Even along the remote highways edging Sax Zim Bog this low-snow February, even yesterday traveling Hwy. 61 toward Grand Marais on a professional errand I've been seeing strips of mowed stubble by the berm, before the trees. Workers are taking out forest seedlings with anything else standing. There's no snow to impede the mowers and trimmers. Most of the swaths don't follow any overhead power lines. Nor do they necessarily trace along the forest cut for the road. Even if safety and visibility, especially regarding deer collisions, is the issue, where the country is wide open, it seems to me why not have a screen of saplings along the ditch to stop snow drifting over the road? I sometimes suspect this is a local or county-level version of busy work, keeping employees paid for something, where it's not private landowners following custom just as always.
Officials for the roadways would for sure tell me how I'm ignorant. Yes, I know I am, but far from their mindset I, an aging stranger to our times, would secretly like to advocate for a lot of those old modes of travel that leave extended time to dodge around deer, porcupines, grouse, etc. The department of transportation would be having none of that. The highways are maintained for speeders, the ones who crash their vehicles on the curves where trees and rocks come right to the edge of the road. But on top of that, obsessive urges to contain/control nature win out time and again, shown by the urge of so many homeowners in city or country to keep a neatly mowed yard, people of every description driving their little tractor or taking their exercise behind a push mower. We've been trained to impose neatness on whatever plant community shows a ragged edge. In another observer's words on this subject, the ancestors of so many Americans were conditioned by the adage 'cleanliness (or could it be imposed order) is next to godliness', whereby we approve of shaved lawns all across town, even at the expense of so much fuel, air pollution, noise and bulky machinery.
In the middle of last week I attended the monthly meeting of the Arrowhead Chapter of Wild Ones, whose mission is "To educate and to share information on the benefits of preserving and landscaping with
native plants in order to promote biodiversity, environmentally sound practices, and a sense of place..." per their web page. These are people who, bit by bit or all in one swoop, have lost that notion that what's outdoors is invariably, more or less, a threat unless properly and traditionally managed. I wonder what it would take for them to become a majority among suburbanites.
The presentation was a DVD of a lecture by Douglas W. Tallamy on the unsung value of sowing acreage that's presently taken up by lawn instead with trees, shrubs and soft-stemmed plants native to the region that we're in. Dr. Tallamy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. In a warm and witty manner, he incorporates the basic drive by people to spread themselves out over a landscape. Early in his lecture he demonstrates the vital usefulness of 'corridors' connecting our specks of remaining pristine wild land--and specks they are if you consider the breadth of wilderness that once took up our common space. The corridors are best seen not as belts to channel animal travelers predictably from grove to grove, but as groves in themselves, bands of interconnecting habitat widening out into hubs ideal for feeding and breeding.
In his article titled 'Gardening for Life', published in volume 22 of the
Wild Ones Journal, Doug Tallamy reminds us that population in the United States is closing in on 306 million, which is a doubling within my own lifetime (I'm in my mid-fifties) and that the U.S. population keeps growing by 8,046 per day. As a consequence we have four million miles of roads and an estimated forty million acres planted with lawn, which is monoculture, a surface cultivated merely as a porous outdoor flooring for ourselves and a few pet warm-blooded animals. Our human growth as yet has no end in sight, and probably won't till physical limits bump into us in ways that we would rather not examine.
What woods and prairie patches we have left in the eastern and central sections of the country are to a huge extent overrun with trees and flowers that got there via horticulture--the plant nurseries and the everyday public they serve. Examples given of alien trees, shrubs and vines especially familiar to me include the multiflora rose, autumn olive and Japanese honeysuckle. In our suburban expansion we have favored exotic trees and flowers at the expense of what grew here all along. In transforming the landscape to serve ourselves we've--per Dr. Tallamy--"taken ninety-five percent of nature and made it unnatural."
He runs through an accounting of glorious native birds, cherished by a growing sector of our population that pursues birds for enjoyment or maintains feeders. The birds of forest and pasture are declining at rates that lead to some despair on the part of folk who remember their relative abundance from as recently as the 1970s and '80s. As we harvest whole forests, oil fields and grasslands, leaving pavement and woody rubble behind, we've been taking away a broad range of food from these birds as we select exotic trees or bushes for our outdoor perimeters, if we even bother to plant trees and bushes for ornamentation on the wastelands that are our lawns, by contrast with restoring supportive bird habitat.
