We’re now getting 13 hours of daylight, and that means it’s a good time to start getting into the garden.
As you consider what to put in the ground this year, one expert says native plants should be at the top of your list.
For a quick study on native plants, Meteorologist Dave Epstein spoke with Elise Howard for GBH’s Morning Edition. She’s a local author and gardener from Western Mass, and he talked to her about her new book, “Plant This, Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden.” What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Dave Epstein: I’d like to start with ... when you wrote the book, you must’ve had some sort of mission or something that you want people to get out of the book itself. So what’s your hope as people get ahold of this book?
Elise Howard: So as I became an avid native plant gardener, which happened after I was asked to garden with native plants in Riverside Park in New York City, I started talking to people about this discovery of mine and the benefits of gardening with native plants. And I quickly discovered how many people thought of native plants as the weeds that they had been told to remove from their gardens for many years. And along with that came a sort of resistance to the idea that native plants could be as beautiful as classic introduced plants. So that’s what I really want to share with people, is the beauty and the benefits and the pleasures of gardening with native plants.
Epstein: You know, when you mention things like weeds, I think for me, one of the big plants that always gets a bad rap in the fall is goldenrod — [or] solidagos. And they’re such an amazing native plant and you see them — they’re drought tolerant, they come back every year. They are a great pollinator plant. And I agree with you. I think there’s a lot of things out there. I’m looking out at my garden right now and I do have a lot of native plants. I also have a lot of plants that aren’t native. And you talked in the book about — I think it was like a 70% recommendation. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that?
Howard: Yeah, absolutely. So there is a variety of recommendations for how many, for what quantity of native plants in your garden will be really sufficient to help support our ecosystems. Essentially, what has happened is there is no longer enough public land to create pollinator pathways to support our ecosystem. Many birds and insects are born, live and die within a small radius. So what the conventional wisdom has come to tell us — and this is largely through the work of entomologist Doug Tallamy from the University of Delaware — is that if you have 70% of biomass of native plant matter in your garden, that is definitely enough to help support a thriving ecosystem of pollinators, of insects, of birds, of small mammals.
Epstein: Is the idea about lawns? So, you know, a lot of us are fortunate to have a piece of property that has a house and then has a lawn around it, and then we have beds around it. So what about the lawns? What should folks be doing with their lawn?
Howard: So turf grass is probably the number one non-native occupier of residential properties. So in other words, of the percentage of non-natives on your property, the lawn is probably the biggest one of those. Think about the functionality of your lawn. You know, where do you barbecue? Where do your kids play kickball? Where are you really using that lawn as a recreational space? Keep that, that’s great. But then look at all that lawn that is essentially just lying there. And think about whether you can gradually, maybe you start with the existing beds and you start updating the plants in those beds to be more native. Once you’ve done that, think about just taking a piece of your lawn every year and giving it back to trees, shrubs, perennials, ornamental native grasses, instead of making it non-native turf grass. You’ll have a lot less lawn mowing to do as well.
Epstein: Let’s talk about some specifics. So here in New England, there’s a few kind of favorite things. We’re about to have the Boston Marathon coming up. One of the things that people see as the marathon is, they’re either running it or they’re watching it as forsythia is going to be all over the place, all this yellow blooming. All right, so talk about forsythia a little bit.
Howard: So for forsythia, it’s curious, because one of the first things we want to do is get rid of invasive plants. And those are the non-native ornamentals that are taking over our landscapes and displacing other plants. Forsythia exists on kind of an edge. It’s showing some invasive tendencies, but it’s not a listed invasive. But because of its tendency to spread by essentially putting down roots wherever a branch touches the ground, it’s certainly an aggressive grower, and it’s in glorious bloom in most of New England right now. So we see that effect all over the roadsides and in gardens. But it’s just not as beneficial as we know that other native plants are. Because native plants co-evolved with the pollinators and other creatures that live in the same places that they do, typically they will be a better host plant, a better pollinator plant, a better nectar plant. So in place of forsythia, you might consider spice shrub, which is Lindera benzoin, and that is an early spring yellow bloomer. There are male plants and female plants. They both produce flowers — a trained eye can tell the differences, but they’re very similar small bright yellow flowers.
Epstein: Before we wrap up, Elise, is there one plant that you know that a lot of folks have in the garden that you just wish you could say, ‘OK, just get rid of this, this one’s just really bad’?
Howard: What I get the most pushback on is butterfly bush, I would say, because people say, ‘OK, this plant is swarming with butterflies all season long.’ Here’s the trick about that. There is a lot of evidence that shows that the nectar that draws those butterflies in is of lower nutritive value than the nectar of our native plants. So in essence, it’s like giving soda pop to insects. It also means that if pollinators are drawn to that plant, they may be staying away from the native plants in the garden. And so those plants aren’t pollinating in as productive a way as they could be. And finally, the butterfly bush is not a host to any insect. So it is not drawing the larval caterpillars and other creatures that are a fundamental part of the diet of baby birds, which has effects all the way up the ecosystem chain.
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