Faux Native Plant Myths and the Horticulture Industry That Promotes Them

It's time to stop blaming native plants and the gardeners who love and promote them for industry failures.

Misti Little

Sep 03, 2023

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-14:47

White fringetree, Chionanthus virginicus

Several times this summer I’ve written about native plants. It’s a theme I think about often as I know many other gardeners do as well. I am probably going to be rather harsh today and this will likely be controversial but it’s frankly something that is needed because too many people are willing to pussy-foot around the subject.

The other day a well-known and respected horticulturist and professor, Dr. Allan Armitage, wrote Allan Armitage on the Myth of Pollinator Plants in Greenhouse Grower. I heard about it via Garden Rant, a place I check in from time to time but take most of what is said there with a grain of salt as it lost most of its luster back in the 2000s. About every 6-8 weeks they publish some kind of eye-rolling screed on native plants and every now and then I’m enticed to comment but generally I growl to myself and move on. There are very well-known garden writers who both write for Garden Rant and comment on there, as well as well-known garden designers and influencers who pop in from time to time. It may not be as visited by newer gardeners who can be found on Instagram, but it is still a significant influence among older gardeners and those in the industry.

Unfortunately what Dr. Armitage published is nothing new and is more of the same pitiful reasoning for shaming the native plant movement and for conventional gardeners and horticulturists to shift the blame off themselves and onto the movement that is challenging their systems. Let’s look at some of what he wrote.

Everywhere I speak, anything I read, every trend I hear about mentions the importance of pollinators. On a global level, I understand this rallying cry, but in my garden, I’m not so sure. Good grief, on the one hand we understand the importance of pollination to produce fruit and seed, yet on the other hand, half of the new cultivars we have bred for the garden are sterile.

I can’t tell if he’s just outright admitting the fault of the horticulture industry here or if it’s a hard look at how bad his own garden is. If you are planting such a significant amount of sterile new cultivars in your garden you are doing it wrong and you are certainly at fault here.

The fact that most gardeners and landscapers don’t want plants to reseed and have no use for the fruit of impatiens or baptisia is not important — the concept of attracting the good guys in the garden is.

Oh boy. Talk about such a human centric set of statements. Does he not understand that in pollinator or wildlife gardening that wildlife actually want those fruit? Let’s pretend he didn’t use impatiens as an example, but baptisia seeds are eaten birds and caterpillars. While we’re at it, are genista broom moths a good guy? Because their larvae eat baptisia and people love to forget many moths are also pollinators and rely on flowers for a nectar source, and instead berate their larvae for even existing because they ate their precious plant. We’re gardening for the ecosystem, not necessarily for ourselves, though that’s a nice byproduct. I guarantee the list of good guys for these types of gardeners are extremely narrow.

I enjoy native plants; as with pollinators, I understand their importance to the ecosystem in general, and we have gleefully jumped on the native bandwagon. In fact, we as an industry have done a marvelous job of marketing the term “native” — to the point that every local, state, and federal contract demands the use of natives/nativars in the planting. We have touted the importance of natives not as a better performer, not even as a prettier plant than non- natives, but because they are “essential for pollinators.”

Yeah, y’all have greenwashed the hell out of the marketing! Good job! You did so well you forgot to start providing regionally appropriate native plants as well as educating non-ecologically minded gardeners on how plants really grow in habitat. (How many times do I need to keep reading how a native plant is invasive? *sobs*) Why is “essential for pollinators” in scare quotes? Do you not agree that native plants are undeniably essential for our insect life? Not only for larval stages but the adult stages as well as every carnivorous insect that isn’t a pollinator but is part of the ecosystem and thus requires those pollinators to drop by for a sip of nectar so that they can then be turned into food for a cute green lynx spider?? Seriously, what’s the scare quotes really about here?

Perhaps, we may have been a little overzealous in our enthusiasm. While it is true that many native plants are excellent pollinators, let’s get real here. The reason for a flower’s existence, any flower anywhere in the world, is to attract pollinators. To suggest that non-native plants are not good for pollinators is silly, and perhaps a little too patriotic, don’t you think?

Wow, talk about colonial thinking here. Also, some wonky wording here regarding what a flower’s purpose is when wind pollinates a lot of plants that wildlife doesn’t. This whole paragraph is very generalist and frankly lazy.

If we are marketing pollinator plants as a landscape/garden trend, tying pollinator plants to only natives eliminates half our palette. Of course we should market our natives alongside pollinators, but let’s not ignore all the other excellent attractors on our benches, even though they don’t make it on the natives lists.

What in the heck do you think happens 10 miles away in a local state park or national forest? Are pollinators or insects suffering because not enough people are planting butterfly bush in those habitats? Nooooo. They are suffering because back in your subdivision the habitat they thrived in has been annihilated. Yes, we tie pollinator plants to natives for a very specific reason, to create habitat that is similar to our own local, natural habitats. But yes, we are eliminating some of our palette at garden centers because the horticulture industry refuses to provide appropriate plants and a diversity of plants to the public. Again, the horticulture industry is a big problem here, one that they refuse to see. You aren’t thinking outside the box hard enough if you think you are eliminating half your palette when you go to plant your garden for pollinators.

