Going Native

Wiping the bugs off of your windshield has become a thing of the past due to the insect apocalypse happening in the Capital Region. Organizations have come and gone as a means of balancing the rapidly declining bug populations but the native plant movement has swarmed the area, and they plan to stay.

Fluorescent green moths and ruby-throated hummingbirds rely on the pollen or nectar produced by flowering plants for food, and the plants rely on the pollinators for spreading their seed. Without this relationship flowers and crops such as almonds, strawberries, and buckwheat (think of your bread and pasta!), would die off. Seeds wouldn’t be able to form and our oxygen and food supplies would run low. Empty carts would stroll endless, even emptier isles. 

Planting flowers is a great start when trying to do something nice for the local birds and bees. However, the native plant movement believes that you can go one step further by planting indigenous, or native, species. Using even a few native plants can greatly benefit local pollinators such as bees, birds, moths, and bats. They’re designed for the region that they grow in, meaning that they will have a natural resistance to New York’s icy winters and hot, humid summers. The pollinators of their region also know them well and gravitate toward them.

“The average person noted the drop in bugs and began to say, ‘I don’t want this much lawn, I want to reduce it but I don’t know how. What should I plant?,’” said Angela Sisson, co-president of Wild Ones Mid-Hudson Valley. Wild Ones is a national organization with chapters throughout the country that focus on encouraging grassroots organizations, education, doing projects, and getting plants in the ground.

Not only are native species much more attractive to pollinators, they’re designed for them. Some pollinators are described as specialist species, meaning they’ve evolved to pollinate and feed from specific plants. Specializing can range from blueberry bees buzzing pollen from blueberries to monarch caterpillars eating only milkweed leaves. These species can struggle without the proper plants to feed from.

“It’s gone mainstream, even in mainstream gardening magazines. It’s gotten to be in the air now,” said Sisson.

What was once an underground countermovement has turned into a gardening trend in the hopes of combating climate change. Cornell’s master gardener program, once a stranger to the concept of native gardening, has evolved to include it. Sisson said that people weren’t interested in planting wild things, but within the past five years there’s been an explosion of interest in native plants.

“If everybody put native plants in their yard and turned it into their own little homegrown national park, then we really could turn these things around,” said Rosemary Mix, the president of Wild Ones Capital Region. The native movement began as a shift from changing how to plant and has grown to include even more natural gardening methods. Terms like “leave the leaves,” “no mow May,” and “let it rot” have spread throughout the community to encourage gardeners to follow the cycles of growth and decay.

While native gardeners strongly encourage the ideology of letting nature do its thing, their movement also focuses on removing invasive species whenever possible. Invasive species are plants from foreign parts of the world or other regions of the country that were introduced for aesthetics but that ultimately cause harm to the ecosystem. They adapt quickly to their environment, drive out native plants, and can be considered “aggressive” spreaders. This can include multiflora roses, Japanese barberry, and Saint Rose’s own Callery pear.

The maintenance team at Saint Rose works to remove Callery pear and other on-campus invasives, but with a lack of staff, they remove them when possible, and they’re hoping to phase them out as time progresses. In addition to invasives, urban forests (the plant life in an urban area) are faced with costly issues like destructive insect species that the maintenance team works to prevent, said Philip Crim, assistant professor of biology at Saint Rose.

“On the campus green we want to put handicapped accessible picnic tables and create stations. In between those stations we want to landscape,” said Gary Goss, Saint Rose’s assistant vice president of facilities and operations. The maintenance team incorporates native plants as often as possible while also facing the reality that some plants do not fit the strain of campus life.

Planting non-invasive plants is simple enough, but growing natives in urban environments can be a challenge. “People rip branches off, they grab them, they shake them, they’re being planted in pretty compacted soil,” said Crim. Larger animals such as fishers or black bears can also make a comeback, which can cause issues within the community.

Creating an environment that encourages larger wildlife to return should be a community discussion, said Crim. Individuals can avoid potential dangers by doing research on how these animals react to people and pets and understand what to do when faced with them. “We don’t have the habitat that allows animals to do their thing without encountering humans very often,” said Crim.

Biodiversity, or the variety of life in one area, should be something that urban forests like Albany emphasize in areas of endemic poverty, said Crim. Studies have found that there are connections between impoverished communities and tree cover. There are also relationships between tree canopy cover and educational outcomes, crime rates, and the rate of ADHD in students. “We need to make sure all of our urban forest is being treated the same way, like trying to improve diversity everywhere so that there aren’t patches of places that have major issues,” said Crim. 

Albany’s past two foresters have made an effort to increase biodiversity by expanding their planting palette. Native trees such as hornbeam or “ironwood” and serviceberries, which have edible fruits that taste like blueberries, have become the street trees of the city.

When starting the switch from traditional gardening into native gardening you may notice that there’s a supply and demand issue. The demand, at times, can exceed the current supply of native seeds. Some sellers also coat their native seeds in pesticides, killing pollinators that visit the plant. You can avoid this by asking your seller if the seeds or plant you’re buying have been treated.

Native plants already have connections to many of the species within an environment. A lack of their presence has led to gaps within these connections, and therefore within the environment. The movement hopes to restore urbanized areas into something more reminiscent of their pasts, something more wild. “It seems to be a message that people are ready to listen to right now, ready to hear. It wasn’t that way 20 years ago,” said Mix.