Why Native Plants?

And why not native plants?



Since I live in California, my specific interest is in California native plants, but in a not so recent trip made to Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, it was great fun to see both natives we share and find out about ones we don't. I'm still after a friend, who took me on a hike outside Phoenix in the spring, to send me photos we took of the lupines and other flora that took my breath away that morning.

So why native plants? Because they are beautiful, because they are becoming endangered, because they are part of our whole ecosystem and we are only beginning to understand how the whole ecosystem works. If you disrupt it by bringing in exotics (as our ancestors did) you not only run the risk of rampant (though unforseen) invasion of the native beauty. There are records of settlers in wagon trains passing through California's Central Valley being awed by the wild flowers. ¹ Most of these are gone to farms.

I live in Central California where the Chumash Indians lived for thousands of years. It was lush life for them, gathering, hunting, trading, and enjoying the bounty of this land. They never farmed, as some Native American's did because they didn't need to. Once they discovered how to grind Coast Live Oak acorns into a flour (after leaching, this was about 1500 years ago) they had a dependable source of food they could supplement easily. Their numbers increased and their society bloomed with specialization and high achievement unique and unusual in a North American Native society. When the Spanish came with their mission of religion and agriculture and of course exotics, the Chumash men had to be allowed time each fall to hunt - agriculture did not sustain them as hunting and gathering had. So ironic. ²

How about wildlife and their relationship to native plants? We are only beginning to understand how complicated this whole issue is too. However, we do know that the plants that wildlife evolved with seem to be better for them. They know when to find what they need for nest building, habitat, feeding their young, cover, etc. Some species are even dependent upon a particular species for survival, an example is the monarch butterfly which needs milkweed to survive so it's young can obtain the chemical needed for survival. This is cardenolide alkaloid, which is poisonous to predators. As the milkweed removed during development the numbers of monarch butterflies decrease.³

Of course, not all plants have this close a relationship with wildlife, but some have an even closer one where they a mutally dependent. I will talk more about this in days to come.

I love native plants! I'm not even sure why I am so passionate about them as I only discovered them about 4-5 years ago. This was when I still lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and we were contemplating our move to the Central Coast of California - 200 miles south - but a world away. While I was madly overseeing the mechanics of selling the property, disposing of unwanted goods in our downsizing, and staging the house myself; I sought information about my new home from what I could discover on the web.

One of my early discoveries was the Las Pilitas Nursery website: http://www.laspilitas.com. This was, and still is, a fountain of knowledge about California native plants. As of 3 years ago, Burt Wilson, the owner is Santa Margarita,CA told me there were over 200 web pages to the site and it is an incredible reference as well as nursery. At first I was intrigued, then converted, now passionate in my love and dedication to encouraging the preservation and planting of these wonderful survivors of the area.

¹Judith Larner, "The Basics of Sowing Wildflower Seeds", 12 December 2009, http://www.larnerseeds.com/_pages/wildflower_annual.html, (3 February 2010)

²Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethnobotany, Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California, (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 2007).

³ Jim Lovett, "Milkweed", n.d., http://www.monarchwatch.com/milkweed/index.htm, (3 February 2010)