He closes with a list of his favorite non-native pollinator plants:

My top tier: Salvias (almost any kind), Calamintha, Buddleia, Agastache, Nepeta
Excellent: Allium, lavender, Russian sage (almost any flowers in the mint family), sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias
Not good: Stay away from double flowered anything, there is little available pollen or nectar

Props for the double flowered discussion—that’s been well documented and more people are finally talking about that. But the rest? This is the most basic of basic plants lists I’ve ever seen. I mean, he is right about any flowers in the mint family, but you know what flowers are in the mint family that are native and are stellar and blow some of these other non-natives listed out of the water, and are conveniently not discussed in favor for some of these banal examples: Monarda sp., Callicarpa americana, Scutelleria sp., Teucrium sp., Pycnanthemum sp., Trichostema sp., and Salvia sp., as mentioned, is also a great one, native to some regions, not to others, check your local field guides for species.

Listen, I love zinnias as much as the next person and have grown them and will grow them again in the future. But I’m not so deluded to think they provide more of an overall ecological service greater than that of a diverse and appropriate native plant habitat. Do butterflies nectar on them? Yes. But I don’t see wasps or small, native bees on them. You know what I see those wasps, bees, dragonflies, and other insects visiting or nectaring on the most? Native plants.

I was going to launch into some more rebuttals of some of the recent Garden Rant posts but think I’ll save that for another essay. They certainly deserve a hard look.

As I’ve said when I was producing the podcast and what I’ve written on my blog and on this newsletter in the past, gardeners must get an ecological education. You have to get outside of your own yard, beyond the local nursery, and out into your wild spaces around you. You need to know what ecoregion you live in, the subtleties of your local habitat, to understand how it all works together. Especially if you are trying to create a native plant landscape. Prairie is very popular right now and there are prairies in many states, but not every locale is set up for a prairie. Forests, wetlands, deserts are all wonderful habitats and if your local landscape used to be that, consider trying to mimic it as best as you can in your own home landscape.

There’s also some thoughts that native plant gardens must be showy or full of flowers all of the time. If you walk in a forest you will see a lot of trees and understory shrubs and a lot of grasses. Wetlands will be dominated by grasses and sedges. There will be forbs in both a forest and wetland habitat but certainly not set up in the highly designed landscape that a garden designer would dream up for you. Many people look at these systems and think they aren’t functioning because they aren’t bustling with blooms. They would be wrong. (Literal comment from one of those GR posts…yes, I’m going to have to rebut that one for certain.)

This is the disconnect between the horticulture industry and actual ecology minded gardening. Another thing that baffles me, especially when reading the comments to Dr. Armitage’s post on Facebook and the Garden Rant posts on their site and Facebook, is that people seem to think native plant enthusiasts are becoming mainstream when they really aren’t. It may be prominent because it is talked about on social media or written in some magazines or blogs online, but in reality native plant gardens are extremely uncommon. Just drive through any neighborhood and tell me what the ratio is of generic landscapes of grass and a few non-native shrubs compared to a native plant landscaped yard. Or compare a conventional garden to a native plant garden and what the ratio is to that. Native plant gardening is still in the extreme minority.

I stopped following most horticulturists and conventional gardeners when I stopped updating the podcast’s Instagram account in 2022. I had always followed biologists and ecologists on my personal account and continue to do so. People like Lilly Anderson-Messec, Plants are People Too, or the Native Habitat Project are great places to begin. It will get you out of the rut of saying negative things about native plant enthusiasts because they show you on the ground repercussions for habitat loss and what happens when invasive species take over landscapes.

Here’s the thing these anti-native plant people don’t get. You can just say you grow plants for yourself. We don’t care and we get it. Just say that you grow butterfly bush because you like it. If you feel threatened because someone is trying to tell you it is invasive in some places or doesn’t provide a substantial amount of nutrition to a variety of species, well, maybe that’s on you for being unwilling to learn more or being unwilling to admit you plant it because you like it. Just say that. There’s no reason to continue writing anti-native plant posts because ecologically minded folks are trying to alert people to the abject habitat loss that is currently happening everywhere.

I grow quite a few non-native plants, mostly because I like them. A few do provide some ecosystem services but some haven’t done anything (looking at you ligularia that has never bloomed and is basically providing nothing…I got it because I liked the look of them but now realize they are basically useless in my garden. I really should rip it out.) I can readily admit that I enjoy growing banana trees, zinnias, roselle, brugmansias, plumerias, and gingers because I enjoy the look of them. The banana trees provide some nectar to hummingbirds when they come through in late summer and early fall but other than finding saddleback caterpillars on them a few years ago, they essentially don’t do much for the ecosystem. I’m ok with that. The gingers are also basically non-existent on the ecosystem services, though they are pretty. Again, I’m ok with that because they aren’t invasive and I have a lot of other plants that do provide ecosystem services in comparison to the ratio of native plants I do have. Now, if this were an all conventional garden landscape? It would be a drastically less interesting and diverse situation wildlife-wise if my garden was like that.

We would all be a lot better off if some of these die-hard conventional gardeners just admitted they like to grow things for themselves instead of constantly trying to find ways to project their issues onto native plant gardeners. Instead of writing terrible blog articles with little to back them up, repeating the same old adages and myths to gain a few points on social media, open your mind a little and look outside the box. You’ve been stuffed inside the horticultural industrial complex for far too long. Take a hike. See some new landscapes.