Restoring native plant habitat is vital to
preserving biodiversity. By creating a native plant garden, each patch of
habitat becomes part of a collective effort to nurture and sustain the living
landscape for birds and other animals.
Over
the past century, urbanization has taken intact, ecologically productive land
and fragmented and transformed it with lawns and exotic ornamental plants. The
continental U.S. lost a staggering 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to
urban sprawl, and that trend isn’t slowing. The modern obsession with highly
manicured “perfect” lawns alone has created a green, monoculture carpet across
the country that covers over 40 million acres. The human-dominated landscape no
longer supports functioning ecosystems, and the remaining isolated natural
areas are not large enough to support wildlife.
 |
| Menominee Park Shoreland Restoration Site Photo, by Mandy Mitchell, 2014 |
Native plants are those that occur naturally in a region in which they evolved.
They are the ecological basis upon which life depends, including birds and
people. Without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds
cannot survive. For example, research by the entomologist Doug Tallamy has
shown that native oak trees support over 500 species of caterpillars whereas
ginkgos, a commonly planted landscape tree from Asia, host only 5 species of
caterpillars. When it takes over 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of
chickadees, that is a significant difference.
Unfortunately, most of the landscaping plants available in nurseries are alien
species from other countries. These exotic plants not only sever the food web,
but many have become invasive pests, outcompeting native species and degrading
habitat in remaining natural areas.
