Growing Native Newsletter: excerpts

Why Grow Natives?

by Louise Lacey

The concept of using native plants for everything from backyard gardening to widescale revegetation is the most important and promising idea in ecology today. It's positive consequences are immense, and we don't even know their full extent.

But just to name a few:

Cost are much lower, for several reasons.
- No soil preparation is necessary -- not even plowing or rototilling. Weeds, however, must be re-moved through pulling, burning and/or judicious use of low-impact herbicides such as Roundup.
- Because they are adapted to leaner, dryer landscapes (than found in "garden" conditions) natives never need fertilizing, cultivating, irrigating once they are established.
- Pruning is also minimal, because natives usually grow to their mature form and then stay that size, whereas hybrid plants continue growing like cancer. (About 1/5 of our landfill is garden prunings.)
- While initial maintenance is more intensive (those pesky weeds), long term maintenance is extremely low because once a native community is established, weeds can't get in.
Native flora brings native fauna. Not only does this mean habitat for human-appreciated critters like birds and butterflies, but more invisible and possibly more important creatures such as insects.
California, for example, has nearly 1000 species of bee, many of whom have a single plant species as their nectar source. If that plant isn't growing somewhere the bee can find it, the pollinator has no food; once it is gone the plant can never again reproduce, no matter how many seeds may be discovered somewhere in a warehouse.
Native plants grow in organic conditions; thus the insect balance is restored. The need for pesticides disappears. On a higher level of the food chain, small mammals also return. More gophers mean more owls, etc.
When native plants are growing together in their own plant community configuration, without fertilizer and cultivation, the soil regains its health. Everything from earthworms to beneficial bacteria return.
Most importantly, the natural mutually beneficial rela- tionship between soil fungi and plant roots -- called mycorrhizae -- is restored. Mycorrhizae is the mechanism whereby plants derive nutrients and moisture from lean, dry soils -- and the fungi get the benefit of the plant's ability to photosynthesize. (You may be familiar with the discovery a couple of years ago of the single, enormous underground fungus found in a Michigan forest -- called the largest living plant in the world until an even larger one was found in the forests of Oregon.)
The underground ecology is just as important as that above ground -- and standard horticultural (and agricultural) practices destroy it with fertilizer and cultivation, not to mention herbicides and pesticides.
Perhaps the most overlooked consequence of using native plants is the esthetic benefit. The human appreciation of "wilderness" as beautiful is incalculable. What's the picture on your calendar?
And finally, on this very short list culled from a very much larger one, consider the impact that growing native has on the human heart and spirit, something I've learned a lot about in the course of publishing Growing Native.

If a visit to a park or other natural area is perceived as beautiful and spiritually refreshing, imagine what happens to people who actual participate in the healing of a patch of earth. It doesn't matter if they are backyard gardeners who do everything themselves or maintenance people on a large revegetation project; the process is the same.

On a rational level, someone healing the earth knows he or she is doing something enormously positive. It is a upbeat activity prevailing against a tide of chronic bad news. On a deeper level, a bond is forged with the planet. Something happens inside, an awareness grows of a profound connection. People who have personally experienced that connection with the wholeness of life on the earth cannot thereafter be any part of its violation. It's a permanent change in consciousness.

Everett Butts, a native plant oldtimer living in the foot- hills of the Sierra, east of Sacramento, puts it this way:

"What nature is doing on its own I'm doing with it. I tell people I have an affair with the land going here. It's damned important to me. It's part of my substance, my living and breathing. What I feel here is the earth and what flies and walks over it and burrows under it. The more I see and feel and understand, the more I like it."

Reprinted by permission from Growing Native Newsletter, P O Box 489, Berkeley CA 94701. Copyright 1994 by Louise Lacey. Permission to reprint granted so long as this page is reproduced in its entirety.

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What Happened to California?

by Louise Lacey

When Europeans first came to California they thought they had found Paradise. The vegetation was so lush and splendid that both horse and man had trouble wading through it.

