Native plants: Curiosity, collection, cultivation rescue, restoration

 

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, learning which resources have reliable information, better understanding nuances of location and rarity and how they interact. In those stages, the person goes from learning what they are, where they exist, and when and how they came there to practicing with actual plants. “Native” implies a place and a thing, so each place has its own suite of native plants, insects, fungi etc.

As learning increases, passively identifying plants in the place as original or imported shifts to actively seeking out plants that might be expected in the place, hunting for them in wild places or admiring them in parks and other people’s gardens. In the process, the learner begins to learn where they like to exist. A person might join a native plant or wildflower group. If the person with new interest is a gardener, they may start to collect, seeking out native plants that they don’t have to place as specimens; allowing the goldenrod to build its backdrop framing more formal beds; offering space for show stoppers like jack-in-the-pulpit or Solomon’s seal, and maybe even building out an area and habitat that encourages the original plants of that area. Learning the ethos of not collecting from the wild, collecting pictures instead. Learning to hide the geographic data on photos of rare or over-collected plants. As their knowledge and interest deepens they may look for more esoteric and inconspicuous plants because of the role they play in an ecology

If the gardener doesn’t have a good source for the plants and is conscientious about not raiding wild spaces, they may move quickly to learning how to cultivate and propagate the plants they want to grow. They network with others to trade information, seeds, cuttings, plants. This creates an odd space, the cultivation of “wild” plants. Because as soon as someone gathers seeds, they have exercised selection,  based on timing or availability or height or propensity to propagate by seed, for example, so many traits that might make a plant likelier to be a source of genetic material than others in its original population. And then we are off to the domestication races. There is a lot of conversation in the native plant groups about pros and cons of cultivars and selection. Is an improved or selected plant still the native, or is it something else? What criteria matter? Does insect/wildlife use get weighted more, or equally with human utility? How account for different tastes and should human taste matter?

For others, collecting entails learning where the plants grow in the wild, seeking out ever-rarer specimens in their original haunts. This may take the seeker to other environments and an understanding that “native" may have a very localized meaning. Pitcher plants are wild in the bog outside Bangor, but are they native if you bring them to a bed in Portland?

Foraging taught me that many of the wild plants in forest gardens I find are in fact cultivated. I build on that knowledge by aiding the native plants I encounter, shaking seed heads and letting fluff cling to me as I move around, replacing and spreading bulbils if I have dug for something, tugging out and dropping the intruding barberry shoot, tossing overripe fruit along the trail as I clean through my basket of gleanings. Wild or cultivated? It is a continuum. Is the lady’s slipper in a carefully tended urn still native? Should the dozens of kinds of pollinators overwhelming the rampant oregano sprawling across sandy parts of my garden, European import that it is, be denied their opinion?

Is it silly to pretend the human hand can be removed from the equation other than by letting it all go…except the human hand was already there doing damage…which takes the plant lover to the next place, rescue. As appreciation of native plants grows, non-native plants that take up large spaces and crowd off original plants look more and more disturbing. Bittersweet and wisteria, strangling and tearing down trees, no longer look like basket material, bouquets and Christmas wreathes. They are threatening the trees that were here before them. The favorite fiddlehead spot being taken over by knotweed cries out for remediation. In disturbed soil, decisions about what to weed and what to thin and leave get recalibrated. 

In addition to knowledge about native plants, a person tending a place starts to learn which plants are most harmful and how to stop them. For some, nothing but a full bore assault because they are implacable. Others may allow accommodation. But there are so many plants brought here from Europe or Asia or other parts of the world and then left to ricochet through the china shop of a native ecology. Where to start, when to stop? A penitent gardener might fixate on eradicating the barberry and lily of the valley they introduced, the non-native roses and milkweeds that overrun and eliminate native plants, confusing and starving wildlife.

Mistakes get made. That plantain so enthusiastically pulled was actually the native rugelii. Poison ivy is native. The goldenrod belongs here, but it is so aggressive (never call it invasive if it is a native plant.)  What grows where there used to be this vine, that jostling weed? Rescue drifts into restoration. Focus widens from individual plants, good, bad, to whole systems of plants in conversation with one another  

There are cross-currents. Is the objective to create some pre-invasion Eden, based on what can be learned about what plants grew before Europeans arrived? A theoretical natural space without touch of any human hand, from whatever place?  Replicate what is actually one moment in an ongoing cycle of maturation and renewal and if so, which? Create a system that will pass through a more or less natural system of cycles?  Climate is changing, it has always changed. Is the system being grown looking backwards or forward?  Build in genetic complexity to assure the greatest opportunity to ride out the unpredictable?  If so, does that include Europeans if they promise to behave, and if so, what constitutes well behaved? Restoration philosophies can be frenzied and absolute, or let-it-be Zen, often both at once. Everything should be as it is, leave it to unfold. But erase your footprints as you go.