We're Asking Too Much From Native Plant Gardens and Gardeners
As much as we want them to be, our gardens are not habitat replicas--they are microcosms of novel ecosystems amidst rampant habitat loss.
The TL:DR - To simplify—plant native plants in your gardens but realize we cannot adequately re-create diverse, native habitat on a landscape scale with the plants we have available right now. Stop letting other people hold you back because it isn’t “good enough”—there is no hierarchy when you are limited by what is available to you.
I’m on a roll again, y’all. I have a different post drafted about monarchs and milkweed and social media that I’m working on revising and hope to get out here in a few weeks. I’ve been sitting on it for about two weeks because I can’t decide whether to directly state names and groups or whether to be obscure about it. It’s almost too important not to share the names but I want to make sure what I’m saying or suggesting is air tight. And it’s probably not an angle you are expecting from me.
Also, as I re-read this, I realize I may come across as contradicting myself a few times but it’s really so I can get from one topic to another and try to show how they are related. I hope it isn’t confusing.
Nevertheless, all of that plays into what I’m going to write here today and what I wrote last August in The Case for a Messy Native Plant Garden. What I wrote then:
Our wild, natural spaces aren’t gardens. Gardens are manufactured ideas of nature and while they can be beautiful, they aren’t the same as truly restoring an ecosystem. How many social media posts have I come across recently about someone “re-wilding” their yard and yet have native plants that aren’t even from their local ecoregion. Just call it a garden. It’s fine and is perfectly acceptable. Let’s stop pretending most of our gardens are more than what they really are. They are a balm for our souls and for what wildlife uses them but they aren’t much more than a band-aid for the wounds we’ve given to the world.
I think it’s still holds up now six months later.
We’re being too precious about our gardens and it’s damaging how we interact with each other and moving forward on any kind of work to be done for native plant gardening and habitat restoration. We’re trying too hard to be perfect when it comes to native plant gardening and at the same time trying to assign so much more to our gardens than they actually are.
I’m coming at this topic from a few different thought trains. The first being absolutely shocked at seeing some development in an area I wasn’t expecting last week. Last year I started visiting cemeteries on my lunch break to botanize and naturalize, to see something different. I’ve followed a couple of other botanists here in Texas who would frequently shared from cemeteries and I thought it was something worth checking out in my own area. It’s definitely revealed at least one county record plant in a prairie remnant at one cemetery and several other interesting and uncommon species. You will never find these species in cultivation or seeds for sale unless you find the nerdiest plant nerd out there willing to trade you other seeds for them…and even then, unlikely.
I hadn’t been on Google Maps for one of the cemeteries in a while and was floored by what I saw in Exhibit A above. I shouldn’t have been surprised but I honestly thought it would be maybe another decade before I saw development out there because it is a fairly rural area. Or was. NW Houston is sprawling like no other right now. As I drove out to this cemetery I saw many adjacent farm fields with big For Sale signs up and knew the writing was on the wall: Coming soon, more developments and likely all of the box stores to go with it. I mean, I’ve been seeing it for the last few years after a new cut-through road opened, watching dump trucks bringing and taking fill in from formerly forested properties that have been clear cut to hell.
The image above is the one where I found that county record plant and some other oddball species. Yeah, this area had already been altered before with pastures, some development, the road, and most of those forested areas have probably been cut over at least twice, but it was a more “natural” habitat.
As you can see in Exhibit C, if there are any other plants of my county record plant out there near that cemetery, their days are numbered. If you think the surrounding “undeveloped” properties adjacent aren’t going to be developed next, you’re delusional. It’s coming sooner rather than later.
Which brings me to the second train of thought for why I decided to revisit this topic. Facebook. Ah, yes, the perennial cesspool. I’ve stayed because sometimes there are some good things to glean but more often than not I think it’s just a reactionary space to hold onto biases of all kinds. Gardening isn’t free from that.