In diaries and letters home they mentioned again and again the impression that the entire territory was like a park -- endless vistas of bunchgrass, wildflowers and enormous, stately trees. Vast herds of elk and antelope surged through, grazing lightly and moving on. The coast ranges and the Great Valley contained almost no scrub underbrush or cover as we know it today.

The catastrophic transformation of California's ecology was caused by many factors -- over-grazing, the introduction of annual grasses, erosion, herbicides/pesticides/fertilizers, irrigation, mass killing off of indigenous fauna, mono- culture, logging, roadbuilding, residential development, the "control" of fire and natural drainage. But of all of these, over-grazing holds the greatest responsibility.

The California Spanish used cattle hides and tallow for money. In any given year in the late 1700's and early 1800's, as many as 100,000 hides passed out through each port. For every hide shipped, many stayed on to graze as reproductive stock, too young, too hard to round up. (The Spanish didn't build fences.)

It is no exaggeration to say that millions of cattle -- and sheep -- ate the heart of California's native ecology almost to the point of disappearance in a few generations, just a geological instant.

The entire process can be illustrated in a microcosm by the story of the bunchgrasses.

California's native grasses, which covered thousands of square miles, virtually all the entire coastal ranges and Great Valley, were perennial. They had deep roots and stayed green for much of the year (many all year) and served admirably to prevent erosion. Many types lived, it has recently been learned, as long as 200 years. With that kind of longevity they didn't have to have much reproductive power.

The bunchgrass growth pattern has interesting character. Each plant (some species as small as 9" across, others as broad as 6' or more) prefers space between itself and its neighbors, so what you see is a cluster of distinct individuals in a large company of associates. When the blades relax in the summer each one looks from a distance like a small wave on a spreading pond, with the upright panicles (seed stem and head) swaying or drooping (depending on its form) in the wind.

But this give-me-some-space distinctiveness was both the bunchgrass's blessing and its downfall. Before the European intrusion, the spaces between individual plants were filled with wildflowers and bulbs which grew, bloomed and fell dormant on their own schedules, creating an ever-changing oriental carpet of extraordinary beauty. Then came the cattle and sheep.

These domestics had grazing habits different from the native grazers, which clipped the top and moved on. Domestics -- especially sheep, but also cattle -- tend to eat grass down to the ground, even wrenching it up from its roots. The perennial grasses were much more nutritious and tasty, too, than the rye and oats the ranchers imported. So the cattle and sheep killed one long-lived, not-very-fertile plant after another, by the millions....And left behind in their excretions the seeds of their annual competitors, which found fertile ground in those very spaces in between.

An annual grass, by definition, has to work fast. It must sprout, bloom, set seed and die all within a few months. It doesn't have much in the way of roots, because it gets its water from precipitation and whatever is readily available near the surface. It has no power to keep the topsoil on the hillside. But it sure knows how to reproduce.

You can see the difference yourself between the way an annual and a perennial go about the business of living when you plant their flower seeds in flats at the same time. Some annual flowers will even be blooming before your perennial seedlings are ready to be transplanted out.

So the annual grasses, and the weeds that accompanied them from the Old World, found a reluctantly generous hospitality in the New. We see the result.

Today the ecological consciousness of Californians is germinating, taking root, and in some people and places, beginning to bloom. An expanding awareness of the value of native plants is just one manifestation.

Each native plant patch in the garden of each aware person is a blossom in the cracks of ignorance and indifference. If Californians up to now have neither known any better nor cared, the planet has finally forced our hands. We don't have the water, the time or the money to continue the horticultural pretense that we live in northern Europe.

What a wonder: We woke up before it was too late, before the plants that have always lived here, and could put their beauty and adaptive capacity at our disposal, had vanished.

We are embarked upon a great adventure, just beginning to learn how to live with the natives. Like the bunch-grasses, we each want a little space around us so as to leave room for the flowers.

And like the bunchgrasses, when we grow together we are each a small wave on a spreading pond.

Reprinted by permission from Growing Native Newsletter, P O Box 489, Berkeley CA 94701. Copyright 1990 by Louise Lacey. Permission to reprint granted so long as this page is reproduced in its entirety.

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