Native Plants for your Garden

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” -Mahatma Gandhi

I'm really not one for proselytizing although I can see that using a quote by Gandhi might suggest otherwise. I do however like to encourage people to realize the change in the world that they can effect. Planting a garden (or volunteering at someone else's) is one of the simplest ways to do just that. Evergreen (a charity that focuses on the themes of nature, culture and community in an urban environment) has an extensive database of native plants that you can search through according to your ecoregion. Planting a garden with exclusively native plants encourages what is known as ecological restoration - the slow process of returning an area to a self-sustaining state. This inturn fosters a natural habitat for local birds, mammal, butterfly, and insects.

Like many invasive fish species that enter into a lake and destory a native population that had previously thrived in the local conditions, invasive plants cause similiar destruction in a different environment. They spread quickly and overtake and strangle out natural plant communities. That Purple Loosestrife (often called Beautiful Killer that you see along highways is an example of an alien weed that has wreaked havoc in both rural and urban habitats. If you have purple loosestrife somewhere on your property, please refer to this website to see what you can do about it.

Similiar to the idea of the 100 mile diet (eating food produced within a 100 square miles of where you live), planting native gardens is about returning to the local, establishing balance in our ecosystems by supporting the biodiversity of our environment by using natural plants (the plants that are the most capable of thriving in our soil types, etc, just like asparagus from 20 miles away tastes better than that harvested from 2,000 miles away and transported here).

If you don't have a garden to tend (and I know how hard those early morning spring days are without dirt to dig around in), then google "community gardens" and your city. They almost always have a call out for volunteers.