I’ll elaborate more on that when I finally get the milkweed post up but there are a few points I will make, re: Facebook and groups from things being talked about in them or said directly to me when I’ve offered a rebuttal in a discussion:
It doesn’t actually matter when you cut your native garden back or if you do or don’t cut it at all. When faced with abject clear cutting and wholesale removal and displacement of soils to create development after development, do you think your trimming back the stems of some grasses a few weeks earlier than maybe “you should” actually matters? No. I’m sure someone will say it matters to the wildlife in your yard and it does to an extent but, really?, harping on it on social media and being antagonistic about it in the face of the realities of what’s happening is unproductive at best. It’s already difficult enough as it is to get people to switch from conventional ways of thinking in gardening that putting up more barriers to entry isn’t getting us anywhere. The vast majority of people aren’t and will never be on an ecosystem level of gardening and even those who are, many of them are like me with scant time and maybe just enough money to work on certain aspects but I’d be a fool to think I have time and money to convert my entire 1.25 acres and still maintain it, so why would I expect someone else to? It’s slow going and I’d love to do it faster but I can’t because I work full time, have a kid, and other hobbies. And we’re expecting people to listen to diatribes about cutting their garden back at certain times or not cutting it back at certain times? It takes a mass of dedicated volunteers to maintain 10 acres of native habitat at a preserve I volunteer at and we still have issues staying on top of certain parts of that because, shocker, even natural habitats require maintenance if you are trying to keep diverse habitats intact. Stop putting unreasonable expectations on people, even if you are coming at it from a good place.
I’ve had two well-meaning but ill-informed people try to tell me planting common milkweed in Texas was as bad as planting tropical milkweed. *sigh* When we’ve gone so far to one end of the spectrum we’ve lost the plot. I’m sure these same people are harping on all of the people planting Echinacea purpurea because it is only native to a couple of counties in NE Texas and not the rest of the state, right?? Right??? (Reader, they are not.) Common milkweed, on TPWD’s milkweed PDF was listed as potentially native with only one suspected locale up in the Panhandle. I dug into herbarium records and found one from the 40s from around Lubbock and on iNaturalist there have been some recent, not-cultivated sightings by botanists in North-Central Texas in remnant prairies. I suspect we used to have more or at least it was present but rare in some areas of northern Texas but we plowed under most of those areas more than a century ago. Like I said, the milkweed discussion is coming but it builds onto my next point.
In one of these groups (a scientifically minded, native plant oriented butterfly group), they like to throw random “what ifs” to trigger discussions—they like to suggest things like planting for pollinators or host plants isn’t necessarily needed, that maybe we’re doing more harm by introducing more native pipevine plants into our gardens (an actual discussion point) because where they grow in the wild (in the east) are in deep forests or in fringe habitats. So, I give you my final exhibits to show how asinine this thought process is, a thought process that might sound reasonable on its face if you want to be a Facebook philosopher about it. How can you legitimately say not planting for pollinators or introducing host plants into your yard does more harm when you are faced with the below?
The image above is from Google Earth from 1944. The labels are still on there so you can place yourself—Katy Mills Mall over on the left, Cinco Ranch development, you can see the beginnings of the Barker Reservoir on the south (where the Clodine and Energy Corridor labels are) and the Addicks Reservoir hasn’t been constructed yet. Both of these reservoirs came into play during Hurricane Harvey, both because of releases of water by the USACE downstream and because of flooding of homes behind the levees to the west.
Those fields, some farms, were all part of the Katy Prairie. The Katy Prairie in this area is gone, except in pieces within the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, which aren’t reservoirs in the way most people think of as lakes—at least during normal parts of the year.
So, I’ll ask again, why are we hellbent on making it so damn difficult for people to grow native plants, jumping over social media constructed hoops with rules a mile long? Why are we berating people for doing the best they can with the species they have available? I wish we had more regionally specific native plant options available to the masses but we don’t. We’re lucky to have the ones we do. We can tell people to go buy and plant regionally adapted native plants until we are blue in the face but unless they are collecting grass and forb seeds from the road right of ways in areas left in a more natural state, you aren’t going to replicate anything remotely like how it used to be, especially when we’re missing a lot of the diversity in the nursery trade that would have been in those habitats (see that rain lily at the beginning). And the Katy Prairie used to have considerable wetlands—so, good luck convincing most people to make a wetland in their front yard.
