Doug Tallamy: How Gardening with Native Plants Helps Wildlife, CA Focus 

Always great hearing someone quoting E.O. Wilson

THANK YOU, VERY, VERY, MUCH!!! THIS IS VITAL, ECOLOGICAL INFORMATION, TO UNDERSTAND!!! I HAVE ALL OF YOU BOOKS, AND NEVER TIRE OF HEARING YOUR MESSAGE! ("SHARED"!!)

Context is everything!

Thank you Doug! We have a yard and at work with the native plants, love to see the Caterpillars feeding the chickadees! Wow! The color of fall is due to sunlight at carotenoids! Ali

The underlying PRINCIPLES driving the presence or absence or frequency of organisms are universal. So Tallamy could come to California and recognize familiar processes. Soils and roots are often ignored, as are the associated microbiomes, but "in that we err, we greatly err." (Beston) Whether it is in the abundant clay soils of the East or the generally more coarse and rocky soils of the West, root requirements, for example, follow the same rules. I started with Kramer's PLANT & SOIL WATER RELATIONSHIPS in the mid '50's, and graduated to Kramer and Boyle's WATER RELATIONS OF PLANTS AND SOILS more "recently." Perhaps there are newer treatments that are "better." As Doug said, "Ecology is not rocket science, it's harder." True, but while we'll never know everything, we can learn essential truths (always provisional), provided we "know what we don't know." (M. Mead) As Josh Billings was fond of saying, "The worst kind of ignorance is not so much not knowing, as it is knowing so much that ain't so!" If we continue to challenge our assumptions, we will learn. If we slavishly follow "best practices" we will tend to stay in the intellectual ruts of convention--a "worst" practice if there every was one. Forging fresh cutting edges is great fun, and anyone can do it! Eschew the drudgery of convention--with which the plant business has long been plagued. As they say in England, TAKE COURAGE!

Very informative 😊thanks for sharing!

Watching from New Zealand - great presentation, all the same issues here.

Very good. Thank you 👍🙏🙏

Where can I find the chart of the native and non native plant value to butterflies and moths?