Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Patriotic Gardening! – Native Plants Feed Native Wildlife

July 4, 2017

 

Celebrate the Fourth of July and help out your local wildlife by planting local native plants in your garden!

 

Development, roads and sprawl consume over 2 million new U.S. acres per year, eliminating the native plant communities that support native wildlife. We have replaced most of our wild places with lawns and gardens dominated by non-native plants.

 

If all plants were created equal, that would be fine.  But they are not, as NPCC Advisor Professor Doug Tallamy reminds us. Native plants have long evolutionary and species-specific histories with local wildlife. The entire food web, from insects to top predators, depends on native plants.

 

Non-native plants simply don’t measure up.

 

Tallamy’s research has shown that non-native ornamental plants support 29 times less biodiversity than do native ornamentals.  Even modest increases in native plant cover significantly increase the number and species of breeding birds, including birds of conservation concern.

 

As gardeners and stewards of our land, Tallamy says, we have never been so empowered to help save biodiversity from extinction, and the need to do so has never been so great. All we need to do is plant native plants!

 

Or as NPCC Affiliate the Native Plant Society of Texas puts it – Plant NICE!  (Natives Instead of Common Exotics)