Viewpoint: This planting season, go native!
Sneed Collard
As the winter chill wears off, many of us are anticipating how we can spiff up our yards. That can be a tall order when we’ve inherited a landscape of sterile lawns and imported ornamental plants that have no business growing in Montana.
Fortunately, this situation presents us with a wonderful opportunity to get back to the Montana we know and love. How? By replacing exotics with native plants that are both beautiful and provide real value to birds, insects, and other native wildlife.
A Scientific American article titled “The American Obsession with Lawns,” points out that lawns began sprouting up in America in the nineteenth century. They were an attempt to emulate trendier Europeans and, more important, to display wealth and status.
Fast forward to today, and a house doesn’t seem complete without its neatly-mowed spread of Kentucky bluegrass. Unfortunately, our obsession with lawns comes with a host of problems.
Especially in the West, lawns gobble water that we can scarcely afford. Just how much depends on several factors, but keeping a lawn alive can consume between 15 and 75% of a family’s household water consumption. Keeping those lawns green and pristine-looking also can be expensive, especially factoring in the gas and electricity required to run lawnmowers, and the fertilizers and herbicides to keep lawns green and weed-free.
My biggest beef with imported lawns and plants is that they have needlessly transformed productive Montana habitat into sterile expanses with almost no useful function.
Sure, a lawn is great for kids to play on—we keep a patch of it ourselves—but our grass obsessions have come at an extreme cost to wildlife, especially for native insects and birds. Many of you have probably heard the shocking statistics that America has lost a quarter of its breeding birds in the short space of fifty years. There are many causes for this, but habitat loss probably ranks at the top. While much of this loss may have been unavoidable, in the case of our lawns, it is not.
Author Douglas Tallamy points out that 40 million acres of our nation’s natural habitats have been converted to turfgrass—an area about 42% the size of Montana! If we “turf owners” convert just half of our lawns to native habitat, it will restore an area larger than the Everglades, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Canyonlands, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Badlands, Olympic, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. Talk about your game changer!
Fortunately, converting your yard to native plants is fairly easy to do. A simple online search reveals nurseries that offer native plants all over our state. You don’t have to create your own “national park” all at once. Just dig up a strip of your present lawn and put in some native shrubs. In many places, you’ll want to stick to deer-resistant plants such buffalo berry, juniper, or maple sumac—or better yet, protect plants with fencing until they grow large enough to thwart deer.
Before planting trees, think about how big that tree is going to be in fifty years—and plant it in an appropriate spot. If you live in a fire area, you’ll want to make sure you keep a defensible space around your house, too.
Incorporating native plants into your yard brings immediate rewards. Our modest native plantings attract chickadees, juncos, wrens, kinglets, and other native birds, many of them feeding on the insects that the plants produce.
Why not join the fun? You’ll discover a whole new aspect of gardening, and take satisfaction in helping the wildlife we Montanans hold dear.