Wild Gardiner

  Native plants: Curiosity, collection, cultivation rescue, restoration I have just been in a heated discussion in a native plant group where a post that distinguished between invasive greater celandine and native wood poppy turned into a brawl over whether it was ethical to favor any plant over any other plant (hello? NATIVE plant is in the name of this group?)   This wandered down avenues such as someone from a local tribe requesting the term native plants be used to distinguish it from discussion of people, and controversy over decolonizing the term “invasive” and rejecting it because it is used to promote pesticide use. After considering leaving the group I wanted to note some of the reasons and ways people care about native plants. At first pass, there seem to be five types of engagement: Curiosity, collection, cultivation, rescue and restoration.   The first two are stages of learning about native plants: learning which is which and why it might matter, lea...

In the summer of my junior year of college, I lived next to a methadone center in not yet hip Brooklyn, in a building in the process of being gentrified. I foraged the stores of my neighborhood. On Atlantic Avenue I walked into an Arab store, sacks full of beans and spices, barrels of olives and breathed deeply. I was home. All summer I returned as often as I could just to stand and smell. I don’t think it was any single fragrant thing, but the mix of it all that made me giddy and happy. I bought packets of this and that and added them to other things, or ate them by themselves. No one thing had that smell. Today, I have that same jump in my heart when I walk down a path covered with fallen leaves, poke my stick into the dark molder of forest floor to get a better look at an emerging mushroom. The robin in my back yard or the wood thrush deep in the woods announces me like the bell on the door of the shop. I pick a little of this and that and bring them home, have them by themselves ...

Not all garden brutes are invaders. At least three of the natives in my garden require a lot of careful forethought because they WILL take over an area. One I regret, one I planned, and one pops up and is easy to leave or keep. I classify thugs in the garden the same way I classify them in the world; by their drive to take over everything. Native or import, garden thugs have several strategies that support their totalitarian ambitions. They blanket, spread, poison or rise up and overwhelm. All of these are extremes of the normal strategies that plants use to spread and find a place, usually in a lovely interplay with others. But thugs tend to do this to the exclusion of other strategies Canada anemone may be a native, but it is a brute. Its roots create a dense crowding system with no room for anything else. I planted it in a spot where I thought it would have room to spread nicely, but it has actually managed to overwhelm a peony and drive mint to the very edge of the patch. It ha...