Back to the Future with Native Plants

A rather funny thing happened to me last summer, and I've been thinking about it for awhile now.

A gentleman came to the nursery from Kutztown, looking for elderberry bushes - not the ornamental elderberries from Europe sold in most nurseries, but the native variety with edible flowers and berries that you can use to make elderflower wine, elderberry pie, preserves, etc.

He said that this plant wasn't available in Kutztown, because Kutztown had become too modern, so he had a good feeling that places in our direction (southern Berks), which are more old-fashioned, would still be carrying plants like this. And sure enough, he said, he was right - we had it. He went back to Kutztown with a beautiful elderberry bush, Sambucus canadensis - the useful kind.

The funny thing about this exchange is how the scenario about this plant differed between me and the gentleman. He thought Kutztown was modern, and south of Reading was traditional, whereas I have exactly the opposite take. But more interestingly, he thought he found the plant because he came to an old-fashioned part of our county, but really, he came to a nursery owned by someone probably 30 years younger than himself, and definitely not operating out of an old-fashioned mentality in the least. In fact, I consider owning a native plants nursery a bit progressive - at least in the horticultural sense.

The reason I carry elderberry bushes - the useful native kind - has nothing to do with wanting to be traditional; it has everything to do with wanting to support the ecology of our landscape, by helping people re-introduce the plants that are supposed to be here back into the environment. To help re-establish crucial plant-insect-wildlife relationships. To heal a landscape fractured by human activity and fashion whims. To bring back our sense of place, the feeling we all get when we look around us and say, "Now, THIS feels like home."

And that actually feels pretty non-traditional. Much of our society is geared towards the new, the flashy, the thing that no one else has but WE do; and native plants are everything BUT. Natives are tried and true, hardy beyond question, will grow without coddling, beautiful but in typically understated ways, and they're everywhere....right?

The funny paradox here is that natives are supposed to be the plants all around us, what we see everyday (as one cynical passer-by told me at the EnergyFest last year - "Guess I could start a native nursery by digging up my weeds, too!") - but they're not anymore. These days, we are more likely to see non-native plants in the typical home landscape, and we even see them more and more in our wild areas.

In many ways, being progressive by planting natives is actually a step backwards into tradition and a simpler time, when our landscape was more untouched by humans. It is the re-creation of a landscape that many of us cannot even imagine, because we never saw what our woods looked like when trilliums, rather than garlic mustard, blanketed the forest floor, or when roadsides were lined with milkweed rather than purple loosestrife.

Thus, I feel the new marketing call for natives should be: "Go back to the future with native plants!"

(I know what you're thinking....I should keep my day job. Thanks for the advice - I will!)