Native vs. Non-native Plants
The harmful binary mindset growing in our gardens, and the process of decolonizing American landscapes.
America is not a country of gardeners, a title often bestowed upon on British cousins, but we are the country of opposition: right versus left, white versus black, urban versus rural—the list infinitely continues. Binary opposition is fundamentally American, as we are defined in life equally by what we are for as what we are against. Perhaps such a mindset is the cultural implication of a two-party political system, or of a nation built on white supremacy and imperialism, or our obsession with rugged individualism, or an even more insidious by-product of the American dream where failure to achieve is attributed to a person’s very essence, instead of the pitfalls of an unjust system.
This constant oppositional approach crops up in seemingly unexpected spaces like the garden, or, more specifically, the approach to garden design and care. As a trained horticulturist myself who’s worked with both native and non-native plants, I’ve seen ire on both ends: one side advocates for “beauty,” an amorphous and subjective qualifier, white the other for native purity, a patently unachievable and facile goal. The entire argument is circuitous, very often punted back and forth by white people with access (myself included), and completely erases eons of land management and biodiversity stewardship by indigenous peoples who have existed on the North American continent for over 20,000 years.
In a brief acknowledgement of the work of Darrel Morrison, a “nature-based landscape designer,” Garden Rant blogger Susan Harris summarizes the viewpoint of journalist and landscape designer Adrian Higgins from a Washington Post article discussing Morrison’s work by explaining Higgins has, “…pinpointed why so many native-plant gardens don’t look very good, why they don’t look like gardens at all. To look their best, native plants need scale…” echoing the belief that native gardens require large plots of land to be successful, or, rather, beautiful. In the article, Higgins goes further than this and explains,
[his] mantra, as ever, is that gardens don’t need to be native; they need to be objectively beautiful. Great beauty can be achieved with native plants, but planting a few coneflowers here and some switch grass there isn’t enough; you need to plant en masse and in layers, drawing lessons from how these plants grow in the wild.
It’s interesting how the argument for the use of native plants mirrors the faulty concept of “the wild,” a white-savior constructed term that further erases indigenous stewardship born from the period of American Romanticism. Think John Muir’s fantasy of preserving the West, or of Thoreau’s Walden Pond—a body of water that was notably situated on family-owned private property—or the current composition of National Parks and National Forests where decades of non-management has lead to increased forest fires and biodiversity collapse. What wild spaces are we emulating with our expansive native gardens? Are urban and suburban gardeners simply out of luck? Is rewilding our garden spaces only accessible to those with large plots of land and ample funds? The argument for en masse planting further relegates native gardens to the fantastical, like another side of the Garden of Versailles coin—another dictation of what is allowed or proper within the discipline of horticulture.
In a follow up post, Susan Harris states that if her personal garden were all native plants, she’d be missing her favorites, and, by her own analysis, a more biodiverse, adapted, and year-round aesthetic garden. She states, “I’m no ecologist (obviously) but wouldn’t these gardens be less biodiverse without the dozens of great plants from other places?”
As a student of ecology, I hope to present a better analysis of biodiversity. Neatly defined, biodiversity refers to the number of different species within an environment, but this doesn’t encompass the reality of biodiversity and its function within the landscape. Biodiversity also refers to how plants species interact with their ecosystem, how they support the soil and its organic food web, how they balance with other plant species, and how they engage with other organisms such as insects, birds, mammals, and humans. Relegating the working definition of biodiversity to simply the number of species completely erases the reality of interspecies and inter-ecosystem interactions that produce thriving and balanced communities.
In the first post from Harris, a UK-based commenter named Anne asked how native plants, “in America are fundamentally different…” and how this difference impacts design. The answer Harris gives appears to fundamentally misunderstand Anne’s question, which centers around the use of the word “native,” and follows up by defending her beloved and “biodiverse” exotics. But Anne brings up an excellent question: what classifies a plant as “native,” and why is this word used a qualifier in American gardening specifically?
In 2020, famed British country house and perennial garden Great Dixter launched a series of online lectures lead by their Head Gardener Fergus Garrett. The lecture on biodiversity discussed an audit performed at Great Dixter between 2017 and 2019. The audit and its results hope to quantify the ecological impact of the Great Dixter’s meadow gardens. Given that 97% of species rich meadows in Great Britain have been lost since World War I, the implications of Great Dixter’s plantings on reviving Britain’s biodiversity are particularly important. So, why are plants not referred to as “native” in Britain? Well, many native British species have been lost for centuries due either war, the Victorian obsession with exotic plants, or the transformative agricultural practices once used across Europe that developed an entirely distinct type of soil.
So why do we use the designation of “native” in America? One way to answer this question would be because the indigenous populations of this land still hold ancestral botanical knowledge, another would be because America is simply much younger than Britain, and due to our sheer size and system of private and public lands, we’ve retained vestiges of plant biodiversity from our pre-colonial state. Commenter Anne notes terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “invasive” are branded as offensive botanical terms in the UK, and wonders why these are not seen as offensive terms in America—one could think of many upsetting but not unsurprising reasons as to why—and why we are so insistent on the categorization of plant species as such.
It appears Harris missed this nuanced semantic discussion, but her inexplicable fumbling of the question further illuminated the need for decolonized language in the garden, as well as a less oppositional discussion of how we view our gardens and our garden inhabitants in America.
