Gardening with native plants a positive step
Supporting local habitats is valuable and simple action we can take right now
It’s no surprise that many people have taken up gardening during the pandemic.
Nurturing growth — whether on a balcony, in a yard, community garden, park, laneway, boulevard or other public space — is a surefire way to feel better. It’s good for our mental health. We’re participating in something miraculous: life flourishing, making more life.
But optimism has taken a beating, and not only from the pandemic. Any relief through gardening can seem irrelevant in the context of larger challenges. As we witness the effects of climate change, it’s hard to feel hopeful about the future.
Here’s a bit of good news, though. Gardening with native plants is something positive we can do to ameliorate the effects of climate change: increasing native plant habitat supports biodiversity, and biodiversity is a foundation of resil- iency. There is a lot of uncertainty about the future, but what we do know is that the long-evolved eco- logical relationships between native plants and wildlife (think of monarchs and milkweed, for example) are complex, interdependent and crucial to all life on Earth.
Native plant gardens support these long-evolved relationships. For those with access to land, public or private, or balconies with space, it’s one valuable action we can take right now.
Consider the recent rainstorms and the predicted increases in extreme weather due to climate change. Gardens can help! Where does water pool on the landscape; where are the muddy masses of soil? These are places calling out for rain gardens of native wet meadow plants that thrive in these conditions. Start with a little digging and the addition of porous materials in the depression, like pebbles or uncompacted soil. Add plants such as swamp milkweed, Joe-pye weed, boneset and great blue lobelia, and you’ll be creating an infiltration garden that ameliorates basement flooding, prevents polluted stormwater from inundating waterways and supports pollinators.
Or, create a dry river bed that follows the path of flowing water during rainstorms. Dig down a bit, place pebbles in a meandering “river,” and border it with dead logs scrounged from pruned trees or a local arborist. This beautiful landscape feature will help with flooding and provide excellent habitat for pollinators.
Lawns are another place ripe for easy, transformative action right now. Take a look at areas of turf grass not actively used for recreation, and consider all the mowing, watering and maintenance work that will be saved by converting them into plantings of low-maintenance native shrubs. Sun-loving New Jersey tea, partial-sun-loving northern bush honeysuckle and shade-loving spicebush all stay relatively low and compact — and they provide crucial habitat.
Now is the perfect time to prepare a low-maintenance planting bed for native shrubs and perennials, with the easiest method there is: using the power of the sun to solarize the soil. Cover a section of lawn with black or clear plastic, weighted down with bricks or rocks, and do nothing for six weeks. When you lift the plastic in late summer, you’ll have a weed-free bed ready for an early fall planting (a great time for native plant nursery sales).
If purchasing native plants is not an option, reach out to Facebook groups such as Ontario Native Plant Gardening, community groups such as Blooming Boulevards (in Mississauga), Project Swallowtail (west-end Toronto), the David Suzuki Foundation or the North American Native Plant Society. They’re all full of native plant gardeners, many of whom have seeds to share or are propagating native plants with the purpose of passing them along to people and community groups. If they’re tapped out of plants, they can direct you to other local groups. Generosity informs their mission of spreading the love.
Gardens are not simply collections of beautiful flowers that brighten our days. They do that and they can also be places where we participate in the long-evolved relationships between plants and all other forms of life.
Climate change makes it more urgent to increase native plant habitat across the fragmented landscape. These are the steppingstones that will knit together connections for the inevitable migrations of species in response to a warming world.
Incremental changes — multiplied by new, casual or keen gardeners across the landscape — add up to a better future for all. I guarantee that if you add even just a few native plants, you’ll get hooked. The birds, butterflies and bees will see to that.