Native Plants as a Moral Issue? Consider Me Chief Heretic.

It is summer and I am standing in a large field/garden of native plants. It is one of thousands just like it, and I have seen so many in the last several years – a rangy offering of the usual suspects that effortlessly cements the gardener’s reputation as one of The Good, if not the imaginative.

This time, I am walking with a non-gardening friend who is fully innocent to the industry buzz words and native plant orthodoxies that have built up steam in this country over the last decade. Consequently she is confused by the definition of garden currently swirling around her.

She is unaware of what she would find attractive and what she would reject, if only she knew better – if only she was better. And she does not understand why her confusion makes her ignorant in the eyes of those who are. 

Is she indeed in a garden? Where is the hand of the gardener she asks?

Apart from the official looking sign at eye level designating this space as Good and Just, it looks much like the open space in the back of her subdivision that she certainly enjoys, but instinctively recognizes as a post-wild wildness – a non-managed space in compacted subsoil where native and non-native species battle, pair, or perish. Or evolve.

I smile at her honest assessment and correct her with tongue firmly in cheek. Evolve? Not on our watch they don’t.  Not anymore. That’s so pre-1492.

Worthy of love…or hate.

As we walk, she points to a scrubby, juvenile tree, marking a bend in the path. She is once again confused. Why is an evil [Asian] tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), in a landscape dedicated to the eradication of non-native plants?

Because it isn’t one, I tell her. It’s a stag horn sumac (Rhus typhina). We stop for a moment, and I regard this Eastern North American native tree with fresh eyes.

How similar the compound leaves are to Ailanthus at this stage in its growth. Both suckering, both warriors in disturbed and mistreated soils. Both colorful. Both flowering. Both seed bearing. Both fast growing. Both medicinal.

My mind wanders to similar pairs… the shade tolerant dominance of Matteuccia struthiopteris and Petasities japonicus. The vining and twining Campsis radicans and Wisteria sinensis. The pollinator magnetism of Solidago rugosa and Foeniculum vulgare.

One aggressive. One invasive. One a saint. One a sinner.

Native Plant Supremacy In a Changing Climate?

We wander further and delve deeper. I cite texts she has not read, invoke the names of prophets she does not recognize, and I suddenly feel uncomfortable with the obvious tone of my apologist patter. I stop pattering.

Her occasional questions now hang in the silence of this space, acknowledged by nods on my part. They are earnest, and curious.

How do species co-evolve if they’re not allowed to begin?

Why aren’t we thankful for adaptive plants in compromised ecosystems?

If xenophobia is bad, why are we doing it with plants?

If the issue is about the human pace of change, isn’t a meteor wiping out three quarters of life on Earth pretty damned rapid?

The last two questions make me smile; but I know we should grapple with them, and many other inconsistencies in a post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, post-Darwin world. She does not know that it’s so much easier not to ask those questions — that reputations are easily savaged in an age of social media; and being brave (or naive) enough to start a discussion against prevailing thought or powerful groups marks you as a dissenter.

That didn’t work out well for Socrates or for Galileo or Semmelweis when there was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter. Modern heretics beware — on a changing planet, the only constant is human nature. And from the Pagans of Athens to the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages, humans can be vicious when they believe themselves to be morally right.

A Moment of Honesty

So, we walk in silence. She – eyes up, having decided that the cumulus cloud-filled sky is vastly more interesting than the textural homogeneity that surrounds us. Me – struggling with my own honest reaction to this landscape, even as I recognize many plants around me that I value and grow.

 

With no colleagues to please, no egos to stroke, no friends to lose in this moment at least, how do I truly feel about this particular garden that surrounds me — one of so many poorly implemented when good intentions meet lack of skill, and then are elevated by virtue of their virtue?

I am tired of pretending it’s a garden.

In fact, the only way I can call it a garden is by using Britishisms which generously term any green space owned by a property a ‘garden’ instead of an American front- or backyard. 

It’s a meadow. A field. A prairie transported. A slice of the [somewhat] natural world. A wildish open space that’s interesting to walk through if the paths are wide enough and the season is late enough. It is a space that looks as if the owner took seed, scattered it to the winds, and mowed paths when it grew.

But I do not think of it as a garden — where at its best, human vision, knowledge, skill, artistry, and stewardship enhance ecotype in a celebration of flora & fauna; and by doing so, create something worth preaching about: an inclusive biodiversity that doesn’t place origin over merit.

And in five years, without an army of interns or volunteers to edit exotic interlopers and aggressive thugs, it will be something very different indeed. I wonder if the owner knows?

 

Qui Bono?

To say the movement has built up steam in the last decade is to vastly understate it.  We have swung our pendulum hard — from badly ignoring our native flora, to recognizing their preciousness, to insisting they are always the best, brightest and most beautiful in any given garden.  There is even a puritan faction that insists that the breeding of native plants to create cultivars (many of which might hybridize themselves given enough time) is terribly wrong.

And of course there is also a Who benefits? aspect to this new orthodoxy. Trends to be capitalized upon. Brands to be forged. Click-bait content to be created. Names to be made. Grant money to be secured. How can we hope for truth in data, and broad-based research when we begin in the premise that ‘biodiversity’ is synonymous with native plants only?

What a shortsighted statement. How ignorant of the massive geological and climatological changes to our 4.5 billion year old planet, and the simple fact that all co-evolved species — every ‘pristine’ ecosystem —  must have a starting point.

MANY starting points in fact.

And yet I have seen it countless times – from government sponsored websites, to advocacy groups, to social media posts.  You might as well say biodiversity begins and ends in a box. The parameters of which you have created. The contents of which you have designated.

And you sure as hell better keep that box closed.

Religiosity Can Take Many Forms

Why do we grant one plant moral superiority and damn another by virtue of an evolutionary journey that abruptly ended with an easy line drawn on a four and a half billion-year-old planet? By men. For men. 

How long will that line separating angel and demon hold up as the climate shifts?  How much longer can the fallacy of native plants as the best-adapted species be shouted from the pulpits when we must fight tooth and nail to preserve and curate so many of them against species obviously better adapted? To our weather. To our soils. To the numerous wounds we have inflicted on the planet?

Our fauna are beginning to adapt – even if we refuse to watch those baby steps.  Are we prioritizing our instinctive need for control with theirs to evolve?

Are we conflating our justified horror of industrial development and the loss of wild spaces, with the loss of native species outcompeted in altered environments?

Do we find the underdog narrative too compelling to resist?

 

 

It’s well past time to be brave and question the tenets of what increasingly feels like a new faith.

Openly. Methodically. Scientifically. Without bias, agenda, or original sin.

Let’s celebrate our native species. Not sanctify them. – MW