Plants Are Not Outdoor Furniture
The outside is not like the inside. Brave, I know, but someone had to say it. Yet, as elementary as that may seem, when we take a look around our cities and suburbs we actually see almost everyone treating the outside like the inside! In my view, the most problematic attitude our gardening culture has isn’t that we like exotic plants or lawns. Rather, it’s that we tend to view any plants we buy, whether native or exotic, in the same way that we view furniture. We want the plant that we spent so much time and money on to stay there forever and to always look great, like our bedside tables or sofa. This goes a long way towards explaining why horticultural atrocities like bermuda grass lawns and oleander bushes are so prevalent in our gardens. Orthodox gardening today in most of the country really is no different than interior decorating. Exotic turf grass (or mulch) is like a carpet, and you surround it with a bunch of nice bookcases and chairs (evergreen shrubs and trees) They’re theoretically always there and always green. You spice it up a little bit with some annual flowers in a pot or small bed like you would add cut flowers on your kitchen table. And while you’re at a work, you’ll pay outside house cleaners (landscapers) and tidy up for you and make everything nice and neat, just like your house!
Finding beauty in change and decay is an attitude worth developing
Now let’s say you got religion and decide to take advantage of something like the SAWS landscaping rebates and plant native or drought tolerant plants instead of all or part of your lawn. This is a really good idea! You take out the lawn, plant the plants… and then leave each little plant an island in a sea of wood chip mulch. We’re not here today to litigate the benefits and pitfalls of mulch (mulch is good, actually), I just use this as a very common example of how even well intentioned gardeners can go astray in their attitude toward their landscape. In this example, we’ve gone native, but we’re still stuck in the same plants-as-futniture mentality. We all could use an attitude adjustment in this department. Planting a native garden is not like planting a conventional garden. We need to think of the garden as a system rather than a collection of individual pieces of plant furniture. Plants need to be able to live, die, and (most critically!) reproduce. When we mow too much or go a little too crazy with the woodchip mulch, we’re inadvertently castrating the ecosystem we spent so much time and money to get started. Plants need to go to seed, and the seeds need to drop onto some bare ground. This is also why it’s important to rely on native ecotype plants as much as possible, we want to give our plants every chance to live out their full life cycle, and native ecotypes are already well known to be able to reproduce here since they’ve been reproducing here for a long time!
This has warm fuzzy benefits for our ecosystem of course, and it makes us feel good. But there is a huge tangible advantage in it for you, the human gardener: massive cost savings. When you plant a garden that is allowed to reproduce, you have become your own native plant nursery. No need for a greenhouse when your velvet leaf senna has spread its seeds up and down the whole block! We needn’t let our gardens run wild of course, it’s part of the skill of the gardener to identify the things we want and remove the things we don’t. It’s a garden, not a wilderness area. Once you’ve developed these skills, there’s also no need for the landscaping/mowing guy, or the trip to the big box “nursery” to replace the oleander that seems to die every other winter.