Native Plant Education

Photo by María Helena Carey

Please welcome Matthew Roberts of Ginkgo Gardens. Throughout the course of the seasons, he will be educating us on different native plants that can be incorporated into a Hill garden’s scheme.  –MHC

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Have you seen all those small dark grey-barked trees with the shocking fuchsia-purple flowers up and down their branches all over town lately? If so, then you’ve been admiring the eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), a tree native to the United States from New England to the Gulf of Mexico and perfectly suited to DC’s climate and the Hill’s smaller lot size. There has been a lot of talk about using natives in landscape design and so here’s a brief explanation of their ecological importance and aesthetic value.

Lots of the plants you’re used to seeing in your neighbor’s yard are originally from Europe, Asia and more recently from Africa. Tulips came from Turkey via the Netherlands; our beloved cherries were a gift from Japan; and those icy white Cape daisies you’ve been coveting hail from South Africa. Other seasonal delights like dogwoods, magnolias, crepe myrtles and the Maryland State flower, black-eyed Susan, all originate from North America. Why does this matter? For two reasons – one large scale and the other at very personal level.

Primarily one plants natives to help out the multitude of organisms and creatures, great and small, which depend on these trees, bushes and flowers for food and housing. Migrant birds covering huge distances need something to eat upon returning to the mid-Atlantic but if your garden is filled with foreign plant material they will starve as will their young upon hatching. Local insects cannot eat alien greenery. No larvae means no butterflies and different stages of insect life feed and live upon different plants but they are all ones that have evolved and adapted to Here, this distinct region of this continent of this world. As we develop more and more for one species (Homo sapiens); there is less and less to support all the other species. No bees to pollinate, no birds, no bats, no frogs, etc. etc. usually ending in no more you-know-who’s. So by incorporating native species into your landscape design you are taking
one small step as a man (or woman or child) to preserve the giant leaf (I mean, leap) for mankind.
Secondarily, one plants natives for the ease of care and lesser maintenance requirements they provide.  When correctly sited, a native plant will naturally fit into the ecosystem with less muss and fuss. One still needs to take into consideration sun and shade, aridity and moisture, wind or lack thereof, but with those elements factored in a local kid from Delmarva will beat an upstart from around the globe any day.

We can all get along. Not every non-native is invasive. Chesapeake marsh grasses won’t flourish in your clay be-damned backyard. However, working together we can add a little more habitat in that backyard; provide a snack for that butterfly, a home for that beetle, a resting place for that songbird. An old friend used to always say that “Many hands makes light work,” usually while I was hauling up the mainsail alone– and in this case multiple urban homesteads can counter the effect of parking lots, highways and acres of lawn hopefully halting and then reversing the ecological decay and promoting a diverse and abundant life.

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I’m Matthew Roberts and I’m still waiting for my first harvest of figs after a so-called neighbor ate them the first year, the roofers got ‘em the next and then that damn squirrel with half a tail the next.