Why is there so much interest in native plants to help save the pollinators not just in Eureka, but across the country? Simply put, the insects we rely on to pollinate plants and provide food for birds and butterflies are in big trouble because of the large number of non-native plants that have not only been planted in people’s gardens, but escaped to the wild.
Two of the more active citizens groups now in Eureka Springs are the Eureka Springs Pollinators Alliance and the Eureka Springs Downtown Network’s Downtown Natives. Both groups are working to demonstrate how important it is to get back to the type of vegetation that evolved here – not exotics from other countries that provide no food for our wildlife.
The native plant groups here and across the country have gained a lot of inspiration from the book Bringing Nature Home, How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants, by Douglas W. Tallamy.
“Bringing Nature Home is a book many of us have been waiting for,” according to the foreword. “So much more than a push for native plants, it articulates the broad interdependency of living relationships and literally redefines gardens as the new Nature.”
Tallamy argues that the wild creatures we enjoy and would like to have in our lives will not be here in the future if we take away their food and the places they live. He examines how we threaten their survival by trading our wild lands for uncontrolled expansions. In too many areas of our country, there is no place left for wildlife but the landscapes and gardens we ourselves create.
Tallamy, an entomologist, points to his research and that of others to show most native insects are not able to eat alien plants, and we are replacing native plants with alien species at alarming rates.
“My message is that unless we restore native plants to our suburban ecosystem, the future of biodiversity in the U.S. is slim,” Tallamy said.
Tallamy draws on his own experience at his home on ten acres in rural Pennsylvania. At least 35 percent of the vegetation on their property was aggressive plant species from other continents rapidly replacing native plants. Removing them was no easy task because the non-native invasive plants –Bradford pears, Norway maples, autumn olives and Japanese honeysuckle – had little to no leaf damage from insects while the native plants including red maples, black oaks and black willows had obviously supplied many insects with food.
“This was alarming because it suggested a consequences of the alien invasion occurring all over North America than neither I nor anyone else, I discovered, after checking the scientific literature, had considered,” he said. “If our native insect fauna cannot, or will not, use alien plants for food, then insect populations in areas with many alien plants will be smaller than insect populations in areas with all natives. This may sound like a gardener’s dream: a land without insects! But because so many animals depend partially or entirely on insect protein for food, a land without insects is a land without most forms of higher life. Even the most incorrigible anti-environmentalists would be hard pressed to make an attractive case for such sterility. Pure anthropocentrists should be alarmed as well, since the terrestrial ecosystem on which we humans depend for our own continued existence would cease to function without our six-legged friends.”
Tallamy said it is a simple fact that we can no longer hope to coexist with other animals if we continue to wage war on their homes and food supplies.
“This simple tenet provides an imperative, particularly for the bird and butterfly lovers among us, to fight invasive plants as if it really matters and to reevaluate our centuries-old love affair with alien ornamentals. Gardening with natives is no longer just a peripheral option favored by vegetarians and erstwhile hippies. It is an important part of the paradigm shift in our shaky relationship with the planet that sustains us – one that mainstream gardeners can no longer afford to ignore.”
Nearly all terrestrial birds rear their young on insects, not seeds or berries. Butterflies and bees are in serious decline. Bees and other pollinators are necessary for 85 percent of the world’s flowering plants to reproduce, including 30 percent of food crops.
Tallamy’s book also details in distressing detail how alien plants can be Typhoid Marys. The importation of alien plants spread the Chestnut blight that within 50 years devastated an important forest species that had survived 87 million years, 20 glaciations, and an asteroid impact. One of the most important sources of food for wildlife from Maine to Mississippi was wiped out.
Equally devastating have been insects pests such as Japanese beetles hitchhiking on plants from other countries.
Then there is the fact that vast amounts of wildlands in the U.S. have been taken over by non-native invasive species. Anyone who has seen a field of kudzu gets the idea. In Eureka the biggest non-natives we see taking over are English ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, bush honeysuckle, and vinca. One field near the train station is completely covered in lespedeza.
Tallamy’s book is a call to action for gardeners to favor native plants over aliens in their yards.
“Gardeners can do much to sustain the biodiversity that has been one of this country’s richest assets,” he said. “We humans have disrupted natural habitats in so many ways and in so many places that the future of our nation’s biodiversity is dim unless we start to share the places in which we live — our cities and, to an even greater extent, our suburbs – with the plants and animals that evolved there.”
Bringing Nature Home is available at the Eureka Springs Carnegie Public Library. To help with efforts at the Downtown Native Pagoda Garden, see the Eureka Springs Downtown Network’s Facebook page. To get involved with the Eureka Springs Pollinators Alliance, contact Ken Trimble at libertysvc@sbcglobal.net or call (479) 981-0072.