Ideas for Bringing Native Plant Gardening into the Mainstream

I recently attended an online event featuring none other than Doug Tallamy, a professor and entomologist who has inspired a whole movement of gardening with native plants! Some of his books include:



The event was hosted by a library outside of my immediate area and I only found out about it because I am a member of a regional native plant group on Facebook, so if you are in any way interested in native plant gardening, you should definitely join an online group (or create your own group!) to connect with like-minded folks and find out about cool stuff going on nearby. I’m so glad I attended this event because I found out about an awesome nonprofit organization called ReWild Long Island, which helps people in my area find native plants and experts who will install native gardens at affordable prices. And I learned of another native gardening expert who provides landscaping design and maintenance services here on Long Island, which brings the number up to three, yes THREE landscapers that I know of who are knowledgeable about native plants out of probably hundreds if not thousands of landscapers on Long Island. Sigh.

This huge shortage of landscapers and designers with knowledge of native plants and eco-friendly gardening is a big barrier to the widespread adoption of native plant gardening and wildlife conservation everywhere. If we want to create habitat and heal the environment, we need to find ways of knocking down this barrier! Here are 4 areas that I think are important:

• First, I think we need more organizations like ReWild Long Island to make native plant gardening more accessible to people because once people learn about the incredible benefits of natives, they are usually eager to add native plants but don’t feel knowledgeable enough to do it themselves, so having an organization connect them to an expert is very helpful.
• Second, native plants should be part of the school curriculum. Children should be learning about native plants, and their own role in environmental conservation. In the online event with Doug Tallamy he mentioned that it’s very easy for people to throw their hands up and say “there’s nothing I can do to help the environment” but if they realized that there is something they can do, that each native garden no matter how small is adding habitat and mitigating pollution, they would favor native plants and ecological gardening. If children learned this, environmental conservation would become second nature.
• Third, the mainstream garden aesthetic needs to change. Right now people will pay a landscaper to install a lawn and a few shrubs close to their home, and call it a day. This kind of design doesn’t do anything for wildlife, including bees and butterflies which are in decline. Grass is a shallow rooted crop that doesn’t provide pollen or nectar or habitat to pollinators and actually requires chemicals and lots of water to maintain, and exotic shrubs may provide some habitat for birds but they won’t provide the berries or insect the birds need to survive. If this kind of “sterile garden” look were looked upon as an ecological disaster rather than a standard in gardening, more people would appreciate the beauty of less than perfect, living native plant gardens. So we need people’s “eye” to change as well changing local ordinances which require grass or very short greenery to maintain the current aesthetic.
• Fourth, quite often that aesthetic is set and maintained by landscape design professionals which means native plants need to be emphasized in landscape design programs and there needs to be some kind of continuing education for landscapers, like a certificate in native plant gardening or eco-friendly landscape maintenance so that these professionals can tap into this niche of ecological gardening and make native plants more accessible, while changing the concept of what a nice garden looks like.

I wish I could go back in time with everything I know now and study landscape design so that today I could help build sustainable, healthy habitats all over Long Island and beyond. As Dr. Tallamy mentioned, “there is huge potential in the niche of ecological landscaping” as more people become aware of the importance of native plants and decide to redo their gardens. I do plan to study landscape design some day, but right now, with a small child and no extra funds for tuition or childcare, the best I can do is document my native pollinator garden and encourage others to go native as much as possible.

For more information about native plants, click here.