While controversy rages in my home island regarding the recent elections, I was reading an article in the gardening section of the Guardian newspaper online - The Friday Debate: Should we all be going native? -- about native gardening in Britain! I left a long comment, and there were only 9 commenters before me so it may not be such a popular debate in the U.K. - or not when there appears to be a hung parliament, a strange occurrence indeed.
I googled a bit but couldn't find much of a native plant movement in the U.K. like we have here, a couple nurseries only and no societies.
When I google "British native plant society" I get links to the California nps! "British native plants" leads to our own Jeffrey Caldwell. Of course I didn't log on to the UK Google site.
There is one marvellous resource, the Postcode Plants Database - by the British museum, somewhat like our own calflora. There I found the lovely image of Papaver rhoeas at the head this post, which to any Brit of my vintage brings back childhood memories of "Poppy Day," which commemorates the dead of World War I (a war that may have other names in other places).
On Blotanical I did come up with some nice posts from the fairly new Garden of Eaden blog, for example this one on native pond plants. But their focus is not on natives, though their website itself does talk about a Best British Wildlife website competition. So maybe things are starting to cook over there.
At a meeting of our local chapter of CNPS last year, a botanist talked about her involvement with the Save Gillies Hill movement. Gillies Hill is a historic spot near Stirling, in Scotland, and it is threatened by quarry development. Interestingly, if they can find indigenous plants there worth legal protection, it would help the cause to protect this historic site of a great battle. I found a local blogger, Fraoch Woodland, writing about it too.
There are many passionate gardeners in the U.K. to be sure, but I didn't find much passion about gardening with natives on the web. I wonder where native plant movements take root most? South Africa and California are two hotspots - both places where non-native people have come in with fresh eyes maybe? Or where the indigenous flora is just so stunning and so evidently garden worthy?
Comments
The movement to plant "native" at home is less strong than here because I believe that it has had such intensive non-native planting and agriculture for such a long time that it is hard to visualize an area totally native - some of the non-natives have been there so long they've been "adopted" as natives. People at home are surprised when I tell them that rhododendron and sycamore are non natives. It's all about education and Conservation Volunteers Northern Ireland does as great job.
And what about those elections? What happens now? How exciting!
I hope they take up the cause of their own plants as well! I'm sure there's some interesting stuff to be found. How adorable would it be to garden to attract hedgehogs!
As an expat here in California I'm all in favor of the going native movement. "Lose the lawn" makes so much sense here, where you have to irrigate all summer and water is precious. (And all the nasty fertilizers flow to the oceans and pollute them.)
Besides there is a huge local flora here to enjoy. Why replace it with an ersatz English style garden that might starve the local fauna and provides no breeding ground for insects that co-evolved with local plants? I'm having a great time on our 3 acres in the coastal mountains learning about the local plants that pop up, as I year by year get rid of the invasive non-native grasses and other introduced weeds. I'm lucky enough to live where I can enjoy restoration gardening. To me it's sort of deep gardening, where you mix botanizing in with the other gardening pleasures.
There are two native garden tours in the Bay Area - around San Francisco - that showcase beautiful and sustainable native gardens that promote wildlife. Going Native, and Bringing Back the Natives.
It's a whole different way to garden, whole different way to think about gardening - not just for color, but for ecology. You don't kill the caterpillars with pesticides, you watch in excitement and wait for the butterflies. (Sometimes things get out of balance but generally it works out.)
I also like nativism because it promotes local differences - why should all gardens everywhere look the same?
I've wondered about native gardening in the UK - do we have enough connection with the underlying native flora to restore it, after so many millenia of cultivation? Interestingly many California native plants are embraced more by Brits than by Californians in general - penstemons, silk tassel bush, pink flowering currant and other beauties. But that's the old approach - taking exotics into your garden.
Well, if they are not locally invasive, some exotics are OK, why not - they are ornamental. But not as the backbone of your garden.
Non-invasive is key. I weep at all the pampas grass, scotch and french broom, myrtle, south african oxalis and etc that have escaped into the wild here and crowd out the local flora.
I believe planting native is important when it supports species that are endangered, encourages sustainability in the landscape, or the plants are exceptionally beautiful. There is no reason to not plant something in a climate that does very well and does not threaten to push out native populations, present cross-breeding problems with native plants, or that can introduce disease.
And, but, however, there are a lot of beautiful European plants. I myself had a bouquet of daisies and cornflowers for my wedding. Yes, they were hybridized or they would not have lasted the day, but it was what I wanted (unusual, was the main comment).
I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that Europe is less 'vulnerable' when it comes to invasive foreign plant species.
In Europe, the soil has been prone to disturbance for a few millenniums yet, and the larger part of our natives is used to at least some disturbance.
In America and Australia on the other hand, only in the last few century's the soil has been disturbed to a larger extend. So, when plants from Europe and Asia arrive there, they are often better suited to grow on the newly disturbed soil then the natives.
So, in Europe, people are well used to see there 'natives', and consider many of them as just weeds... And who wants a garden full of weeds?
I have the impression that here in Belgium, a country with only little nature left, the native gardening movement is already growing.
'Onderdeappelboom' published a blogpost about the native flowers in her garden, 'Eigenwijze tuin' is a 'wild gardener', just like I am. In the last few years, several blogs on native-plants gardening came into existence here in Flanders(Dutch speaking part of Belgium), whereas I haven't found that kind of blogs already in Germany, France, the Netherlands...