Going natural
By Mary Lhowe / Ocean State
Stories
'Strawberry Matriarchy,' a drawing by Dawn Spears.
This story was originally published by Ocean State
Stories, a nonprofit newsroom covering under-reported issues in Rhode Island.
Read more at Ocean State Stories.
So, you are thinking of sowing in your yard a few native
plants. Who cares?
The list of who cares is long: pollinators like bees,
hummingbirds, and butterflies; bats and birds; worms and underground bugs;
fungi and bacteria; and plants.
And, who cares about the health of pollinators? Farmers,
of course, and, in theory, anyone who eats. Native plants and native
pollinators adapted over the millennia to live and work effectively together.
The movements of pollinators allow plants to become fertilized and to produce
fruits, seeds, and young plants. In turn, plants feed the pollinators.
“If we don’t have native plants so that native
pollinators can live, we will lose food sources,” said Jane Case, owner
of Blue Moon Farm in South Kingstown,
which grows and sells native plants. “Pollination is important in carrying on
what sustains us.”
Native plants are generally understood as those whose
ancestors had roots in this region before the arrival of Europeans. Plants,
insects, and winged creatures that have lived and worked together here for
millennia have formed an ecosystem of interdependence and they function well
within it.
Nonnative species introduced from other places can
present a threat to native species. They also don’t support native pollinators
as well as native plants do. They have no natural enemies here. They may
compete fiercely, spreading fast and even threatening native species with
extinction. If native species die off, the pollinators and insects that rely on
them for food and resources can also could die off.
“The entire food web is based on interactions between
plants and organisms,” said Kate Venturini Hardesty, an educator at the
URI Cooperative Extension. “Native plants feed a native insect population. This
is an evolutionary relationship, and these relationships are not forged
quickly. Some insects need certain plants. We lose species diversity when a
species does not have the food it needs.”
Plants that come from elsewhere and establish themselves
on our landscape are called “introduced” or “exotic.” Plant species introduced
from elsewhere that dominate our landscape, spreading voraciously and causing
ecosystem destruction, are called “invasive.” For example, the pretty and
aggressively invasive purple loosestrife from Eurasia is plowing through
marshland in North America, eliminating nest sites and food for birds.
In contrast, native plants are those that evolved in our
climate and are a natural element of our ecosystem. They support beneficial
insects and the entire food web. Some native plants are considered
“nuisance” species (poison ivy and bull briar, for example), but they
have high habitat value for wildlife. Examples of native plants include
wild bee balm, mountain mint, golden Alexander, foxglove beardtongue, butterfly
milkweed, goldenrod, and New England aster.
What’s the big deal with native plants?
With global warming a growing concern, native plants may
be more resilient to climate change than introduced exotics because they are so
well established. “If there is a fluctuation a few degrees warmer or colder,
natives are more tolerant because they sit squarely in the zone,” Hardesty
said.
The view is seconded by David Vissoe, an expert with
the Rhode
Island Wild Plant Society. Native plants, according to Vissoe,
“can tolerate a wide range of temperatures and seasonal abnormalities. Native
plants have adapted to change over time and they support the biodiversity of an
area,” including providing essential nutrition for beneficial insects. “It is a
web of life and everything is interconnected,” Vissoe said.
Invasive plants, a subset of exotic, or introduced,
plants, are aggressive, tenacious, and competitive. They can produce a lot of
flowers and seeds that appeal to birds that will eat them and then scatter the
seed in their feces. Because they spread fast, invasive plants can create a
plant monoculture, which may starve out native pollinators and introduce
susceptibility to disease for themselves and the fewer insects they support.
One form of human-made monoculture is suburban yards with
large lawns. Construction often begins with the cutting down of trees and
digging up of the top 6 inches of soil, where a complex ecosystem of worms,
insects, soil, grasses, and plants may have developed over time. Heavy layers
of mulch can threaten a type of bee that nests underground.
The lack of biodiversity also is dramatically on display
in the monocrops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans in vast fields in the
Midwest. Some farmers have had to bring in European honeybees, Hardesty said,
to pollinate crops because the evolutionary relationship between exotic food
crops and native bees is not strong.
About one-third of Rhode Island is covered with plants
that have been introduced from elsewhere, according to Hardesty. How do exotic
plants arrive? Early settlers wanted familiar plants from the Old Country.
People like them for ornamental landscaping. Seeds of exotic plants hitchhike
into the country in ballast water, sheep’s wool, animal feces, packing crates,
and car tires. Kudzu, the voracious vine that blankets whole groves of trees in
the South, originally came from China and was brought to Rhode Island to
control erosion near highways.
“That was a big ‘oops’,” Hardesty said.
A short list of nonnatives in the Rhode Island region
would include purple loosestrife, multiflora rose, autumn olive, glossy
buckthorn, Japanese honeysuckle, and Asiatic bittersweet.
Supporting native plants
A desire to respect and restore native plants is on the
rise among ordinary homeowners, as well as farmers and academic scientists.
People at several Rhode Island garden centers say they
get a lot of inquiries from customers about native plants. Case, owner of Blue
Moon Farm, said she has seen a big shift in interest in native plants.
“Forty years ago people had no interest whatsoever” in
native plants, she said. “I couldn’t sell anything with the word ‘weed’ in the
name, like Joe Pye weed,” a native plant that flowers into a gorgeous purple
crown.