Here is where the quietly exuberant mission of Wild Ones, the various Audubon societies and local native plant societies and bird clubs fits into the picture. For survival's sake we have to remember that we need biodiversity, the diversity of living species, as our own life support not to mention that of our fellow-creatures. We need oxygen that the plants transpire. We need the clean water that their roots filter and their decayed living matter harbors in the form of river and lake beds. We also need topsoil borne of more of that decayed matter, and we need pollination, all services of nature--we need the intricacy of the whole life-support system that we've been taking apart on this American continent. And so those of us with a will to help put it back together may as well change our clothes as befits the moment; we have a lot we can be doing to make our surroundings increasingly lively again. For all the variety we will be re-creating in our spaces, it has to fit the region in terms of local climate and soils. Help is out there in the form of
native plant nurseries somewhere in your area. And, says Dr. Tallamy, if you replace the native shrubs, trees, grasses and herbs, the insect species that service them and the birds that devour those insects and larva will--as long as we haven't yet driven them to extinction--come back pretty quickly, as if to a banquet extended to them over a season or more.
He attributes the trend within the past several generations to design landscapes with exotic plants as a measure to starve insects that people had lumped together in their minds as pests. The imported Eurasian trees, shrubs and flowers have been largely free of insect infestation because they did not evolve here to host the various insects that feed off our own plants. And if we don't have to sit by the window or on the deck or patio and look at insects or at the leaves they've been damaging then we are somehow...more reassured? Everything seems more under our own control, our living room extended right out into our yards. And of course, many of us have said, it's better for the farmers if we keep down the insect pests that could proliferate if we just 'let things go.'
His article hastens to explain the relationship between insects and plants in terms of specifics: eons of coexistence between whole families of plants and neighboring insects has allowed those insects the benefit of being able to eat and digest those plants, and only certain plants, depending on the species of insect and its plant host. When the plant hosts are in their prime, so are the insects that eat and lay their eggs on them, sometimes right before our fretful eyes. But the native plants supporting the native insects will in turn invite a stream of native insect predators, many of them our diminishing American birds. Quoting from the article: "one bluebird pair brings up to three hundred caterpillars back to their nest every day. You will be hard pressed to find any caterpillars in your yard if you create habitat for breeding birds." A lot of us have forgotten about the web of nature, if we were ever taught much about it; the very wording mostly a nerdy cliche left over from science class or an organized nature hike, for lack of living examples out the windows of a typical home.
When I lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area I gardened with native prairie plants in a state of great enthusiasm since I still missed the countryside of my secure childhood, and the places I spent my week-ends and holidays. At one point in the suburb of Blaine, underlain with a light sandy soil, we had three long and billowing plantations, each on one side of our double-wide manufactured home. Even though we were surrounded by Interstate 35W, a state highway and huge parching barrens of trailer park lawn with a ball field, a few exotic acacia trees and scattered silver maples, we began attracting migrant birds who would otherwise have flown over the yard: I remember blackpoll, Nashville, yellow-rumped and Tennessee warblers and a singing Lincoln's sparrow in spring or fall as these functional gardens came into their own. When we moved out I moved with me as many of my favorite prairie plants' rootstocks as I could dig up and transfer in plastic bags. But I never saw them flourish again wherever I was able to relocate them in the city. I sometimes wonder if a single one of them survives to this day.
Now I'm blessed to live in a depopulated farming area well to the north, with its high water table assuring plenty of swamp habitat where only a few landowners ever did much commercial agriculture. We still have forestland of native firs and spruce, cedar, tamarack and birch, maple, ash, chokecherry, juneberry, poplar and some oak and basswood. We have lesser-known native trees like the nannyberry, and native shrubs like the alder buckthorn and chokeberry. We have a reduced breeding population of warblers, vireos and sparrows in the nesting season. But even among these vestiges of the old wilderness bygone land-holders have introduced several kinds of herb from far-flung flower beds, from which they probably shared seeds and starts: common valerian, for example, from roadsides to secluded forest openings all over the region. To my surprise last summer I found a sunflower cultivar called Garden Golden Glow, fat and decoratively showy as a rubber flower on a swimmer's bathing cap, over where an unidentified landowner had maintained an apple orchard, now gone to weeds. (Many of us define weeds as anything growing in disturbed or dug-up soil by happen-so.) Along one forest-lined wild river I should not have been surprised when I discovered the invasive glossy buckthorn above a fishing nook.
For nearly twenty years I've kept painting native plants and landscapes, sometimes with a naturalized alien brought in because it seemed it had developed a profile of its own if only in my sight.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/89340939/watercolor-notecard-blank-card-harris?ref=shop_home_active_9
Note Card 4 1/4 x 5 1/2" "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore" features red pine, aspen, birch and a ground cover called Hudsonia--beach heather--found on sparse soils all the way north to the tundra.
"Bluestems in the Autumn" original watercolor includes big bluestem, Indian grass and bush clover at season's end - card or print available by inquiry
As we fill up and commoditize ever more of our common land, the wildscapes of interdependent plants, insects, birds, reptiles and mammals of North America deserve all the promoting they can get, in art form, in seed stock and in the places we go home to. They can be revived
right out our windows, even in an inner-ring suburb or downtown where the pavement ultimately ends.
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