This is the natives vs invasives debate, or maybe the flower gardeners vs conservationists debate! Should you be allowed to plant whatever you like in your own garden? Are plants on sale at garden centers and in home gardens causing a problem with invasive plants? Back in July a hot debate was raging over at Garden Rant. Many gardeners were arguing that provided they are being responsible in their own garden they saw no need to have controls on what they grow.
I’m a bit behind the times on this one, but Carole at Conservation Gardening got me interested in thinking about it when I found her reply while browsing her blog yesterday. I took the time to read all the way through the comments at Garden Rant last night and I’ve been giving it all consideration. While the debate at Garden Rant has come to an end, this is a topic that is not going away. Controlling invasive plants costs someone $$$$ and it’s not the home gardener who is paying, unless it’s through their taxes.
I’d like to make several points:
1. People who believe they are right will go on believing that. So, yes, as a gardener and human being a person can spend their money on anything they want, even in some cases when it is illegal. This isn’t about you or me controlling what another person puts in their garden. It’s about rising above being an individual who cares more about their our own likes than about the long-term consequences of their actions. Do what you like, but you are not an individual. We are all connected. What you do affects me too. If you choose to grow something that even might be invasive are you taking resonsibility? Who is the better person, the one who does what they want, or the one who stops and thinks and does the thing a conservation expert is telling them is right?
2. The gardening system is broken at all levels – gardener, garden center and landscape designer. The gardener wants what looks nice to them and what they’ve seen around and looking beautiful. The gardener also wants a nice choice of plants either close to home or available from a catalog – let’s face it, we all want things to be easy, we most often do what is convenient. If the garden center or mail order company provides non-native annuals and perennials that is what people will see and buy. If the landscape designer is college trained in using non-natives that’s what they know and that’s what they’ll put in the plans. If those plants can be used throughout the USA so much the better because the designer can train one place and then work somewhere completely else without having to learn about natives. It’s a self-perpetuating convenience with someone else bearing the consequences when a non-native becomes invasive.
I used to want a totally native garden, but then I read an article arguing the point that we’re better off growing food in the suburbs and freeing space for larger natural ecosystems in the countryside rather than having nothing but agriculture. I need contact with nature and I’d not want to have a 100% food garden, so I compromise.
I grow natives which provide food for nature. I’m working on expanding to have some native fruit sources which work for wildlife as well as for my family. I have non-natives which provide food for me and my family. My garden contains plenty of non-natives – 95% of them were here when I arrived and I’m removing them when I can. I read the Kansas list of contolled and invasive species pretty frequently; I work on prairie restoration on a Kansas farm. None of the plants in my garden are on that list.
Some people say it’s too much work to learn about invasives and to find native plants they’ll love just as much. I agree that it’s too much work to figure out what is invasive. It’s also too much work to have to control invasives. I’m a lazy gardener. I want to be able to buy native plants at the grocery store 0.5 miles from my home rather than to drive for 30 minutes to visit the specialist native plant nursery. I want to order online and have natives from a local source delivered to my door.
Bottom line, if gardeners ask for natives suppliers will provide them. It’s like magic! Visit Conservation Gardening and learn about why and how to include natives in your landscape.
Related posts:
Thanks for the shout-out, Alison. This article is a great review of the “broken” parts of our current gardening practices. I’m hopeful that more and more nurseries, including Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart, will begin to see the value in carrying locally native plants. In order for this to happen, we gardeners must continue to ask for them because the stores need to have a financial incentive to do the right thing.
I wish that folks on both sides of the native/invasive debate would stop shouting at each other long enough to realize that all of our actions have consequences. The consequences of continuing to plant invasive plants are very high.
We taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year in the attempt to control invasive species. Then we turn around the following year and have to spend it all over again.
This cycle has no hope of being reversed as long as we continue to be able to purchase and plant these harmful plants.
Thanks for a great article.
[...] Kerr, of Loving Nature’s Garden, has written a very good summary of this debate and a discussion of how she chooses the plants in her gar…. She makes two very good [...]