Not long ago, when advising some friends who were about to start a garden, I told them to plant a state-of-the-art garden, meaning not a technologically complex one, but rather one in accord with the best knowledge we have of what constitutes excellence in a home garden. This can be expressed on the smallest levels – get the best-bred cultivars and best-performing plants – but more important than that are two principles which are emerging as good guiding principles for small gardens. The first is to plant edibles. Every bit of research indicates that fresh, local calories represent the fullest development of arete–virtu-excellence in food. While there are some crazies who hate any kind of “mess” like fruits or nuts when it comes to plants, people are generally amenable to this idea (and there are plants like blueberries and serviceberries and strawberries which create no mess).
The second principle is to use native plants. This requires more persuasion and argumentation. Many of the most desirable plants – which look good with no maintenance whatsoever through the entire year – are not native. The classic Northeastern American garden is composed mostly of nonnatives: ivy, pachysandra, boxwood, yew, flowering cherries, hostas, daylilies, japanese maple, peonies, most roses, barberry, forsythia, rose of sharon, daffodils, tulips, lilacs, and so on. Refusing to install these plants leaves you with a significantly reduced plant palette. And while many nonnative plants are delicate, others like pachysandra and ivy appear to be made of iron and will grow beautifully where other plants will look spindly and miserable. It is a sacrifice to give up such plants.
But the argument to stop using these plants is becoming increasingly persuasive. The full argument has not yet been put together, because the reasons, which have to do with the health of the entire ecosystem, are extraordinarily complex, but the two books which put the case most convincingly are Sara Stein’s Noah’s Garden and Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home.
Stein’s book is casual in tone and serves as a kind of memoir of her garden career: she had purchased a large suburban property, admiring its abundance of life, and in the process of turning it into a well-tended garden, she managed to drive away precisely the charismatic fauna she had enjoyed. She cleared a field of weeds that had been home to monarch butterflies, and put in perennial borders and shrubs which the monarchs did not visit. Eventually she realized that monarch movements are keyed specifically to asters and (especially) goldenrod, which most gardeners treat as weeds, and of course they depend entirely on the presence of milkweed to feed their caterpillars. In clearing these plants out, despite the fact that her property looked neater and did have flowers, she ended up killing any monarchs that might once have been nourished by her property. This is but one of many stories from the book, which has as its general lesson: the native animals have all evolved to gather food from specific native plants at very specific times. Even substituting a foreign viburnum for a native one in order to get blooms later in the year may mean that it can no longer provide berries for birds at the precise time they are in the area on their migrations. The system is inimitably complex, and the best thing to do is to preserve or restore it as much as possible. Stein describes her adventures remaking her garden with native plants, and seeing, with real satisfaction, the return of the animals that had been driven out by her pachysandra and daffodils and lilacs and forsythia.
Douglas Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home makes a more thorough and scientific argument (which I will detail shortly), focusing especially on insects. Even North American insects show astounding beauty and diversity, and Tallamy’s book is one of the few nature-books photographed in Delaware – and in mere suburban gardens – which is legitimately beautiful. However, even for an entomologist like Tallamy, the insect-plant relationship is hopelessly complicated, and so Tallamy focuses merely on “lepidopterans” – butterflies and moths – as insects that we can all agree are worth protecting. Even with such a narrow focus, there are literally hundreds of species locked into highly specific life cycles utterly dependent on the presence of native plants in the Northeastern United States, and understanding or replacing the whole system of interrelationships is impossible. Tallamy’s main conclusion is the same as Stein’s: plant natives.
It is worth taking a look at the basic argument, which is continually being elaborated as the state of the art advances. It goes something like this: all life on earth (with only trivial exceptions) derives its energy from the sun via the photosynthetic process of plants. All animals either eat plant-tissue or eat other animals which have eaten plant-tissue. All ecosystems are elaborate modes of extracting energy from plants, and in every natural ecosystem every plant provides food for multiple other creatures. If this interface is severed, then there will necessarily be less life on earth. This is precisely what happens with nonnative plants. Pachysandra looks good all the time in North America because almost nothing can eat it. It is virtually a plastic plant. Hence all of the energy it captures from the sun remains pachysandra, and is not converted into caterpillars or lightning bugs or deer or anything else. Hence fewer butterflies and fawns and fireflies.
