What's So Good about Native Plants anyway?

 Since I moved to Prairie Hill, my consciousness about native plants has grown considerably. Earlier in my life, I doubt I even thought about the difference between the plants I saw growing in the fields and garden, and plants that were native to Iowa. I thought I knew a lot about plants! I was a farm girl, so I saw the fields of corn and soybeans and oats and hay all around me, and all the vegetables in my mother's garden. That was my reference point, and when I grew up, I ordered vegetables from the seed catalogs for my own gardens, not even thinking about the history and development of the seeds I was planting. It's amazing to me now that I had very little awareness of native versus altered or introduced plants. 

So I have been doing lots of reading and observing. And since I have been doing this during a time when our country is going through serious division and controversy, I've been wondering about evolution of life in general. How has our species come to the present crisis where money, wealth, and prestige seem to have taken precedence over honesty, humility and caring for the whole system? Although in many ways, we have evolved, we are clearly in trouble as a species everywhere, tending to make decisions that threaten our very existence in the future. I try to imagine myself hovering over the planet when thinking like this, try to have curiosity and a bit of distance. I wonder whether our own native species eons ago had more resilience and more ability to put others before personal gain. There are many wonderful and admirable things about the human species, but it would seem we've hit a tough point in our evolution. Let's hope we can draw on those resilient attributes that all life has at its core somewhere, and come through this hard patch.

Thinking about the wider issue of native species in general has made the study of native plants more interesting to me. One of the things I have found especially fascinating is that in general, native plants have co-evolved through the years with their whole ecosystem. This means that there is a cooperative beneficial interaction between a native plant and the other life around it: the insects, birds, animals, and microbial life below the ground. The system has been fine-tuning itself over generations so that it works well and all of its components are nurtured and well established. That makes sense. No one takes over. This natural evolution tends toward balance and health. 

Then comes human intervention. Not that anyone can blame us. We needed to eat, and we learned many centuries ago that it was possible to grow our own food rather than depending upon finding it in the wild. It was a creative and helpful development, and back then we had no way of knowing that far in the future the earth would be covered with millions of acres of mono-crops. By observation and initiative, we found ways of having a more predictable diet by intentionally growing some of it. Then gradually we learned that we could choose our favorite plants and save their seeds to promote specific qualities: bigger fruits or more cold resistance, sweeter flavors, earlier harvesting. And so over the centuries we have gently changed plants to favor our needs. 

Different from these first gardens cared for by primitive people, native plants have evolved by themselves over thousands of years in response to ecosystem characteristics such as climate, diseases, insect and animal life, soil and water quality. They tend to be highly resilient, deep rooted, and independent of us humans. So they don't need cultivating like our typical garden vegetables do. They don't need fertilizers or pesticides, and they can get by with little water during droughts. Their complex root systems tend to build healthy soil and reduce runoff after large rain events. And they sequester carbon underground, often better than trees in forests. Clearly native species have lots of advantages over introduced species or plants that have been genetically altered. And it would seem that they are better for our environment in general

However, over the centuries people have found ways of breeding plants with specific characteristics. Some changes have to do with appearance: bigger flowers, more vivid colors, earlier blooms. A landscape gardener tends to have different aims than the natural evolutionary process: visual interest, a sense of organized place, multicultural appeal, ground cover and ease of management. And of course, a plant breeder working with vegetables would encourage larger fruits, earlier ripening, enhanced taste, and compact form. Plant breeding has come so far these days that many flowers are incapable of procreating on their own; their flowers don't make viable seeds. Yet these changes in plants would seem to be making them more to our liking. Is there any harm in it?

As you can imagine, there are two sides to this. Ecologists and nature lovers in general tend to fall onto the side of protecting and increasing native plants. And for good reasons. A native plant has been a part of the wider ecosystem for a long time, and it has adapted physically, chemically and genetically to that system. Pollinators depend upon the flowers and spread the pollen, birds depend upon the fruits and spread the seeds, animals depend upon the landscape for their homes, soil organisms thrive on the environment the deep roots of natives provide. It is a circle of dependency that is pretty self-sufficient. There is also a healthy diversity in lands that are allowed to go native. And diversity is considered a hallmark of health in an ecosystem. So natives seem to have a lot going for them.

The folks who are vigilantly protecting native areas are worried about all these good things disappearing when people interfere with the landscape. And of course, we interfere with the landscape all the time. In urban areas, 70% of the plants are non-native. And of course if you look at farmland, it's surely more than that. The truth is that native plants are being pushed out by our "progress". When one or more species is diminished in an ecosystem, the whole system is affected. The balance has been disrupted, the support systems have been damaged. Not so good. And yet that is where we are here on planet earth, and it seems unlikely that this will change.

My answer to this is to just learn about native species and find areas in which to plant them. For many years now I've turned my living room into a greenhouse and from February to April I've started herb, flower and vegetable seeds inside before planting them in my garden. Yet I had never planted seeds of a native species before this past winter. Many of these natives need "stratification" in order to germinate (a couple months outside in freezing temperatures). So I planted a good many flats of native flower seeds and let them sit outside beside my home from early February until May. By April, they were beginning to germinate. Then once they had their second and third leaves, I began to transplant each of them into their own little 4-packs, and let them grow some more. By the end, I had something like 1500 little plants waiting to be adopted! And now ALL of them have been planted around Prairie Hill. Many are already blooming. And they are beautiful!

I'm sure that unless our civilization collapses completely and everything goes back to nature, we will probably have less and less native plants growing on our lands. But wherever it's possible to help them continue, we can promote them and plant them. No need to fight the ongoing procession of progress. We can just do in our own little areas what we can, and enjoy the peace of mind that comes from watching these wonderful resilient and beautiful plants, the result of thousands of years of creative evolution. They can be teachers, if we have time to listen and watch.