As Higgins and Morrison argue above, expansive vistas are the preferred (and apparently only) expression of beauty for America’s native species. If the purpose of a garden is ultimately to be beautiful, these two would require who knows how many acres to complete their vision. Can a small garden not be beautiful? Can it only beautiful if we use non-native plants, as Harris believes? How are we defining beauty? With most creative disciplines, the views are overtly subjective, especially in a binary culture. To achieve X you must first have Y, and if you don’t have Y, then you cannot achieve X. The ouroboros is complete.
To employ a cliché, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or rather the gardener, and decolonizing the garden as well as making horticulture a just discipline requires us to redefine how we view the outdoors in America and who has access to it.
America is also at risk of losing its species rich biodiversity across all of its ecosystems—for example, only 1% of the Gulf Coast Prairie ecosystem remains today due to industrialization and agriculture—and the old growth forests of the East Coast are a distant memory, as are the once towering Longleaf Pine forests of the South, which were logged to near-extinction. Even now precious redwoods and sequoias on the West Coast are being lost to climate crisis-fueled wildfires. Temperatures are rising; ecosystems are crashing; wildlife is going extinct. Places like the Lurie Garden, designed by the New Perennial movement pioneer Piet Oudolf, will serve as America’s Great Dixter in the future if gardeners continue to view their discipline as self-serving or as existing only within the confines of their property line. Following the ethos of the New Perennial movement, all seasons in a garden have value beyond beauty. If we are to succeed in saving our world, or at least in altering the lens through which the everyday person views the outdoors, we must first transform our own gardens and our approach to the landscape.
Plant species that are from this land, though they may bristle some traditional gardeners due to their seasonality, have value far beyond their aesthetic features, which I find quite engaging, and serve as the best ambassadors for not only local biodiversity preservation but also as educational tools for adjusting our approach to gardening, to our landscapes, to our green spaces, and to our world.
However, relying on native plants alone, especially in a landscapes enduring the flux of climate change, is unrealistic, and the politics of “purely native” have an icky aftertaste. This is where the position of one versus the other fails, and where the click-bait title Harris employs is kindling for the fire of native plant idealism.
The ethos of the New Perennial movement—such as the work of Piet Oudolf, Nigel Dunning, the Tokachi Millennium Forest, and the useful and analytical book Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West— straddles both sides of this oppositional face-off by making a case for ecologically-informed landscapes and small gardens. In these spaces, perennial species are the focus, whether they be forbs, grasses, or shrubs, and native plants are seen as especially important, but are not placed on the pedestal of perfection. You do not need to adhere to native purity for a successful and ecological garden; you do, however, need to adjust how you view horticulture, particularly in looking to nature and the seasonal shifts of the landscape to reform your approach.
Harris was right that non-native plants do contribute to biodiversity, but they are only one element of the whole. Perennial species—especially grasses—and native plants should frame out the majority of the garden, and non-native species should be used as accents. You don’t have to lose your favorite plants—that’s a straw man argument—nor pit them against another type of gardening. If biodiversity is goal, how is championing one at the expense of the other accomplishing anything?
We used to look to horticulture and gardening for how it served our needs, as monuments to our human conquest of nature, a sentiment to which my fellow Houstonians can agree is wholly delusional. We needed them to provide year-round color and texture, to withstand cold winter or blazing hot summers, to be constantly alive with color supplied by ecologically ineffectual annuals, for genetically-modified cultivars with biologically-inert blooms to keep up with the latest trends, for neatly clipped hedges hem gardens alluding to our ability to place artificial boundaries on the power of nature.
What Harris fails to ask herself is why. Why do we need these things? Why this pursuit of capitalist excess and perfection? Why are we obsessed with defying nature? Perhaps this is what is uniquely American, and perhaps this is why we cannot function outside of the binary. If we are or if we aren’t makes sense, but if we make room for the mutable, we cannot emblazon our chests with our chosen identities. We are no longer the conquerors of nature.
To me, this is what Aldo Leopold meant when he discussed a land ethic, or what Robin Wall Kimmerer hopes to teach us with the concept of reciprocity. We must heal ourselves from the pursuit of conquest, follow the teachings of nature, and infuse our gardens with an ecological mindset. To destroy the binary, we must begin to decolonize the artificial boundaries of what gardening is and is not and stop seeing the garden as a mere commodity or as reflection of our ability to subvert nature.
How exciting would it be to rediscover what wild plants grow near you, and to bring their beauty into the garden? How fulfilling would it be to briefly glimpse the bounty of the Earth?
One way to accomplish this decolonization is deny the artifice that you can conquer nature. Why must we be constantly at war in our own yards? Another is to learn from indigenous people—not solely from white, academic polyculture or permaculture practitioners who are, often by their own admission, recycling indigenous knowledge. We must give land back to indigenous management, especially public lands because if we are to truly reinvest in the land, we must also reinvest in the people who’s connection to it eclipses our own history of colonization. We must make gardening just. Everyone should have access to the knowledge of land stewardship, and no one should be barred from learning the language of plants. Impactful landscapes should not be solely relegated to wealthier parts of town—they should be woven into our streets, into our bike lanes, into our highways. Every citizen should be able to walk by, touch, feel, see, and be surrounded by a different model of landscape design, where biologically inert lawns and input-heavy species are no longer the standard, but seen as unthinkable options.
In a just society, nature belongs to everyone, and especially to itself.
