There is this odd intersection of my life where politics and gardening collide. It has to do with a word and a concept: native. In a nutshell, there is confusion at the moment between the concepts of native plants and native peoples. It involves value judgement, i.e. native is good, non-native not so good. And it is particularly difficult to talk about with people concerned about social justice and the acceptance and well-being of immigrants to America.
A local politician recently railed against a suggestion that all the plantings in a public park should be native plants which he took to mean that people not native to America were also not desired.
People I work with in natural habitat restoration projects also have questions about the good of using only native plants. But we are also faced with an array of plants we call "invasives" that displace native vegetation and reduce the value of habitat for native fauna (and the native fauna also are losing ground to the "introduced" fauna). In gardening, the term is "weed" and we gardeners don't want them. But one gardener's weed may be another's prize specimen.
Our gardens are highly artificial environments so it's hard to justify excluding plants that didn't grow there before (and the question is when was before?). On the other hand, if you take a walk into the nearby hills with someone who is very concerned about a creekside habitat that is becoming a monoculture of escaped Algerian ivy, or blue Vinca (periwinkle) the implications are far-reaching.
I remember a friend describing the countryside of northern England (Yorkshire) after her first visit there. She said the countryside was entirely artificial now. Meaning that there weren't any "native" plants anymore. And very few wild animals either. Even few birds. And this in the nation famous for it's gardens and gardeners.
So, what to do? Getting back to politics, people and plants are not alike. Human society is not ecology. Humans can move around, adapt to situations, and assess danger relatively rapidly. Plants and animals have fewer options. When a housing development ploughs over an ephemeral vernal pool where a small population of flowers has evolved over millions of years there is no place for those flowers to go. They have lost their niche forever. California poppies have a good chance of hanging on because we like to grow them in our gardens and they have a way of reseeding themselves all over the place.
The recent discovery of a pathogen that kills California oak trees has me more worried. I cannot imagine a California landscape without oak trees. Which perhaps is why, in my own backyard, where the local (non native) squirrels have buried hundreds of acorns from the next door neighbor's giant old oak, I am letting them grow. There are maybe twenty now and they may one day turn my bedding plots into an oak grove. But I feel a need to ensure that there is another generation of oak trees there. I have heard that my neighbor is planning to build a house on the spot where the old oak grows.
Posted by briggs at February 10, 2004 4:50 PM