Quotes from Rick Darke

native: a plant or animal that has evolved in a given place over a period of time sufficient to develop complex and essential relationships with the physical environment and other organisms in a given ecological community.

Ecosystems function locally, not globally. Local extinction, the disappearance of a species within, say, the woodlot down the street, or even your front yard, is now predicted to compromise the productivity of that woodlot and your yard.

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you can create multifunctional residential landscapes using all-natives some of the time, and some natives all of the time, but you cannot meet all landscaping goals using all natives all of time.

Trees help reduce storm water runoff by intercepting falling rain and holding a portion of it on the leaves and bark. A mature tree can hold 100 gallons of water on its many surfaces during a rainstorm. Part of this water soon evaporates and the rest is gradually released into the soil below.

One small 15 by 15 foot garden in a courtyard in the center of Dover, Delaware, produced 150 monarch adults in a single season by including several Asclepias syriaca plants as one of its species.

Contrary to popular belief, trees rarely have taproots beyond the seedling stage. The root systems of most deciduous trees extend out from the trunk at least as far as the canopy branches, yet they rarely grow deeper than 2 or 3 feet into the ground. This is partly because roots require oxygen, which is increasingly scarce in the lower soil horizons.

Few people realize that the dry Mediterranean region, including the original breadbasket of civilization in what is now Iraq, was once a forested ecosystem. When humans cut those forests thousands of years ago, rainfall became even more scarce than it already was and the entire region became and has remained an extremely fragile and far-less-productive desert-scrub ecosystem.

A century after its introduction, Eucalyptus stelloleta, a tree planted worldwide for lumber and ornamental purposes, supports only one species in California but 48 species of insects in its Australian homeland according to D. Strong and colleagues.

On average, native plants support thirteen times more caterpillar species than non-native plants.

In most cases and most places, the design of broadly functional, ecologically sound, resource-conserving residential gardens requires a carefully balanced mix of native and non-native plants. It's time to stop worrying about where plants come from and instead focus on how they function in today's ecology. After all, it's the only one we have.

One of the most important functionalities is durability: the capacity to thrive over a long time without dependence on resource-consuming maintenance regimes.

However, popular culture defines Nature as an "other," a near-sentient force operating beyond the bounds of human community. I was raised with that notion and can empathize with the nostalgia often accompanying it, but I can't accept the idea of a separate Nature any more than I believe digital data resides in "The Cloud" (the data resides in machinery that is typically plugged into a wall socket).

Likewise, a home garden can be designed to serve a variety of environmental functions: • recharge groundwater • replenish atmospheric oxygen • sequester carbon • furnish shelter/cover for wildlife • promote a stable food web for wildlife • support pollinator communities • provide the right conditions for natural hybridization and the continuing development of biodiversity

If our landscaping choices can rebuild populations of a butterfly thought to be extinct without listing it under the Endangered Species Act and without investing one dime of limited conservation funds—that is, without even trying—imagine what we can do if we include conservation as one of the goals of our gardens.