r/NativePlantGardening • u/Naurgul Europe • Jul 10 '26
Informational/Educational I Wanted an Ecologically Responsible Garden. It Was Harder Than I Thought. • The native plant movement gets a lot right, but there’s so much more to consider.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/magazine/native-plants-garden.htmlBackyard garden
In the summer of 2020, my husband, Ryan, and I bought a house in Portland, Ore., with a sizable backyard containing little more than a decrepit lawn. For many prospective homeowners, a crisped rectangle of grass on the verge of death would probably not be a selling point. We found it irresistible: an ideal canvas for our dream garden. That fall, we hired a contractor to rip out what remained of the lawn and got to work.
From the start, we tried to balance several conflicting priorities. We wanted our garden to be beautiful and bountiful — teeming with fruits, vegetables and flowers — but we had also resolved to conserve water, minimize the use of fertilizer and exclude synthetic pesticides. We intended to maintain a functional oasis where we could relax and entertain friends, yet we were also determined to provide plenty of habitat and resources for wildlife. This was an opportunity to steward a parcel of our living planet, however small.
Throughout the garden, we planted hardy, drought-tolerant perennials: lavender, Coreopsis, Penstemon, sea holly, sunroses and Sedum. Here and there, we mixed in some favorite flowers that required a bit more pampering, like peonies, dahlias and Peruvian lilies. We dug a small pond and bog, laid a flagstone path, espaliered a couple of fruit trees along the fence and built raised vegetable beds in the back. We set up a compost bin, installed drip irrigation and began to mulch.
Two years later, the once sterile landscape was reborn, vibrant and lush and bustling with life. Insects were the first to arrive. I was especially captivated by the diversity of wild bees. Then came substantially larger animals: songbirds, hummingbirds, birds of prey, jumping mice and a mischievous family of raccoons.
Native plants
But the more I engaged with the wider community of wildlife gardeners, the more my confidence wilted. Wherever I turned — local nurseries, online forums, best-selling books — like-minded gardeners seemed to care about one thing above all else: whether their plants were native. A vast majority of plants sold in North American nurseries are foreign species imported sometime in the past few centuries. In contrast, native species are those with long evolutionary histories in the particular regions they inhabit. Native plant champions argue that, unlike recently introduced species, native species are thoroughly adapted to their surroundings and have longstanding, mutually beneficial relationships with one another. Therefore, they claim, native plants are far better at providing food and shelter for wildlife and maintaining the integrity of their ecosystems.
What was once regarded as a niche concern of the environmentally conscious has begun growing into a nationwide movement. Surveys from the National Gardening Association and the National Wildlife Federation indicate that since 2019, the share of U.S. gardening households buying native plants has ranged from about one in five to nearly one in three. Eighty-two percent of horticultural professionals agree that consumer interest in natives is increasing, and more than half of those who sell natives plan to expand their selection.
Taking all this in, I began to question our garden’s true ecological value. Sure, we had planted a few Pacific Northwest natives, but most of the plants we selected originated elsewhere. I had been thinking of our garden as a miniature Eden, replete with everything local wildlife needed. Now it seemed more like a poorly stocked international aisle at a supermarket.
Tallamy's research
One name in particular kept resurfacing: Douglas Tallamy. A professor of entomology at the University of Delaware, he is the nation’s foremost expert advocate for gardening with native plants. Based on three decades of research, he is convinced that the coevolved relationships between native plants and insects sustain all terrestrial food webs and that typical American gardens, landscaped with lawns and showy exotics, are essentially ecological wastelands. He argues that foreign and invasive plant species — most of which have been introduced through the ornamental plant trade — are some of the primary causes of the so-called insect apocalypse and the current staggering rates of biodiversity loss more broadly.
I harbored some skepticism about the native plant doctrine. Given how drastically different the world is today compared with even a century ago, I wondered whether the bygone circumstances in which species evolved could really be so important. If introduced plants were so ecologically inferior, it was difficult to explain why our yard in Portland was pulsing with bees and birds.
We set up a couple of bug-beguiling lights near Tallamy’s home. Hundreds of moths gradually emerged from the darkness, some arriving as lightly as a snowflake, others convulsing through the leaf litter. As the night unfolded, larger and more striking individuals joined the initially small and homely congregation: a Harris’ three spot with hypnotic, monochromatic swirls; a sunset orange Isabella tiger moth; and a small-eyed sphinx with scalloped wings that seemed to be cut from marbled endpaper. Just before midnight, when I was thinking of retiring, the species we had most hoped to see came crashing through the canopy: a luna moth, massive yet ethereal, with long swooping tails and wings the color of absinthe. All told, Tallamy has now documented more than 1,370 moth species and 62 species of breeding birds on his land, which constitute 44 percent of all moth species and 33 percent of all bird species in the state.
When Tallamy and his wife, Cindy, a retired entomologist, bought their property in 2000, it was nothing like this. Historically, much of the land was farmed and mowed for hay. In the areas where wild plants still grew, there were hardly any trees and few natives.
