Talking about natives - part 1 of ??

Yesterday evening I had the very great pleasure of hearing Mike McGrath, organic gardening guru and host of WHYY's "You Bet Your Garden", speak at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills.

The storm the previous night had knocked out the power in the village, but this sort of mishap doesn't deter gardening fanatics. The entire audience sat in chairs outside the hall where the talk was to have taken place, with Mike right up front, perched on a step, talking to us as if we were all sitting around his living room.

The scene had that slightly otherworldly feel that you sometimes get in a Camphill village - like time had stopped about 50 years ago, when many of us were still connected with farms, in one way or another, and with our neighbors. Children of all ages fluttered behind the seated adults, looking for all the world as if they'd been birthed by fairies. I had the distinct impression that if you were to offer one of these waifs an X-Box, they'd look at you silently and curiously, wondering if perhaps it could be used as a footstool, helpful for reaching the limbs of taller trees.

Mike touched on a variety of creatures beneficial for organic gardens, including toads, birds, and spiders. But it was what he said about the bees that caught my imagination.

Honeybees are in serious decline across the country - and indeed, across the world. The mysterious diagnosis is termed "Colony Collapse Disorder". Nobody is really sure what all of the culprits are, but mites and viruses are on the list. This is important for everyone, as fully one third of all of our food in the US is pollinated by honeybees.

But, as Mike shared, much of the problem might have to do with the fact that honeybees aren't native to the US. Turns out, they're Italian, and quite well-adapted to that Mediterranean climate. Honeybees have never had an easy or a happy life over here in the US, where all sorts of mechanisms have to be employed to keep their hives going. They can't sustain themselves here - we sustain them, because we need them to pollinate our food crops.

The mantra of organic gardening is "right plant, right place" - because a plant well-adapted to the growing conditions of a particular site will be healthier, and better able to fend off pests and disease than one that is poorly adapted, and needs lots of coddling to make it. Sounds like the honeybees aren't in the right place, and now they're showing us why this was a bad idea to depend on them so heavily.

Unfortunately, many of the favorite foods we grow in the US are also not native here. "As American as apple pie?" Nope - apples are from central Asia, more Turkish or Russian than American. Maybe this is why it's difficult to grow apples without lots of coddling, at least anywhere east of the Rockies - they just aren't meant for this climate, and they show us why it was a bad idea to put them here by getting attacked by every pest known to man.

This all leads to some interesting questions about nativity. What does it mean to be native to a place? Does it mean to be born there, to be able to grow up to maturity, or even to thrive in a place? Or does it mean more than that?

I was born in Berks County, but I've never been able to identify myself as a Berks Countian. I realize this is because my parents weren't born here, but were both transplanted from other parts of the country. This means I grew up without the body of knowledge of what it means to be from Berks implanted in me from a young age. For example, all things Pennsylvania Dutch are foreign to me, including the foods. I've heard of chow-chow, but I have no idea what it is, and no inclination to seek it out and try it. Instead, I relate to a body of knowledge, values, and food that originated in other places, places where I have not even lived - the childhood places of my mother and father, in rural Minnesota and Rochester, New York. How strange that is!

Turns out plants act in much the same way. Plants relate to the growing conditions not where they've germinated and grown up, which could be anywhere, but to the growing conditions of their true native place. They may well be able to make a life for themselves outside of their native range, but there are missing elements to their transplanted experience. Crucial of these missing elements is their relationship with the insects around them.

And what, you may be asking, do insects have to do with anything? For that, I will need to introduce you to my new most favorite person in the world, Doug Tallamy. I haven't met him yet, but that will change in September when he comes to the Reading area to speak at the Berks Hort Club. He wrote a book, published Nov. 2007, called "Bringing Nature Home". In this book, he detailed the vital connection between native plants and native insects. Here's the crucial part: Native insects eat the leaves of native plants at a much higher rate than non-natives. In many cases, they cannot use the leaves of non-native plants at all.

We need to take one step further back until this makes sense. Plants capture energy from the sun and turn it into food, in the form of their bodies. All life depends on plants being able to photosynthesize, because plants pass this collected energy from the sun all the way up the food chain - ending with us. However, not all animals can use the energy contained in plants directly. We are surrounded by lots of green grass, but it's not usable food energy for us. However, some of us eat cows that can eat grass, so we get the energy from the grass that way. Humans are not unique among animals in our inability to digest most of the vegetation around us. However, luckily for us, insects can and do digest lots of vegetation. They are the most efficient converters of the energy in plants into a high-protein, animal form - in the form of their bodies. And insects are the preferred food of many small animals, which in turn are eaten by larger animals, which in turn are eaten by us. Thank you, insects, for keeping us alive!

Okay, now back to our gardens. Birds and butterflies are on the most wanted list of every gardener. But, in order to nurture the birds and butterflies, we need to make sure their babies are well-fed. Take birds first. Adult birds like to eat berries, but baby birds eat insects. Those mama birds dropping caterpillars into the scrawny beaks of their young? It's the high protein, easily digestible diet baby birds need to get off to a good start. This is not unlike baby humans, who need a different diet in their first months than the diet they will eventually adopt for the rest of their lives.

But, I digress. Caterpillars, in turn, eat leaves. Not just any old leaves, mind you - they eat the leaves of plants which are familiar to them, plants with which their ancestors co-evolved over thousands of years. It's a chemical thing. You can put a caterpillar on a butterfly bush (a non-native shrub), and he won't know what to do, other than climb down and find a plant he can actually eat. Once he's eaten the leaves of his preferred plant, metamorphosed and become a moth or butterfly, then he can eat the pollen from the flowers of the butterfly bush - but it didn't do him a bit of good when he was a young'un.

You see where this is heading? Not enough plants to feed the caterpillars in our yards, even if our gardens are full of beautiful plants...not enough caterpillars for mama birds to feed their babies...not as many baby birds being born or making it to adulthood...not as many birds. And the equation ends even earlier for butterflies. End of story.

The surprising truth is that most of our landscape plants come straight from - can you guess? - nowhere around here. We have Asian and European landscapes everywhere in American suburbia. And we're paying the price with wildlife that's struggling to survive, to find those plants that used to live here that we've squeezed out of our landscapes because they were too ordinary, or not as fashionable as the newest introductions from Europe or Asia. After all, it took the European plant breeders to recognize the beauty in our native purple coneflower, and to start choosing cultivars of it. Then they started to sell them back to us and we said, "Wow! Those are beautiful...why didn't we think of this before?"

Where did this all start? Ah, yes - nativity. So, what is a native plant? You can see from the above that the answer is very complex. It's a subject that interests me, so I will keep writing about it. Stay tuned!