, plants in nature, each one is unique,
they each have a different
blend of chemicals they produce
to protect against things,
so like in nature,
if a pest hits one tree,
it'll typically, you know, hit that tree,
but it won't be able to move as easily
to the other ones,
because they're producing
a different blend of chemicals.
But, like what will happen with these
is there will be a disease or infestation
and it will spread
and sometimes it will kill all the trees.
And it's like, the trees are not evolving
if they're cloned like that.
I want to give another example.
I see a lot of people who plant things
that are "native"
but they're native to North America,
so for example,
where live, people plant a lot of
Purple coneflower.
It's a pretty plant.
And people say it's "native".
Now, where is it native to?
It's really common in Missouri,
Arkansas, Illinois.
There are only a few counties
that have small, isolated populations of this
plant
on the East Coast.
So like, in Pennsylvania,
I think there, the USDA only shows
one county where this occurs in a wild population.
So, it's kind of native,
like it's native to North America,
but it's not really a locally native plant.
It's very different from like, Rudbeckia hirta,
a species of black-eyed Susan
that is abundant,
and you can find it in the wild
in the surroundings, in like
Delaware, Pennsylvania,
a lot of other areas.
I really think it's important
to plant locally native stuff.
And I've noticed, like when I grow
the locally native Rudbeckia hirta,
black-eyed Susan, in my garden,
and I grow it next to
the purple coneflower
that you get from a nursery,
that is native to North America
but not locally native here,
I notice that there are a lot more insects
supported by the plant that is locally native.
And I've noticed this pattern play out
over and over again.
So it's like, okay, purple coneflower,
probably not gonna become
a damaging invasive plant
like garlic mustard.
But it's not gonna have
the same ecological benefit
as a truly locally native plant.
I think this stuff is really important.
Humans are destroying the environment
at unprecedented rates,
like we are causing extinction
of many many species,
and one of the big things we're doing
is habitat loss,
we're just building on all the available land.
We're building suburbs, cities,
we're building industrial things,
and we're building agriculture,
we're using agriculture,
and people are like "protect farms" and stuff,
but like, farms are taking up space
that would have been a wild ecosystem.
I think it's critically important,
if we're gonna protect as much biodiversity
as possible,
for us to create as much wild
or semi-wild space as we can.
And we can do that in our gardens,
but we need to like understand
the deep stuff.
Like plants are not these objects
that you install in your landscape
as if it were like a building toy or something,
it's not like you build a house.
Plants are living beings,
they have populations,
they have genetic diversity,
just like you and I do.
You can see that genetic diversity,
you can, like if you grow a lot of plants,
you'll see the flower shape
is subtly different,
the leaf shape is subtly different,
and there is value in that biodiversity.
And that biodiversity corresponds to like
insect biodiversity and animal biodiversity.
And it's like, do you care about all of these
things?
I care about all these things.
I want to protect as much biodiversity as
possible.
If you are a gardener,
and you want to do these things,
I think it is super important to like,
not just say "native plants",
but to do research, and say:
"What's locally native in this area?"
I say forget commercial nurseries.
Like, they have not caught up.
If they catch up,
then I will start recommending them.
I have never found a large commercial nursery
that is anywhere at the level
that they would need to be
for me to recommend buying plants there.
Like, you want to get plants
from local populations
grown from seed.
Get stuff that comes up in your yard.
Learn what's what.
Learn to identify it.
This is how we're gonna protect
and preserve biodiversity.
It's like, this is the next level.
I want to go far beyond
what Doug Tallamy is advocating
in this Bringing Nature Home thing.
Like, he's like,
oh it's okay to plant cultivars and stuff.
I'm like:
"Why would you want to plant a cultivar?"
Wouldn't you want genetically unique plants?
That's what I want.
I want us to be preserving
the populations of these plants
that occur in our local area.
Like, I want to grow plants in my yard
that are grown from seed
from populations within,
ideally, a one to two mile radius,
and max like 50 mile radius or so,
I don't want them to be coming
from other states
or across geographic divides,
things like that.
So, this is what I have to say for now.
I'd love to go into this more
in the future,
because I think this is a really deep topic,
I think there's a lot to be said about it.
But yeah, thanks for your time.
Bye bye!
