Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens

species have the potential to sink or save the ecosystem, depending on the circumstances. Knowing that we must preserve ecosystems with as many of their interacting species as possible defines our challenge in no uncertain terms. It helps us to focus on the ecosystem as an integrated functioning unit, and it deemphasizes the conservation of single species. Surely this more comprehensive approach is the way to go.

Your leaf litter can be home to a rich assortment of native plants while it is fertilizing, mulching, and watering your land.

We have allowed alien plants to replace natives all over the country. Our native animals and plants cannot adapt to this gross and completely unnatural manipulation of their environment in time to negate the consequences. Their only hope for a sustainable future is for us to intervene to right the wrongs that we have perpetrated.

30 percent of all animals are beetles.

Notice that she is able to produce young without mating with a male (parthenogenesis) and that her offspring are born live (viviparity).

One acre of alfalfa can indefinitely support aphids at a biomass equivalent to that of an elephant, whereas an elephant would eat all of the alfalfa in that acre in a matter of hours

The ovipositor of tree and bush crickets is needlelike and is used to insert eggs into the stems of plants like goldenrod and blackberries. These eggs stay in the stems all winter and hatch in the spring. This is one reason it is important not to mow field vegetation in the fall: fall mowing destroys the following year’s population of crickets and their role in the food web.

might mention the imperative of rescuing endangered native plants from extinction.

If we humans are capable of turning hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest into depleted grasslands, and extirpating millions of buffalo from the plains, and billions of passenger pigeons from the skies and cod from the North Atlantic, we are also capable of returning natives to our gardens.