Originally Posted by
razz
Cannas and Japanese beetles are permanently bonded in my garden so not ever welcome.
I love native plants because the bugs and birds have spent centuries learning to coincide their lives and food supplied by the natives; they tolerate the average weather conditions in different parts of the country and go through their reproductive cycles without trauma or mollycoddling; natives are predictable; natives provide valuable original DNA material and seeds without the destruction from the corporate engineering of seeds; seeds of natives can be collected easily in one's own garden since so many seed companies have been taken over, closed and controlled by a few major corporation - hence, Seed Savers Exchange in the US and Seeds of Diversity in Canada. Besides all of those reasons, natives are just as pretty, healthy and fun to grow as the pricey plants of the snobbery elites who compete to get the newest most sensational plant of each season.
IL, you love your lilies and the breeding as do many other people. I admire your interest and enthusiasm but don't care about the latest colour and design. I want a basic healthy beautiful plant of whatever variety and size, shape, season-appropriate. I am not competing with anyone to be one-up on them but simply want a lovely overall appearance to give me consistent joy in my garden. Natives do that very well.
I agree, razz.
Here is what Audobon says about natives:
Over the past century, urbanization has taken intact, ecologically productive land and fragmented and transformed it with lawns and exotic ornamental plants. The continental U.S. lost a staggering 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to urban sprawl, and that trend isn’t slowing. The modern obsession with highly manicured “perfect” lawns alone has created a green, monoculture carpet across the country that covers over 40 million acres. The human-dominated landscape no longer supports functioning ecosystems, and the remaining isolated natural areas are not large enough to support wildlife.
Native plants are those that occur naturally in a region in which they evolved. They are the ecological basis upon which life depends, including birds and people. Without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds cannot survive. For example, research by the entomologist Doug Tallamy has shown that native oak trees support over 500 species of caterpillars whereas ginkgos, a commonly planted landscape tree from Asia, host only 5 species of caterpillars. When it takes over 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of chickadees, that is a significant difference.
Unfortunately, most of the landscaping plants available in nurseries are alien species from other countries. These exotic plants not only sever the food web, but many have become invasive pests, outcompeting native species and degrading habitat in remaining natural areas."
The natives I grow I think are beautiful--not lackluster. Rudbekia, echinacea, aster, milkweed. I throw in a couple of annuals every year, and I admit to having a couple of non-natives--my favorite being balloon flower (platycodon). Since I don't have one "specialty" and it's hard to decide what to plant, I choose to plant the flowers most likely to make the local birds, butterflies and bees happy.