Curb Appeal, Co-existence & The Wildlife Garden

When the Home Bug Garden first started, I was worried that the neighbours might think I was an eccentric bugger with an eyesore frontage. As grass disappeared and the uniform mulch gave way to increasingly irregular eruptions of ‘wildflowers’, unmanaged horticultural variants of former wildflowers, grow-where-they-wish shrubs, and fallen autumn leaves, any claim to conformity with community norms was quickly lost. Nonconformity is rarely valued in our culture and under the relentless barrage of a monolithic media we are increasingly given one view of what is true, what we should think, and what we should not. Nonconformity, even in science, is denigrated and demonized. Living in Alberta, of course, I do have 6-7 months of a kind of conformity every year – the blanketing snow.

In Queensland, not smiling and saying hello to someone on a neighbourhood street would be unusual. Perhaps it is the constant sunshine, but an easy if superficial friendliness is the norm. Canadians seem far less welcoming to strangers on the street. I think the weather here encourages one to mind their own business and get where they are going before they freeze or are hailed upon. Most of those hurrying past the Home Bug Garden don’t stop to smile and pass the day. Those that do, however, have been uniformly pleasant and positive about my ‘woodland’. Even a door-knocking politician claimed to ‘like what you’ve done with your yard’. Well, maybe this office-seeker was just relieved there wasn’t a slavering dog or an old car up on cinderblocks. Still, none of these passersby had to say anything at all about the yard, let alone say something nice about something that is far from finished.

Of course, when neighbours ask, I am careful to describe my gardening as ‘wildlife friendly’, not as ‘bug friendly’: birds, bees, and butterflies come readily to my lips, wasps, spiders, and maggots almost never. I know then that I am on safe ground, because Wikipedia has pages for ‘Wildlife Garden’ and ‘Butterfly Gardening’. Never a reliable source of facts, Wikipedia, in its own 1984-ish kind of way, is a good guide to what are acceptable dogmas, politically correct attitudes, and proper forms of self expression. And according to Wikipedia (this morning anyway): “When one wildlife gardens, one acts always in accordance with the idea of keeping plants that are native to the area preeminent in the garden.” Sounds like a reasonable formula, I mean ‘native plants = native insects = native birds etc.’, right?

So how does one tell that a plant is ‘native to the area’? Unfortunately, ‘native’ isn’t a scientific term, but a collection of cultural concepts. As an adjective, it comes to us from Old French via the Latin ‘nativus’ for ‘produced by birth, innate, natural’. Appropriate to the season, ‘native’ has the same root as ‘nativity’, but also less savory derivatives such as ‘nativism’ and when used as a noun in Latin referred to a ‘natural slave’ – one born into bondage. As well as a plant bound to an area by birth, a ‘native plant’ is often taken to mean one that lived in an area ‘before people’ or, in a racist way common among some ideologies in North America, ‘before white people’.

The part of Edmonton that I live in was developed after World War II from a mixture of farmland and wetland. The wetland probably existed before European colonization, so its plants would count as ‘native’ by one usage. A pond is a great addition to any wildlife garden, but who wants to live in a slough?

Possibly there was some aspen forest earlier. That would be better, but if I converted my yard into an aspen forest there’d be little sun, lots of mosquitoes, clogged water and sewage pipes (aspen is bad), no veggies, and not many flowers. I suppose the largest plant in my garden is a ‘native’ spruce, so perhaps I could argue that I meet the ‘preeminent’ criterion, but a spruce forest would be a dark and oppressive place to live. If we try to expand our concept of ‘native’ and treat all peoples as equal, then the Clovis culture (~11,500-13,000 years ago) left the earliest human artifacts anywhere near here. But back then glacial ice covered all and algae was the only likely ‘native plants’. No thank you, I don’t think that kind of garden would be at all good for wildlife.

Should wildlife gardening be fun or a chore? Does ‘native’ have to imply a slavish devotion to what once grew in an area? Surprisingly, Wikipedia has a page called ‘Native Plant’ and (at least this morning) starts out with a not unreasonable definition: “A Native plant is one that develops, occurs naturally, or has existed for many years in an area.” Since I usually cannot afford the most recent horticultural fads and have no interest in putting in plants that are not going to develop, I think that a functional Home Bug Garden can be built around this concept of ‘native’. Moreover, such a garden could become a refuge of diversity in the increasingly developed and depauperate blotch of an ever-expanding Edmonton. Could be fun too.

Even for someone who has no interest in insect conservation, gardening does not have to be incompatible with bugs. Perhaps the biggest barrier is in the vegetable garden, because it is unfortunately true that there are a lot of insects that are far more efficient at harvesting our crops than we are. Tomatoes, potatoes, beets, spinach, radishes, arugula, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and the like host far too many pests and many are of little use to foraging bees and butterflies. If you let your mustards (arugula, radish, and others in one of those plant families with two-names: Brassicaceae or Cruciferae) bolt they provide bees with some solace. Solanaceae (tomato, potato, pepper, ground cherry, eggplant) are better. But beans and peas (Fabaceae-Leguminosae) are probably the best veggies for bees. The more acceptable insects and the not too entomophobic gardener, however, can share the wealth of culinary herbs without any worries. That will be the topic of the next post.