submitted by Matt Zaff, Morrisville Environmental Advisory Council
Have you heard what’s been buzzing around garden groups and nurseries recently? In the last few years, greater attention is being paid to the importance of planting native plants in our yards and gardens.
But what are native plants, and why are they important? Endemic to a particular region means native plants are central to the natural ecosystem.
Having evolved special relationships with native insects, they are the base of the food-web. One example of this relationship is the monarch butterfly and milkweed.
Adult monarch butterflies can feed on nectar from many flowers, but importantly, they can only lay their eggs on one of several members of the milkweed. Without milkweed in our gardens, no more monarch butterflies.
And that’s just one plant-insect relationship. Native oak, cherry, and willow trees serve as larval hosts for hundreds of species of insects each!
As our native plant ecosystems have dwindled, so too have much of the food-web they support including insects that feed those songbirds at your birdfeeder, resulting in a decrease of nearly three billion of our American bird populations over the last 50 years.
What can we do? In his book “Bringing Nature Home,” author Doug Tallamy calls us to action with a Homegrown National Park.
If half of privately owned lawns in America were converted to mostly native plants, we’d create a park of nearly 20 million acres – almost 10 times the size of Yellowstone National Park!
To learn more about native plants visit Bowman’s Hill Nature Preserve or a local native plant nursery. Check back for future articles on how to incorporate native plants in your yard!
Author Matt Zaff is a member of the Morrisville EAC with a background in permaculture, regenerative agriculture design, and hands-on experience at a native plant nursery.