Of course the amount of solar energy the pachysandra by your driveway captures is insignificant, but of course the amount of petroleum you yourself consume is insignificant too. No one has done a thorough census of these things, but a large percentage of the plant material in North America is now nonnative – supposedly around 40% in the New York City area, even worse in places like California. Farmland of course contains few natives and no wildlife either, so much of the interior of the continent is now ecologically barren – supposedly around 2% of the prairie remains in a relatively natural state. When your eyes become trained to recognize nonnative plants, it becomes slightly frightening to realize that you can drive for hundreds of miles without coming across a single undisturbed plot of native plants. The scale of our alterations to the landscape is mindboggling.
What is more, the effect we have on plants has an exponential effect on the upper reaches of the ecosystem. If you reduce, say, the density of native plants by ten percent, that may reduce the density of mice by twenty percent; which may reduce the density of owls, bobcats, and snakes by fifty percent, or eliminate them entirely. This helps explain the seemingly impossible descriptions of North American wildlife by the earliest Europeans – we almost cannot conceive of an environment so fecund – but it may well have been like that, at one point.
The good side of this massive manipulation of the environment by human beings is that if we can manipulate vegetation in one direction, with some attention we can manipulate it back. Not only that, but such a project does not require giant investment on a vast impersonal scale, like “the hydrogen economy” or things of that nature. Almost any homeowner can make minor improvements which will enable his land to support more life; and there is room for eco-Johnny Appleseeds, to restore the landscape; there is increasing interest in nurseries and landscaping businesses of this type. And the rewards can be quick and tangible: on many occasions as the landscaping company I work for has put in plants, we have found that by the end of the day, as we are cleaning up the site, the first bees and butterflies have found the plants we just installed. And single gardens do make a difference: my mother’s garden was always noticeably different from others in the neighborhood, because she did less “gardening,” let things go to seed, composting all garden waste rather than throwing it away, etc.
Some of this requires a departure from traditional gardening, which I will call Selfish Giant gardening, after the figure in the Fairy Tale. The Selfish Giant, for instance, will kill a caterpillar or beetle he sees eating a plant. Tallamy reminds us that insects are utterly essential to life on earth: not only are they pollinators and seed dispersers and scavengers with a huge role in producing humus, but they are also the most efficient converters of plant tissue into animal tissue, and hence become the most important food source for predators. Even large animals like bears and coyotes eat insects. And almost all birds rely on insects as protein sources when feeding their young. In short, plants are the interface between the sun and life, and insects are the prime interface between plants and the rest of Nature. And most insects, we know, are so specifically adapted into niches that they can only survive with plants with which they share an evolutionary history (i.e., natives). What is more, in cold climates they almost all die during the winter, and their eggs must overwinter somewhere, often in leaves or plant stems or seedpods; precisely the things that Selfish Giants clean up and burn (or bag and send to the dump).
It will be asked then, will this insect-friendly gardening not create endless pest problems? The answer, in general, is no: a garden which is hospitable to herbivorous insects also thereby becomes hospitable to any number of animals which eat herbivorous insects, and if the system is complex enough, it will find a balance. The biggest exception will be introduced pests which are themselves nonnative: these at times run amok. But if you are planting a diversity of species, you will not find them all destroyed by insects. Nature knows how to damage without destroying.
This is becoming the new gardening, not merely to find beauty in visual arrangement, but to take the perspective of Life itself: whatever nourishes the life around it, is beautiful; and whatever stays within itself, inert and ungiving, is ugly. The pleasure you receive thereby, seeing not only your plants but the life your plants sustain, is like that of Adam in paradise; the other animals become your brothers, and admire your gardens with you, and you find God himself strolling through them in the cool of evening.
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