Mountain Sneezeweed in foreground, Douglas Aster back right, Canada Goldenrod back left, all locally native plants.
Re-wilding with Native Plants – A New Perspective For Your Yard Sabine Almstrom loves helping our wild bees and birds through gardening with native plants.
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s a nature lover who has enjoyed native plants for many years, I have noticed that the vast majority of gardens feature hardly any native flora in their designs. Even more intriguing is the fact that this includes the gardens of people who genuinely care for our natural world and understand the urgent need to preserve wildness. The most likely reason is our conditioning, from childhood onwards, by gardens around us, which focus only on the decorative value of plants, never ecological function. Nurseries strengthen this cultural mantra by promoting showy flowering species native to Asia, the Mediterranean, the tropics and so on. And why not? I hear you say. After all they are beautiful to look at. Plus, one might add, they garner respect and admiration from neighbours and visitors, enhancing our status. Regarding native plants, the cultural imperative seems to be: not in my backyard… But here’s s the big catch: introduced plants are not good at providing food for the native animals that drive our ecosystems. A full third of our wild bees are specialists, meaning their
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larvae, the next bee generation, can only feed on the pollen of certain native plant lineages. Over many thousands of years they evolved with those local plants in a win-win relationship. Bees get pollen, the food for their larvae, from specific plant genera or even a single species, while the plants ensure their pollen is spread mostly in their own genus, guaranteeing seed production and propagation. Now picture a little newly emerged specialist bee, singlemindedly searching for the particular native flowers it needs to rear its brood. If this mother bee can’t find those plants, it cannot fulfill the purpose of its short life: nest-building, egglaying and provisioning the babies with a pile of pollen food. When this little bee dies, so will all future generations with it. This scenario is happening around us countless millions of times, around the neighbourhood, around the country, and sadly, around the world. For wild specialist bees, the most stunning introduced plants might as well be made of plastic. Our love affair with foreign plants is killing our bees by leaving them without food. To make things worse, many common introduced garden plants like periwinkle, mountain bluet, yellow archangel and many more have become invasive inside and outside of gardens, forming smothering carpets that may otherwise be populated by native plants
