Photo: https://www.fernsfeathers.ca/main-blog/tag/garden+books
January 15, 2023
Published over 15 years ago by Douglas W. Tallamy, the book Bringing Nature Home reveals the inseparable link between native plant species and native wildlife. This plea for natural landscaping and native plants remains highly relevant today, and (re)reading it reminds us that anyone with access to a piece of land or a backyard can make a significant contribution to maintaining biodiversity.
Not only should we replace more lawns with other plants, but we should especially do so with native plants that serve the roles they have evolved for in our environment.
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When I decided to start the production of wild and native plant seeds, I didn't yet know Douglas Tallamy. The intuition that native plants needed to regain ground, and the initial momentum that gave rise to our project, suddenly took on new meaning and became more clearly defined after reading his various works.
This passage from Bringing Nature Home particularly encapsulates the conclusions of scientific research on the role of native plants and confirms the validity of our desire to propagate them through our seeds:
“We humans have altered natural habitats in so many ways and in so many places that the future of the world’s biodiversity looks bleak unless we start sharing the places where we live with the plants and animals that evolved there.
Because life is powered by solar energy captured by plants, it is the plants we use in our gardens that will determine what nature will be like 10, 20, and 50 years from now. If we continue to landscape our spaces primarily with exotic plants that are toxic to insects—the most important herbivores in our suburban ecosystems in terms of transferring energy from plants to other animals—we may witness an extinction on a scale that exceeds what occurred when a meteor struck the Yucatan Peninsula at the end of the Cretaceous.
But if we instead use plants that have evolved with our local animal communities as the foundation of our landscapes, we may be able to save much of our biodiversity from extinction. Essentially, for the first time, we will coexist with nature rather than compete with it.
For the past century, we have designed our gardens with only one goal in mind: aesthetics. We have selected plants for landscaping based solely on their beauty and how they fit with our artistic ideas.
Yet, if we designed our buildings the way we design our gardens, focusing only on aesthetics, they would collapse. Just as buildings need supporting structures to hold up graceful arches and refined architectural lines, our gardens need native plants to support a diverse and balanced food web, which is essential to all sustainable ecosystems.”
—Douglas W. Tallamy, 2007, Bringing Nature Home, Timber Press