Kicking Grass: Native plantings foster environmental health

BY ROY HEILMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

For over 50 years, Earth Day has fostered awareness and action for the health of the environment. In that time, it has served to encourage large-scale efforts, like national and worldwide advocacy as well as localized work, in acts as simple as planting a tree.

The Earth Day theme for 2023 is “Invest in Our Planet.” One of their suggestions for homeowners is to “Plant native species and pollinators to support biodiversity and beautify your outdoor living space.” This is not a new idea; homeowners have been incorporating, and even replacing their lawns with, native plants for years.

Turf grass common to residential lawns promotes chemical use and supplemental watering, while offering no ecological value. Implications are far reaching, touching on groundwater and surface water quality, the pollinator crisis, and more. Converting lawn space to native plantings can help solve all of those problems, often with added benefits.

Native plants—especially those from the tallgrass prairie— require little to no watering to thrive. Their root systems reach deep into soils (some over 10 feet), which make them highly resistant to droughts. Placing them in the hottest, driest parts of a yard can reduce or even eliminate watering needs.

Because native plants have been present on the landscape for millennia, animal species utilize them heavily.

Mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects use native plant communities across seasons and habitats for food and cover. This is especially true for insects, many of which have suffered severe declines in population due to intensive farming, development, pesticides and other factors. Some have very specific plant needs for their life cycles.

One example is the Karner blue, a small butterfly classified as endangered in Minnesota. It requires habitats which include wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), the only plant Karner blue caterpillars eat. Due to overwhelming loss of those habitats, it is possible that only one site in the state still maintains

CONTRIBUTED

Replacing ordinary grass with native plants invites wildlife, while allowing us to water less often. Pollinators like this bumble beelove Rough blazing star (Liatris aspera), which does well in dry, sandy soils. (Photo by Roy Heilman) a population of this rare species.

Monarch butterflies, which were classified as endangered last year by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, famously require milkweed for the production of their caterpillars. While there are several native milkweeds suitable for monarchs, they (and other butterflies) also need nectar-producing plants throughout the season. There are many such plants endemic to this region, including Meadow blazing star (Liatris ligulistylis), Stiff goldenrod (Solidago rigida), Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) and Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea).

Monarch Joint Venture (MJV) is a national partnership network for monarch and pollinator conservation headquartered in St. Paul. Executive Director Wendy Caldwell says homeowners can make meaningful impacts on behalf of pollinators.

“We embrace this research called ‘All Hands on Deck,’ which basically shows that to reach our monarch conservation goals—which can serve as a proxy for pollinator population goals—we need all hands on deck to get there. Getting homeowners to convert their lawn to more native plants, to pollinator habitat, certainly contributes to that collective goal of restoring pollinator populations.”

Caldwell says any thing helps, and that discontinuing pesti cides is critical: “With species like monarchs, more is always better. But monarchs use a lot of different kinds of habitat. No habitat is too small ... Remember, when you’re