Plants and People

 The NY Times has some writer describing the need to eschew non-native plants and to install as many native plants as you can. She notes:

For now, my compromise is to fill our yard with plants that do the work nature designed them for: to feed our wild neighbors. All over this yard there are now young pawpaws and red mulberries, Eastern red cedars and American hollies, redbuds and native dogwoods and, yes, serviceberry trees. It’s not too late for you to do the same in your yards and your towns. The local county extension service or a native-plant nursery can help you find the trees and shrubs that work best for the soil and light conditions where you live. 

Now where I live in New Jersey was some ten thousand years ago Lake Passaic , a leftover  mass of clay resulting from the end of the glaciers just some twenty miles south. One of our native trees is the white ash, fraxinus, a miserable and useless tree subject to infection, with a surface root system and also the major source of housing damage in winds. 

The author misses the point. Humans are a species like so many others and we play and active role in plant habitat. The plants make us do this. Take the daylily H. fulva, a triploid, and unable to breed. Namely any one of these orange daylilies is genetically the same as all others, it propagates by root movement and in getting humans to move it around the world. The plant has convinced us humans to move it from China, kind of like COVID but with roots, to almost every place on earth. The same plant, thus the largest organism on the planet! 

Plants attract many species including us poor humans. We look at them and we say, come with me!. Off they go! Rabbits, squirrels etc also move them about by carrying their seeds to new places. 

I grow ginkgos, dozens each year, and give them away by the car load. Now ginkgo is from Asia, Japan, Korea and of course China. It is one of the oldest trees, some live more than 3,000 years. They are impervious to almost all plant pathogens and their seeds feed a variety of animals mid winter. Needless to say the squirrels get much smarter from ginkgo nuts! They also absorb mor CO2 than any other tree per sq m of leaf area. Unlike our native plants.

Thus perhaps we should not try to make us go backward but to go forward. To understand what plants a beneficial to our co-existence. Try a ginkgo, they really are nice.