Traverse City Record-Eagle

Life

December 2, 2007

On the Wing: Native plants provide 'Home'

By Kay Charter

Last month, on the day that my niece got married, I helped her -- along with her mother, her aunt and her elegant satin dress -- into the limo that would shuttle them off to church. Then, with less than an hour to get ready myself, I picked up my new book and began to reread a favorite passage.

Minutes ticked away and still I read.

The book was Dr. Douglas Tallamy's wonderful new offering, "Bringing Nature Home" (Timber Press $27.95). Tallamy, professor and chairman of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, tells us that "not all plants are created equal," and demonstrates the importance of native plants to healthy, viable terrestrial ecosystems.

I learned about the book last fall, when I e-mailed Tallamy and asked permission to quote an article he had written about the relationship between native plants and insects. He not only granted permission, he generously sent me a disk with the pre-pub galleys of his book. I've been anxiously awaiting it since. It was well worth the wait.

The good professor says in his first sentence, "Occasionally we encounter a concept so obvious and intuitive that we have never thought to articulate it, so close to our noses that we could not see it, so entangled with our everyday experiences that we did not recognize it." The concept is that because there is too little space left for the wildlife we care about and love to watch, we must make our yards friendlier to the birds, frogs, butterflies and other wild creatures with which we share this planet. With roughly 40 million acres of land in American yards, his is a compelling argument.

Tallamy appeals to the gardener in all of us to do just that. Although he says that "Bringing Nature Home" is not a "how-to" book, in a way, it is precisely that. While he does not attempt to instruct us on how to landscape, he takes us step by important step through the crucial reasoning around why we should -- indeed, why we must -- return as much of our personal property to native plants as possible. We must do so because native plants do, in spite of the above-mentioned biologist's doubt, support the insects upon which those same birds, frogs, butterflies (and all the rest of us, for that matter) depend.

Tallamy discovered the importance of that link when he and his wife purchased 10 acres in southeastern Pennsylvania. The land, previously farmed, was filled with alien plants such as autumn olive, multiflora rose, Bradford pears and others. He told me in a recent interview that the vegetation was so dense, they had to cut trails through it in order to get inside of it.

One day, he took a walk through the trails to look for insects and found virtually none except on the few natives struggling to survive under the stranglehold of invasives. It was a defining moment for him and he began to present programs to educate the general public about his discovery. The pamphlet he made up to hand out at these presentations ultimately grew into the book.

Those birders among us who still support the idea that autumn olive is good for birds will gain insight from the following: "The foliage of autumn olive is inedible for almost all native insect herbivores. A field rich in goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed, boneset, milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and dozens of other productive perennials supplies copious amounts of insect biomass for birds to rear their young. After it has been invaded by autumn or Russian olive, that same field is virtually sterile."

Filled with beautiful photographs of insects, plants, birds and hard data presented in an easy-to-read style, "Bringing Nature Home" will persuade all of us to take a look at what is in our own yards with an eye to how we, too, can make a difference. It has already changed me; I will not be so quick to kill a hornworm on our tomato plants after reading it.

Pick up a copy of "Bringing Nature Home" for yourself and another for your favorite conservationist. I can't think of a better holiday gift.

Kay Charter is executive director of Saving Birds Thru Habitat, an organization that teaches people how to help migrating birds whose populations are declining.

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