You may expect this article to be about planting red, white, and blue flowers for the Fourth of July. For me, patriotic gardening is using American plants in your home landscape to provide food for American wildlife. The term American plants is synonymous with native plants.
The important difference between native plants and plants that originate in other parts of the world is their chemistry and how a plant’s chemistry relates to American insects. The massive number of insects is the key to transferring the sun’s energy from plants through the food web to higher forms of animals.
An Eastern Bluebird catches a caterpillar to feed its young.
These insects are a major source of protein for wildlife from chickadees to grizzly bears. Parent chickadees do not feed their babies berries or sunflower seeds. They must find 400 to 575 caterpillars a day to feed their nestlings. These caterpillars are found primarily on native plants.
Over millions of years, our American plants and insects have worked out chemical relationships. Plants develop toxins such as latexes, alkaloids, terpenes, and tannins to make their tissues unpalatable. Over time, insects develop enzymes capable of breaking down these chemicals.
After mating, the female luna moth will lay 150 eggs, which provides future caterpillars for baby chickadees and other wildlife. Photo by Lilly Anderson-Messec
Plants from other continents have chemicals that most American insects cannot break down and thus cannot sustain them. A well-known example is the monarch butterfly. Its caterpillar stage of life can eat only milkweed, tolerating the toxins in the leaves and actually incorporating them into its body to make it safe from predation by birds.
Landscape plants from other parts of the world such as azalea, camellia, boxwood, crape myrtle, and ligustrum serve very little function for American insects and thus wildlife farther up the food web. They may provide nectar for a hummingbird or butterfly or berries for birds, but for the most part native insects cannot utilize these landscape plants.
One documented example is the Chinese tallow tree. In China, it is a great native tree where approximately 400 species of insects utilize it for some part of their life cycle. In the southeastern United States, where Chinese tallow is rapidly invading thousands of acres of natural forest, only three species of American insects can feed on the tree. For every alien plant like this that takes up space in our forests or yards, it displaces a valuable American tree or shrub.
Invasive alien plants such as mimosa, kudzu, Japanese privet, Japanese honeysuckle, coral ardisia, Chinese elm, and Chinese camphor that invade our wild lands and park lands is another threat to our native wildlife. In this case, I would posit that to be a patriotic American, we should strive to rid our yards of these stealthy invaders. They occupy space where natives could grow.
The timing is perfect for this early spring blooming native phlox and a newly emerged spicebush swallowtail. Photo by Donna Legare
Since we have destroyed 95 percent of natural America with agriculture, cities, and suburban sprawl, we can improve what we have control over – our own yards. As Craig Huegel notes in his book, Native Plant Landscaping for Florida Wildlife, “Do you want your landscaping to be mere window dressing or part of a functioning ecosystem?”
In my own yard, the previous owner landscaped it very nicely, all with traditional non-natives such as boxwood, azaleas, camellias, and podocarpus. Over the past 20 years, we have replaced overgrown, sick, or dead plants with American plants such as wild azaleas, highbush blueberry, Elliott’s blueberry, needle palm, and oakleaf hydrangea.
My yard is not 100 percent “American.” I have kept beautiful large camellias and a sasanqua hedge for privacy. We have a large Japanese magnolia that we work around. I also use some non-native perennials in the hummingbird and butterfly garden, though natives are very important here as well.
The advantage of native perennials or wildflowers is that they bloom when spring begins while most non-natives are still underground in their winter dormancy. When hummingbirds return or butterflies emerge they need flowers and the timing of this is where natives shine.
In our nation’s current divisive political environment, this is one issue we can all come together on. Add a new dimension to your patriotism by adding American plants to your yard. You can increase the percentage of native plants in your yard by just adding one native plant per year!
In his book "Bringing Nature Home," Doug Tallamy calls for creating Suburbia National Park. He states, “Like it or not, gardeners have become important players in the management of our nation’s wildlife… We have not shared space very well with our fellow earthlings.”
Let your yard become a part of Suburbia National Park. Replace some non-native plants with American plants whenever you have the opportunity, and help every type of wildlife from insects to songbirds to mammals. Let’s make America native again.