Local Ecotypes - the next big thing in native plants!

There is lots of new stuff at Sugarbush for the 2013 season, but perhaps the most exciting overall is that we've greatly increased our stock of local ecotypes.

No, we're not talking about the eco-types who arrive here in their Priuses and Civic hybrids, although we've always got plenty of those, too. Local ecotypes are the varieties of plants that are growing wild right around here.

Why's this important? Well, some plants that are native to PA are also native to other states - or, more importantly, other "eco-regions". An eco-region is defined by geological and climatic uniformity. Species that are commonly found in one eco-region may not be found in another - even if these eco-regions are side-by-side in the same state. However, many species can exist across many different eco-regions, and here's the key take-away about that: species of the same plant found in different eco-regions are all different from one another!

Now, these differences might not be discernable to the naked eye, or even to the experienced botanist. But they're there at the genetic level. Communities of a plant species in one eco-region have adapted themselves in often micro ways to the particular habitat they find themselves in. They're nuanced in their genetic make-up in the same way their area is nuanced in its soil type, weather vagaries, typical diseases, etc. This makes them better adapted to that specific neighborhood.

It also means that within plants of one particular species, there exists a huge amount of genetic diversity - the genetic diversity borne out of plants that may be native to and thrive from the deep South up to Vermont.

Where a plant is actually from is called its "provenance". A plant of Rhododendron periclymenoides, or Pinxterbloom Azalea, may be sold in a nursery as a plant that is "native to PA". However, the plant itself could have been propagated from Pinxterblooms that were growing wild in Tennessee. It's the same species as the species that is native to PA, but the provenance of the particular plant is Tennessee.

This kind of mixing up of the genetic pool is the norm in the nursery trade. In fact, as the native plant boom gets bigger, economies of scale kick in, making the field as a whole less true to its roots - so to speak. Big wholesale growers start growing "native plants" in massive quantities, propagating them all from seed from wild populations that are in the area of the grower, and then shipping those "native plants" everywhere around the country, to every different eco-region, thus introducing a different gene pool into that plant neighborhood - and ultimately impacting that gene pool. This means genetic diversity will get replaced with uniformity - definitely to our detriment, as we know that genetic diversity increases chances for survival.

And we haven't even gotten into the issue of cultivars!!

So, to wrap this up, the local ecotypes are the counter to this phenomenon. These are plants grown from seed from wild populations growing in the same eco-region as the eco-region in which they'll be sold. There is no mass propagation potential here: a grower could not ship a local ecotype to Minnesota and still call it a local ecotype. It's like a boutique plant....you can only get it in one place, and you should only plant it in one place.

Talk about buying local!

So, to make things super easy for our customers who want to go the native plant route in style, we're now labeling all of our plants that we know have local provenance with a new "Local Ecotype" tag. Our prediction is that the "local ecotypes" will be the next big trend in native plants - a big trend that will have to express itself through a multitude of small growers around the country, each specializing in their particular plant communities.