Horticulturist and garden designer Rebecca McMackin in conversation with Margaret Roach recently on A Way to Garden quoted some numbers about gardening and native plants in her discussion saying, “But what they also found in 2021 is that one-third of all U.S. adults had planned to purchase plants to help wildlife”. She goes on to say, “They found that 58 percent of gardeners had purchased native plants in the previous year, which gets us to 107 million people, which is literally one-third of the U.S. population.”
So, this is really cool and good news on face value! This could be a native milkweed, coreopsis, or just planting an oak tree! Or someone could have gone whole hog and bought a mass of native seeds from Prairie Moon or somewhere similar. Her source data doesn’t distinguish the details but the numbers sound great. But…buying one or two native plants does not equal habitat restoration or even mimicking any kind of natural habitat. Planting an oak tree does go a long way in the long run by providing for a plethora of wildlife—regionally appropriate oak trees are probably more vital in the long run than planting a milkweed. Now, I’m not trying to knock this hard work from both gardeners and advocates who have been pushing natives for years or decades, including myself, but we need to face some harsh realities that are not going to compensate for gardeners “thinking about buying plants for wildlife.” What are those realities?
And we lose around 80,000 acres of wetlands annually—probably more because so much slides under the radar with regard to reporting requirements and what is considered jurisdictional or not according to the Clean Water Act—and much worse now with the recent Sackett SCOTUS case.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can Homegrown National Park our way out of this.
I’m sure someone will call me a Doomer about this, but the reality of what we think we are doing with our gardens is not nearly what is actually needed with regard to helping our ecosystems. Hence, why I believe we are being too precious about native plant gardening, and what it is and what it isn’t. If we can’t even get the plant palettes we need to build regionally adapted native plant gardens that are biodiverse, you’ll be disappointed to know that the issue is much larger and that there isn’t even enough seed supply to be sufficient for current and future ecological restoration needs for public land agencies!
Where am I going with all of this? If you are gardening for wildlife or wanting to expand into native plants, do your best with what is available to you. Stop listening to gatekeepers on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube who tell you you must do something a certain way or else it isn’t good enough. Perfect is the enemy of good in this instances because we do not have the capacity to be perfect right now. Many of these garden educators, and sometimes the randos in these groups, are there with good intentions and with good information, but it’s too easy to get stuck in the narrow defined lines of what native plant gardening is and not seeing it for the landscape scale issue it actually is beyond all of us as gardeners. The rest of the A Way to Garden podcast episode was worth listening to and I do recommend it because we do have to continue pushing people to buy and grow native plants. But we need to be doing more with regard to land conservation as a whole outside of this because that’s where the bigger value and importance is. I’ve written about this before on this newsletter but gardeners need to be joining with other environmental advocates for the creation of additional public lands on every level, from city parks to national parks. Sprawl and crops will continue eating away at habitat and gardens aren’t going to make up for the loss on the scale we need it to, no matter how hard we try. We’re not replacing the right habitats lost with our gardens, instead often creating lovely but novel ecosystems. At some point we have to accept that this is just fine because we’re not going back, we’re not tearing down neighborhoods or box stores and un-filling wetlands and putting prairies and woodlands back.
Habitat loss is an issue I think about not just as it pertains to gardening but on a broader scale. I’ve written two essays recently on my other Substack, On Texas Nature, about this very issue as it pertains to Texas: Time is an Asterisk and Texas Needs More Than New State Parks. I suspect most of what I write there can easily be transported to other states or countries and I hope you’ll start reading about the status of conservation and the environment locally for you, too.
In the meantime, buy a native plant, plant something you can eat, and just spend some time outdoors observing nature. And get off of Facebook! (That last one was for me!)
That was a lot! I hope you made it through and I don’t even know if it all makes sense. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reply via email or leave a comment on Substack. I’m sure someone will find something I’ve written that is contradictory of what I’ve said in the past here and to that I’ll just say, we change and ideas change. Please forward this newsletter on to other gardeners if you think they’ll enjoy it!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and formerly hosted The Garden Path Podcast.