With apologies to readers who come here for the variety of content, it wasn’t my plan to write about native gardens two weeks in a row. But circumstances intervened.
These are dark times, and even with summer unfolding its pleasures all around us, it can be struggle to think happy thoughts. Still, I was shocked, soon after publishing last week’s post about native gardens, to run across an astonishing denunciation of the whole idea on political grounds.
I’m not going to name the writer, on the chance that someone hacked her account and posted a deranged parody under her name. Nor am I going to link to the article, because it was more likely a desperate bid to go viral with social media rage-bait.
But just to give you a taste of the logic at work: The writer’s lumpy opening paragraph introduces Douglas Tallamy, the entomologist and native gardening advocate, as a proponent of “violently cleansing the landscape with machines and killing chemicals of newly arrived migrants he considers ‘ecological tumors.’”
Can I interrupt here? A good copy editor would have changed that to read “a proponent of using machines and killing chemicals to violently cleanse the landscape of newly arrived migrants …” A good fact-checker would have killed it outright.
She goes on to liken Tallamy to Stephen Miller, the ultra-right architect of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation program: “For Tallamy as for Miller, those of us in the ‘wrong’ place should be removed for the good of nature, by force if necessary.”
The writer does not seem to understand that plants and people are different. Getting rid of invasive species makes sense because of the damage they do. Since the emerald ash borer arrived here in the 1990s, for instance, it has destroyed tens of millions of forest and city street trees, endangered some native ash species, and continues to cause an estimated $1.2 billion a year in lost wages.
Getting rid of human immigrants, on the other hand, makes no sense at all, because they provide a massive boost to the national economy, among other benefits.
The writer gives no evidence of having interviewed Tallamy or read his books. She’s just reacting to a profile of Tallamy she read in the New York Times last month. The machines she refers to are the tractors, chains, shears, and saws he and his wife used to clear their land of invasive species. The killing chemicals are herbicides, which he treats as a last resort to be applied carefully to control certain stubborn invasive plants.
Equating plants and humans, however stupid it may be, allows the writer to assert without evidence that the entire native plant movement “shares a common origin with the anti-migrant movement.” Native plant gardeners by extension are all in the same nativist, anti-immigrant gang with the masked thugs from ICE.
The writer apparently means to take on the current Administration’s mass deportation campaign, but do it without any direct attack on Donald Trump, his ICE agents, or the billionaires and corporations complicit in their murderous work. Instead, to the tune of “Do You Hear the People Sing.” she boldly mounts the barricades and rains down her deadly fire on … backyard gardeners.
All this will come as a shock to the many anti-Trump, anti-ICE native gardeners I know. We tend to be more familiar with Tallamy as a genial entomologist and the author of books like Nature’s Best Hope, in which he makes the case for planting native species based on scientific studies of their “carrying capacity.” Abundant evidence shows that native species are essential to the success, and even the survival, of the birds, butterflies, and other wildlife that have co-evolved with them in the same habitat.
Plants that evolved elsewhere don’t provide the same benefits. For instance, the butterfly bush, introduced from China, seemed wonderful to me not so long ago because its abundant nectar attracts Eastern tiger swallowtails, fritillaries, and other butterflies. But it’s a dead end for these butterflies. “No native caterpillar evolved alongside it. No larva can eat its leaves,” writes naturalist and illustrator Patrick Lynch. “Plant a butterfly bush, and you set a beautiful table with nothing on the menu for the next generation.”
If you care about the next generation, then you forgo the butterfly bush and instead favor native species that are their known host plants. The case for native species is based on what they do, not where they come from. And even among the natives, it’s nuanced. Oaks, for instance, are a powerhouse, supporting 500 native wildlife species, according to Tallamy and his fellow researchers. Tulip trees, by contrast, support just 21 other species. But swallowtails will lay their eggs on tulip trees. So this monumental tree might be what you want, if you have room for it. Likewise, goldenrods support 115 wildlife species, violets just 29. But if you want fritillary butterflies, violets are the necessary host plants.
I suggested at the start that I was trying to think happy thoughts, so let’s get to it. Even if the writer who provoked this rant is, to put it gently, misinformed, she suggests an important point: We should be promoting the value of native gardening with language that draws people in instead of inadvertently driving them away. In Nature’s Best Hope, Tallamy did it by acknowledging that his former practice of referring to non-native species as “alien species” could sound offensive. Instead, he now calls them “introduced species.”
Why not go further? If celebrating native species seems divisive in the current political climate, should we call them “indigenous species” instead? The British zoologist and writer Jane Wisbey inadvertently suggested a larger and perhaps more palatable change in a comment on my post last week. She noted that she hadn’t “come across the term native gardens so much in the UK.” Instead, people there call them “wildlife gardens.”
I love this idea, entirely apart from the politics. What is it that native gardeners do differently? What is it that makes it such an endless source of discovery and so richly rewarding?
We garden for wildlife.
Why not just say that out loud?
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Postscript: I’ll be taking the next two weeks off to enjoy the last few hot, sweaty, glorious weeks of summer. While I’m gone, I’ll reprint a couple of my favorite past articles for other publications.
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