Changing Attitudes Towards Gardening
By: Frank Hardy
Frank Hardy has worked many years as a professional landscaper and has a real heart for all things nature. In the following article, he touches on the importance of planting and reintroducing native plants in our gardens.
There have been many changes in the horticulture industry in the past twenty years or so. As a landscaper by trade, I remember going to garden centres to purchase plants that had been dug from fields in the spring and placed into containers usually with loose, sandy soil. Extra care was needed when planting, and often limited to spring and fall. The big change was when the large department stores started selling plants. The product was now container grown in warmer climates and delivered by tractor trailers in huge quantities. Traditional garden centres had to adapt rapidly to this change. To survive they had to stock these container grown plants and find many innovative ways to keep their clients. Meanwhile, many new varieties of shade trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials and annuals were being produced.
Gardeners now had more choices than ever before. Hybrids were developed to be less prone to problems such as powdery mildew, or perhaps to have larger or different colour blooms. So many new options for gardeners, for some it almost became an addiction, the desire to have that new variety of hosta or coneflower seemed important. Also, terms such as "pest free" or "pest resistant" were often used by sales staff. We now could have the perfect garden, so many beautiful plants, colours and no bugs. Lately, however, we have realized that due to a continuing loss of natural habitat, we have the moral responsibility to establish areas that will benefit wildlife.
A few years ago, honeybees started dying off in huge numbers, some beekeepers reported that up to eighty percent of their hives did not overwinter. The popular trend of planting garden to attract butterflies was now modified and called pollinator gardens to provide pollen and nectar for more species of adult insects. We also remembered that we had many species of native bees and if we provided habitat for them, they in turn could pollinate more efficiently than the non native honeybees.
Gardeners love nature, that is why we are gardeners, and we are always adapting and trying to find new things to improve our plantings, more than ever with an environmentally minded approach. Purchasing the latest exotic, or newest hybrid doesn't seem that important now. Instead we realize that we need to use native plants in our urban gardens to re-establish habitat for wildlife. That butterfly bush (Buddleia) that was promoted not so long ago as the ultimate plant is now viewed in a different way, it may offer pollen and nectar for adult butterflies, but it cannot support North American butterflies at any other stage of development. We now realize that if the plants we use in our garden are not native, they cannot act as hosts for our native insects. Studies confirm that non native plants are un-palatable or even toxic to native insects. The plants that were promoted as pest and insect free does not seem so appealing now that our native insect population is so depleted.
Ecosystems cannot function without insects. If we look at problems with pest insects we have had to deal with, we find that largely they are non-native species. So now with a renewed passion, urban gardens are being created with ecosystems in mind. Native plant use is greatly on the rise. This will help re-establish a food source for native insects and in turn song bird population may again have a food source. Hopefully they will be able to recover from the tremendous declines they have been facing.
We have tried the exotics and the hybrids, that was fun, but our goal is now to provide habitat for native plants and insects. The horticulture industry -growers and suppliers- will need to change with their clients and increase their selection and availability of native plants to accommodate the better informed and more environmentally minded gardener.