By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee
Or as my 80-something mother and CNPS Fellow Betsey Landis said when I told her, “Not that again.”
Yes, that again. Right now, we’ve got some people who arepushing to get hyper-locally focused on native plants. What this means is that they want only plant seed sourced in particular parks or watersheds planted in those locations. The notion is that these plants have evolved in that location over evolutionary time spans, so if you move them they won’t do so well, so you need to grow the seeds near where you harvested them, and, and...
And breathe. First off, consider that there are 7,000-odd plant species in California. Some of them are very odd indeed, and some are not. While there is some evidence that some rare plants are worse off if moved, that’s definitely not true for all species, and it’s not clear that it’s even true for most species.
For example, California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) has a native range from Washington to Nevada to Baja. And it is a weed in Alaska, Hawai’i, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, both Carolinas, Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and 31 countries (https://www.gbif.org/species/2888380) outside the U.S. I’m not worried about the local genetics of California poppies, because it’s not clear they’re even locally native around here. Rather, I’m worried about people dumping pounds of poppy seeds to “beautify” open spaces. This is why it’s a mistake to assume a native plant growing in an open space is locally adapted only to that space. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not true, and it can be very hard to tell the difference.
The next thing to do is to break the binary either-or. I’m not advocating planting whatever you want, nor am I advocating planting hyper-local, origin-certified plants. Instead, I’m going to propose an approach that partakes of both. My goal here is to protect native plant species from impacts of habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change, and I’m pretty sure that the best course is somewhere between not fussing about origin and fussing too much.
First, let’s look at the locally native problem, in terms of CNPS history: in restoration (not gardening, restoration), in the 1990s and even now, we get a few people who think that they can plant whatever they want, claim it’s native, and go prancing off. My pet example comes from my least favorite and now extremely ex-boss, who planted a stand of redwoods in the Los Angeles Basin as native plants. After all, they now grow in California and used to grow in the LA Basin back during the ice ages, so they’re native, said he. He and I had quite a set-to about it, and neither he nor I are working for that employer any more. There used to be a lot of that kind of thinking going around, and so CNPS enacted a number of policies supporting the use of locally native plants inrestoration. That’s fairly reasonable.
Where we’re struggling now is to define what ‘locally native’ means, to deal with climate change making it hard for species to survive where they’ve grown for at least the last few centuries, and to figure out what to put in the landscaping. If the answer isn’t pounds of poppy seed, what is it?
On the less objectionable end, we have the notion that restoration should use a plant palette taken from the immediate surroundingarea. Most agree that’s a good idea. But even this isn’t followed, particularly by firms that have things like standard “Diegan Sage Scrub” palettes that they plant, whether those species are all found on the site or not. This, incidentally, is plant community thinking running mildly amok, if you read last month’s newsletter.
More responsible planters try to collect seed from the site, grow it out, and plant it. That’s great when it’s doable. This works much better on big projects, where the areas impacted are known, where there’s time to collect seed, and someone to contract to grow out the seed and plant the plants. This is normal business for native plant nurseries. What’s less clear is what you’resupposed to do about any surplus. Do you destroy them or sell them?
The problems start when you move from restoration to community landscaping and individual gardens. Landscaping has the advantage of scale, so you can contract-grow the plants you want. The problem with landscaping is that it may have to meet needs that restoration does not, and if the site is in the built environment, it may not have a native analog. Needs, in this case, are things like fire protection and lack of dangerous plants, while site issues might be compacted soil from the building process, shade from large buildings, or worst, old industrial sites and landfills.
Unfortunately, when we think about things like putting native plants in underserved areas, sometimes the available open spaces are former industrial sites with messed-up soil. If the soil is contaminated with something like lead, cadmium, or asbestos, probably this isn’t a good place for a vegetable garden. But it might be okay for a native plant landscape, if that helps immobilize the soil so that dust stops poisoning the neighborhood and people have a place to walk and enjoy some flowers without being poisoned.
Where we really get into real difficulties is when we start trying to get locally native plants into people’s landscapes. It’s tricky to grow plants from a particular place and make sure they are only sold within a defined area around that place.
In San Diego, one huge problem is seed availability, because you can’t take seeds from an open space and sell them commercially. Assuming you get seed, how are the plants going to get sold to the right people? Who checks to see if that the plants are going to the right place, and are those people competent? What happens to the surplus plants no local person wants? Finally, of course,there’s price: how do you keep the price of locally-sourced plants competitive with non-local big box store plants?
Then there’s the double standard. Weeds travel freely in San Diego, as do horticultural plants from all over the world. People even plant them in parks, although they’re not supposed to. But to promote native plants, even poppies, we’re supposed to be hyper-picky about where the seeds are harvested, how they’re grown, and who they’re sold to? That’s one hell of a double standard. No one asks if non-native plants will thrive sufficiently well in a random garden, but we’re proposing such limits on the spread of natives, under some rubric of local purity. It’s almost as if we’re trying to confine the natives to their open space ghettos and punishing them if they live in the wrong neighborhood. That just makes it easier to sell weeds and non-natives.
I’d suggest, instead, that we level the horticultural playing field for native plants, and give them a normal place in people’s gardens. That means making them more available, not less. A simple way to do this is to mandate using plants native to San Diego County and adjacent Baja. Why should a redwood from northern California be easier to plant here than a Baja endemic that grow sin our climate? For people’s gardens, balconies, and patios, native to the County and surrounding areas is doable and probably good enough. Remember, the goal is to help the species and make it easier for them to live in gardens, not harder. That, in itself, is enough of a challenge.