Remove Invasives, Plant Natives and make America Biodiverse Again! by Tracey Lehman

I work part-time at Leaves for Wildlife, a native plant nursery. It opened about five years ago when the owner, Patty, a practitioner in natural medicine, read a book by entomologist Douglas Tallamy. Convinced of the intricate connection between the well-being of our environment and human health, she shifted gears and opened a native plant nursery.

I, too, have been inspired by Tallamy’s ongoing research that supports the idea that the non-native plants that dominate our landscape have contributed to the loss of biodiversity, which is the variety of life on Earth. As entomologist E.O. Wilson said, “Biodiversity holds the world steady.” The 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference said that biodiversity “is important for our health and well-being, food supply, and safety.” It also said that the widespread preference for non-native plants in the horticultural industry has globally transformed millions of acres from potential habitat into ‘food deserts’ for native insects, with the unintentional consequence of reducing the abundance and distribution of birds, as well.” And of course, those pristine green lawns that are so appealing to many Americans also count as food deserts.

Insects and plants co-evolved alongside of each other for millions of years, and 70-90% of plant-feeding insects are specialists, meaning their larvae are adapted to feed on a very narrow range of what are called host plants. Without these host plants, the specialist insect must either adapt to a new plant, which can take thousands of years, or die. This is why there has been a grassroots movement to plant species of milkweed, because that is the only plant species that monarch butterflies will lay their eggs on, as it is the only species their caterpillars can eat. As for bees, many ground-nesting bees are specialists on certain groups of plants. Some are so specialized that they only forage for pollen on one or two species of flowering plants.

Currently, up to 40% of the world’s lands are degraded. Urbanization, habitat destruction, land management practices, and replacement of the native host plants with non-native plants have played a large part in reducing biodiversity. I live in an area where there are a number of walking trails. Imagine my dismay, after reading Tallamy’s book, when I used an app to ID the plants in one of those lush little corridors only to learn that there was nary a native plant in sight.

E.O. Wilson proposed a “half-earth project” in which his goal was to inspire countries to save half of the earth’s land and sea to safeguard the bulk of biodiversity. Douglas Tallamy proposes a domestic version of this—if American homeowners—and this would include apartment dwellers with balconies—would plant part of their landscape with native plant communities, they could create a Homegrown National Park that spreads across the country. It would be a way to connect wildlife and rebuild biodiversity by creating networks of native plants in residential and public spaces. It’s truly something we can all do on an individual level to connect with others and make a difference. As Tallamy says, “78-85% of the land in America is privately owned. The public is the new managers of biodiversity, and they don’t even know it.”

I love the fact that everything on Earth is connected in some way. And, that, like the forces that rule the universe, it’s all a great mystery that we simply can’t comprehend, and we experience it together, yet also individually.

Insects didn’t used to be mysterious to me. In fact, I thought they were either scary, annoying, or not even worth my attention. But here’s what I’ve learned: insects rule the Earth, and we’d better do what we can to help them. Not only that, but they are really interesting! One of the things I love about my part-time job is gathering information for each plant profile. As I am not an expert, I have to look around online to find reliable information about each plant, and I usually come across quirky or fascinating facts about the interactions between plants and insects. One such example is myrmecochory, which is seed dispersal by ants. How would a plant entice an ant to scatter its seeds? Some plants, such as violets, trilliums, and trout lilies, have small, fatty appendages called elaiosomes attached to their seeds. Ants carry the seeds back to their colonies to feed the nutritious elaiosomes to their young. They discard the “worthless” seed into the soft, crumbly soil a distance away from the parent plant, and wah lah, new violets sprout in new areas in the spring.

Another example of a co-survival technique involves toxic compounds. Many plants have adapted to use these to protect themselves, but there’s always some crafty insect that has their number. The leaves and stems of hoptree have glands that release chemical deterrents when crushed, which, by the way, gives it another common name of “stinking ash.” However, the giant swallowtail butterfly adapted to be able to not only consume the plant, but to use these chemicals to protect itself from predators.

Color, on the other hand, is a gentler means of acquiring the help of pollinators. The blue wood aster’s disk flowers start out yellow and turn pink as they age AND when they’ve been successfully pollinated. The color change is a signal to pollinators, steering them away from pink blossoms that are pollinated and nectarless and over to the yellow flowers that still have nectar and need to be pollinated.