Matthew Crudale, nursery manager at Clark
Farms in South Kingstown, noted a wrinkle in a town law that is
giving native plants a boost. He said the town of Narragansett prohibits
homeowners from allowing any water to drain off their properties. One solution
to this is to create a “water garden,” or a low area in the yard, to which
excess water can drain. Customers are showing up at Clark Farms, he said, with
advice from landscape architects and lists of native plants that tolerate “wet
feet” to sow in these depressions.
Restoring and promoting the use of native plants is a
serious undertaking for URI master gardeners, the URI Cooperative Extension,
and the Rhode Island Wild Plant Society, particularly through its ReSeeding
Rhode Island project.
During the 2022 growing season, scientists from ReSeeding
Rhode Island collected seeds from
wild plants in Rhode Island. The seeds were sowed in the winter, and throughout
the 2023 growing season they grew into healthy plugs. In fall 2023, plugs from
15 species were planted in “foundation plots” on the lands of partnering
farmers and land trusts. The seeds from plants in these plots will be harvested
each year, serving as the source with which to “re-seed” the state. A second
cycle of the same process was initiated in 2023.
Albert Brandon, owner of Brandon Family Farm in South
Kingstown and a partner in the Reseeding project, has planted hedgerows of
native common yarrow, New York ironweed, gray goldenrod, and mountain mint on
his land to support the project.
The goals of ReSeeding Rhode Island, as stated on its
website, are to create a wild-sourced seed bank in Rhode Island, to preserve
the genetics of the state’s wild plants, to improve the biodiversity of the
state’s native ecosystems, and to help connect people to the environment.
The wisdom of Native people
People in South County who are seriously interested in
plants are likely to be familiar with the farm and family of Dawn and Cassius
Spears, in Hopkinton. Cassius Spears is a member of the Narragansett Indian
Tribe and his farm is named Ashawaug, Narragansett for
“the land between two rivers.”
Spears, who grew up in Charlestown, waves off an attempt
to call him a “farmer” because, he said, his role on the land — which he
protects partly for future use by his eight grandchildren — is much broader
than farming alone. The family does raise commercial crops such as corn in
raised beds that help warm the soil and under high-tunnel greenhouses that can
extend the growing season. Food is for sale at a farm stand on the property.
Spears said the family’s work also goes a long way in
supporting native and heirloom plants, and plants of importance to Native
American heritage. He explores the woods and transplants wood lettuce and
marsh mallow; he raises heritage Narragansett flint corn, crook neck squash,
pumpkins, sunflowers, and Jerusalem artichokes.
“We are seed savers and sharers,” he said.
Spears plants “Three Sisters,” a Native American
tradition of three “companion” plants in which corn rises tall to support
climbing bean plants while squash provides ground cover to retain moisture in
the soil, fight off the weeds, and provide nitrogen for the corn.
Spears said a casual observer might see parts of his land
that look unused, but that impression would be wrong. In those
uncultivated-looking areas, pollinators are feeding, turtles are resting in
sandboxes, mud wasps are burrowed in mud, and birds are nesting.
Spears said his family welcomes interested visitors so
that people can “understand the value of working with the land, that we are not
using things up; we are leaving something for the next generations.” He doesn’t
like to promote the idea of Native people “in moccasins and breechclouts”
because “we are still evolving.” One example: solar-powered wells that provide
water.
Dawn Spears is an essential part of the farm’s work. Her
husband noted, with a tone of pride, that his wife is bent on “putting
‘culture’ back into agriculture.” One of her undertakings is to create
paintings that celebrate the love of Indigenous people for the land.
‘Three Sisters: Best Friends,’ a drawing by Dawn Spears.
Spears said he likes to be on his land, notice a passing squirrel, and think, “Hey, your great-great-great- grandfather ran around here with my great-great-great-grandfather.”
Anyone in Rhode Island who wants to experiment with
planting native species has a number of good resources. They include Rhode
Island Wild Plant Society, the URI
Cooperative Extension, and the RI Native Plant Guide.
Case loves the book with the upbeat title “Tiny and Wild:
Build a Small-Scale Meadow Anywhere” by Graham Gardner. Case also recommended
information provided by the Xerces Society.
Doug Tallamy is an entomologist at the University of
Delaware and co-founder of the organization Homegrown National Park. In essence, that group is
encouraging American homeowners — sitting on 135 million acres of residential
landscape, including 44 million acres of lawn — to plant native species.
Homegrown National Park calls itself “a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate
biodiversity and ecosystem function by planting native plants.”
Homegrown National Park’s aim, according to Tallamy, is
to “catalyze a collective effort of homeowners, property owners, land managers,
farmers, and anyone with some soil to plant in … to start a new habitat by
planting native plants and removing most invasive plants. It is the
largest cooperative conservation project ever conceived or attempted.”
“We are in the middle of a biodiversity crisis,” Tallamy
said. “Eighty percent of plants [on residential properties] are not native and
do not support the food web.”
One poster child of the problem may be the well-known
example of monarch butterflies, which have been under stress, Tallamy said,
since scientists developed “Roundup-Ready” species of corn and soybeans.
Assured that those food crops were safe from the herbicide, farmers sprayed
fields and roadsides far and wide, killing massive numbers of the milkweed
plants that monarchs absolutely need to survive.
“We are having a global insect decline,” Tallamy said.
“If you own a piece of the Earth you have to steward it responsibly, and you
cannot do that without native plants. Whether we realize it or not, we cannot
exist without nature.”