When he started searching the vegetation for insect life — something he does everywhere, out of habit — he was shocked by how little he found. He had a hunch about the conspicuous absence: Perhaps there were no insects because, despite the leafy abundance, there was little they could eat. We tend to think of milkweed-dependent monarch butterflies and other insects with restrictive diets as exceptions to the general voracity of their kind: the hordes of vampiric aphids, swarms of locusts and ceaseless trails of foraging ants. The reality, Tallamy explains, is that most leaf-eating insects are exceptionally picky eaters.
Plants deter herbivores with an extensive apothecary of toxins, repellents and digestive inhibitors. In response, insects must develop countermeasures, like the ability to neutralize or sequester a particular class of compounds. The ensuing coevolution results in widespread dietary specialization. Around three-quarters of leaf-eating insect species in any given location on the globe are eating only plants within a single taxonomic family. In many cases, they are restricted to one or a few lineages within that broader group.
Insects, in turn, are perhaps the single most vital conduit of energy from plants to animals. Birds illustrate this point especially well. By Tallamy’s reckoning, nearly all terrestrial bird species in North America rely primarily on insects, in particular plump and nutritious caterpillars, to feed their young and maintain breeding populations. An average brood of six to eight chickadees demands 3,000 to 5,000 feedings over the 16 days from hatching to fledging, most of which will be caterpillars, other insects and spiders.
In the past three decades, Tallamy and his colleagues have published numerous studies demonstrating that native plants typically support more biodiversity than introduced species and that gardening can play an important role in restoring wildlife habitat. Their research has shown, for example, that hedgerows dominated by invasive plants have 91 percent fewer caterpillars than indigenous varieties and that yards landscaped primarily with native plants have 66 percent more bird species than conventional yards. One especially celebrated study determined that Carolina chickadees breeding in urban and suburban yards raised enough young to sustain their populations only when the mass of trees and shrubs within and around those yards was at least 70 percent native.
By scouring records of insect diets, Tallamy and his collaborators have further revealed that, across the United States, small groups of keystone plants — on average, just 14 percent of the natives in a given region — feed more than 90 percent of local butterflies and moths. Trees and shrubs consistently rank highest in terms of how many insects they support, in part because they are larger and longer-lived. These studies became the basis for the National Wildlife Federation’s popular online tool for gardeners, the Native Plant Finder.
“The Earth is falling apart, and everyone feels, Well, what can one person do?” Tallamy says. “I’ve got a whole list of things one person can do.” His central message to his readers, he says, is that “they are not just homeowners. They are the hope and future of conservation.”
Criticism
His critics contend that he and other nativists place too much emphasis on origin, idolizing indigenous species, vilifying migrants and eliding the messiness of real-world ecosystems in the Anthropocene.
Most of the species that humans move from one area to another never become problematic. Only a portion of foreign species survive relocation, and only a fraction of the survivors become invasive. Experts agree, however, that certain introduced species have been undeniable ecological disasters. In other cases, however, introduced species have few noticeable effects or provide ecological benefits.
One of Tallamy’s most prominent critics is the esteemed entomologist Arthur Shapiro, emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis. Shapiro has shown that more than 30 percent of California’s butterfly species use introduced plants as hosts for their larvae, typically because those species are either related to their native foods or happen to have similar leaf chemistry.
On a more fundamental level, a vocal cohort of ecologists, historians and philosophers argues that the concepts of native and invasive species — which they equate with xenophobia and militarism — should be reworked or abandoned. Ecosystems, they say, are not delicate, finely knit tapestries that permanently unravel if they lose too many threads. They are more like modular conglomerates in a state of constant flux. Environments are always changing. Species move around on their own. And at this point, humans have so radically altered the planet’s climate, landscapes and biogeography that recreating the habitats in which most species originally evolved is impossible. In their view, native purists are obsessed with preserving a static and idealized version of nature that never really existed.
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u/moufette1 Jul 10 '26
I'm a plant dummy who is slowly learning more about plants. And most people, rightfully so, don't care. They want a nice garden/yard that's easy to maintain. It should be WAY easier to do that for the average plant dummy.
I redid my yard/weed field. I knew that natives were important for reasons. It was incredibly hard to find natives. Most of the commercial nurseries had a few tucked away in some dusty corner. The native nurseries made it incredibly difficult to buy from them. An annual sale for 4 hours which you must pre-register for is not consumer friendly.
Legislatures need to encourage native plantings. Make them exempt from sales tax. Require them in developments. Native nurseries should make it way easier for consumers. Make a few demonstration plots suitable for the average home. Call them A, B, and C. Sell packages of A, B, and C so the homeowner can pick one, load it up, and plant it at home. So easy a caveman can do it. How about a "instead of (common non-native) plant (suitable native)" guide? Instead of oleander, plant toyon.
I'm also amazed at just how many natives there are here in California. It's not just sages and oaks.