For my last example, imagine bees as tiny airplanes amidst a sea of colorful, fragrant flowers. How do some species make sure that they get their share of attention? With very clever marketing. Northern blue flag iris has developed large and colorful blossoms with upright petals that catch the attention of insects. But that’s not all. The sepals are shaped into a sort of landing pad with a little, yellow “runway” that guides visitors into a narrow passage leading to the nectar glands. In other plant species, these guides can be patterns, lines, or spots that may only be visible in ultraviolet light, which is something bees, unlike us, are able to detect. As the bee follows the guiding lines into the flower, it must crawl through a narrow space, and the pollen that is already on the bee’s back from a different floral visit rubs off onto the sticky stigma. As the bee moves further, it runs into pollen-producing anthers and picks up new pollen to carry to the next flower. This adaptation benefits both the flower, which is efficiently pollinated, and the bee, which is able to rapidly collect what it needs and move on. It may also make sure that there’s no ‘nectar robbing’ going on, which is when a bee takes nectar, but fails, in return, to pollinate the flower.

And now I’d like to bring in my closers (Jeff, Jon and Mario) so we can end with a rallying cry:

“Remove invasives, plant natives, and make America biodiverse again!”

Gardening Gives Life by Dan Halterman

“Gardening Gives Life” is accurate in many ways.  Stated specifically by one wiser than I, gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.

“Gardening gives life” and life is based on what we call “the life cycle”… including death.

“Gardening gives life” can be oversimplistic because preventing or eliminating life is nigh impossible.  Life is tenacious. In the center of my concrete patio a thriving thistle plant stands in an expansion joint that apparently lacks all features we attribute to the word, “garden.”

Microbes that thrive in sea-floor volcanic vents or in Yellowstone’s geysers are labeled “extremeophiles,” although their homes are not “extreme” to them. They, and the microscopic, whimsically-shaped tardigrades or “water bears” that can survive flight on a spacecraft’s exterior, make the weed in my patio crack seem overly indulged.

A journal entry from 2018 describes an episode of my ongoing garden education, a disgusting first experience of “black carrot rot” that had turned half my crop to stinky mush in the soil.  Grabbing tight onto the top of a large carrot to ease it from its bed is normal.  Fingers puncturing into decayed ick is not.

I wanted to consume life, given by gardening, in the form of living carrot tissue.  Something called, quote “Pectobacterium carotovorum (previously called Erwinia carotovora), or Dickeya dadantii (previously called Erwinia chrysanthemi), or certain species of Pseudomonas, Bacillus, or Clostridium” unquote, got there first and consumed “my” carrots.  Before I had my chance, they ate that life in the form of living carrot tissue I assumed I would eat. That’s because “everything is food for someone else” and food means life.  My gardening gave life, alright…to the carrots and then to that host of microbes.

“Gardening gives life” to those whose passion is gardening.  A person not resonant with gardening is unlikely to become a gardener, or may try gardening and soon move to something better.  The “life” gardening gives to gardeners is balm for that driving, devouring passion, the intense desire or enthusiasm gardening means to one so afflicted. I understand some people like to golf.  Some enjoy golfing; others can’t stay away from the course.  I can’t stay away from the garden. 

I focus on vegetable growing and soil care and feeding to help maintain the soil life that helps the food plants I want to grow well grow well.  Compost bins are a major piece of the enterprise, and composting is nothing more nor less than life-death cycling. Edward C. Smith, in The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, says, “Folk wisdom has it that a poor gardener grows weeds, a good gardener grows vegetables, and a very good gardener grows soil.”

At its highest, best ideal, a garden gives the gardener what he or she presumes to want from the activity and lucre invested.  The life, though, happens regardless and comes from death, as Wendell Berry explains in “The Man Born to Farming”: “The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death yearly and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap and rise again in the corn.” 

A month before my black carrot rot teachable moment, I was cleaning the garlic harvest when I heard the cry of a red-tailed hawk – it was circling on a thermal, apparently enjoying the ride as I enjoyed the sound and the sight.  A soaring bird of prey announcing its presence articulates freedom we cannot comprehend while it is intent only on changing a mouse or rabbit or snake into flight fuel and skin, bone, feather, or offspring, the bird transforming the captured life into energy to allow its continued life.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book “Orwell’s Roses,” (and I recommend any of her books) describes one aspect of the life gardening gives – “In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.”

Which leads straight to Richard Foster wisdom in his book, “Prayer,” where he tells us that avoiding the pervasive lies and illusions is critical to living, quoting here, “as close to the truth as possible: the truth about ourselves, the truth about others, the truth about the world in which we live.  Humility is, in fact, filled with power to bring forth life.  The word itself comes from Latin humus, which means fertile ground.”

That loops us back to today’s reading, the psalmist crediting fertile ground to Yahweh’s good gardening – “God causes the grass to grow for the livestock and plants for humans to cultivate, that they may bring forth food from the earth.”  That is only true through the ageless cycling of life and death growing soil.

And when the gardener stops participating, the life gardening gives continues.