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There is something oddly revolutionary about the simple act of growing plants even in one's neighborhood or backyard. The right plants can greatly increase the biodiversity in a backyard, town, or community. Growing those plants, especially ones under-represented in the landscape even can change history. Take Wangari Maathai whose small act of planting trees challenged those in power and at first got her imprisoned and beaten. Yet her continued efforts went on to inspire the Green Belt Movement which empowered women in Kenya and around the world, brought back rivers, and planted tens of millions of trees, eventually earning her a Nobel Peace Prize. Now the Kenyan army plants trees as a matter of national security to build and protect their water and soils. You can even see her impact creating a greener, more secure world from space.
Planting even a few strategic species in ones’ own backyard may seem like a small act, but it can create incredible change. The right plants can boost biodiversity, make a landscape more resistant to both droughts and floods, build soil fertility and soil carbon. Plants can feed, teach, and inspire us. They can help restore, purify and protect our streams, rivers, and water bodies. Plants are astounding. They support insects that humbly work all around us to support our ecosystems.
Let’s just look for a moment at that last statement about bugs because insects and other arthropods are part of what makes the act of growing and planting so revolutionary.
The great majority of people when they think of bugs, will often think of the common pests they encounter the most often like mosquitoes, house flies and agricultural pests like aphids, for instance. Yet the vast majority of bugs are not pests at all. They are actually wonderful and essential. They are the recyclers, decomposers, protectors, pollinators, food and fuel of our ecosystems. They often work unseen and overlooked all around us. They feed birds, frogs, fish - we know this - but did you know they also make up a surprisingly substantial part of the diet of many mammals like foxes, raccoons, and even bears!! Insects are an incredible protein source that many animals take advantage of to survive the winter, support nursing cubs, and maintain health. This includes humans in many parts of the world!
I found what I think is a Lettered Sphinx moth caterpillar above. Sphinx moth caterpillars are magnificently large caterpillars that are important food sources for many mammals like bears!
When a neighborhood or town or suburb or field has a greater diversity of insects, the ecosystems are healthier. The greater the diversity of bugs, the more the “pests” are kept in check. With awesome names like Minute Pirate Bug, Assassin Bug, Mealybug Destroyer, Green Darner Dragonfly, Lacewing, and the Six-Spotted Tiger Beetle, how could you not want to work with these awesome predators? The greater the number and diversity of insects, the more songbirds we hear and the more seeds are planted. Did you know, for instance that ants “plant” seeds like those from the nitrogen-fixing violet? They take the seeds underground often to eat the nutritious coatings the seeds provide, leaving the rest of the seed to germinate underground and spread much farther than it otherwise would have. Then, there are the loud and gregarious blue jays who also are forest planters. Insects are an important part of their varied diets. In his recent book, The Nature of Oaks, Doug Tallamy calls out blue jays as exceptional forest planters planting as many as 4,500 acorns every year!! They store these acorns underground, but only remember the exact location of approximately a quarter of them. As Tallamy writes, not only do blue jays live between around a decade or more, but if the blue jay becomes prey to some other predator further up the food chain before it has a chance to retrieve all it’s thousands of acorns, yet more acorns have the chance to become the trees for future forests.
May I present two guardians of garden, greenhouse and woodlands. One a mighty aphid-destroyer, amiable and incomparable: the magnificent Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (above) and the second the fierce, fast, and friendly Six-Spotted Tiger Beetle (below).
Yet learning to work alongside plants to enhance ecosystems is not always quite so straightforward. Plants that aren’t adapted to a local region or microclimate can quite unintentionally cause more trouble for you and the local ecosystem. When we plant, we can create supportive, regenerative landscapes by getting to know our local ecology. Or we can inadvertently do quite the opposite if we use plants that smother their neighbors, introduce foreign pathogens, aren’t adapted to a region, require lots of resources to keep alive, or that don’t support the local insect populations. A fascinating example of this is milkweed.
Milkweeds are AMAZING!!! They are super-powered plants that are like supermarkets for bugs. According to the US Forest Service, Common Milkweed (Ascelpias syrica) supports a whopping 450 species of insects and is the host plant for several insects that only eat milkweeds like the Milkweed Beetle, Milkweed Tussock Moth, and of course, the iconic Monarch Butterfly!. Now we need more milkweed, and you can do enormous amounts of good on so many levels by planting native milkweeds. Yet there are a few milkweeds that do cause problems. Tropical milkweed, for instance, is a perennial and Monarchs do LOVE it, but it doesn’t die back in winter and so can become host to a parasitic protozoa. This protozoa can cause Monarch butterflies to emerge from their chrysalises with deformed wings making them unable to fly, let alone migrate hundreds or thousands of miles. As gardeners, you can cut back tropical milkweed each year if it grows in your garden to upset the protozoan life cycle. Unmanaged tropical milkweed causes great harm by spreading the protozian parasite as adult monarchs visit milkweeds for egglaying or nectar gathering and unknowingly spread it from plant to plant causing just one more pressure on an already-pressured population. So plant more milkweeds, yes! But plant the native ones adapted to your region!
Asclepias incarnata or Swamp Milkweed is named for its ability to tolerate wet soils. I prefer it's other name, Rose Milkweed which better captures its beauty and fragrance!
The lovely, drought-hardy Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)
A particularly adorable Monarch butterfly caterpillar munching happily on milkweed.
Milkweeds and oaks are two particularly exceptional insect-supporting plants that support enormous quantities of insects. In doing so, these plants FUEL ecosystems. There are so many species of milkweed to choose from… species that love swamps or deserts or mountains or barren slopes… and despite its previous reputation as a “weed”, we are finding it doesn’t deserve such scorn. The flowers are incredibly lovely, beautifully fragrant and brilliantly colored, and there are so many forms of milkweed that grow in all sorts of climate. Parts of them are edible for humans (if you know how to eat them… do some research if you want to find out!), a fiber, a potential regenerative latex source, a source of insulation for life vest or winter coat. Milkweeds are as abundant in their uses for us, as they are for the insects that depend on them.
Oaks, too, come in many sizes and shapes. Dwarf varieties of oaks exist that grow well on streets or even small backyards as well as evergreen desert oaks like the emory oak which produces acorns you don't even need to process before popping into your mouth as a tasty snack. Oak acorns are edible, though often processing is often required to remove the mouth-puckering tannins contained in the nut meats. Oaks were an especially important (and delicious!) food source for people around the world who depended on them. Think deep rooted, majestic “crops” that don’t require fertilizer and allow people to make nutrient-dense breads, porridges, puddings and soups! Oaks also are insect-supporting powerhouses, making up only a fraction of our forests yet supporting some of the largest amounts of the insect biomass. The sacredness of oaks for many cultures still resonates in how we describe them today: majestic, upright, steadfast, strong.
Sometimes all it takes is a single planting to bring on a cascade of positive ripple effects. Planting trees can (and has) literally changed the course of history. Finding those strategic plants in your landscape and even planting just one of these plant powerhouses can change the course of dozens of tiny lives (or hundreds? thousands? certainly billions if we include soil microbes!) even in your own backyard. Life begets conditions for more life, and planting is indeed a revolutionary act.
Resources:
Wangari Maathai's story: https://wangarimaathai.org/wangaris-story/
Black Bears and Sphinx Moths Caterpillars: https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1713&context=etsu-works
The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees by Doug Tallamy
US Forest Service on cool facts about Common Milkweed: https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/asclepias_syriaca.shtml
Problem of tropical milkweed and guides for finding native milkweeds: https://xerces.org/blog/tropical-milkweed-a-no-grow
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