Bringing Nature Home changed my life. The answers are all around us if we slow down to look. More wildlife has entered our yard since allowing natives to reclaim their home. I grew up in the woods and that might have something to do with me never fearing nature. Insects are good. The wasp are great pollinators. Everything in balance. It is a risk to let go of fear. I feel that when i walk in the woods with more balance, i feel safer since it feels less on the fringe of quick and sudden collpase. In a disturbed woods, animals seem desperate, the poison ivy is unchecked, the ground is not stable, the air feels stale...some change is okay...just not to the degree we humans are playing their manifest destiny. And HOA's need to change. Leading by example is what im doing and hopefully it will catch on. In the low country of SC some communities are catching on entirely.
Hope it’s going well. I’m restoring an Arroyo in my property in California. When I moved in it was completely flattened out with gravel and patches of weeds here and there. It was worse than having ornamentals. Now it’s slowly turning into a habitat
You're blessed to live where you do. All I've done in making my yard into an oasis in the turf desert of my subdivision is piss off all of my neighbors. The bees are going to sting their children, the foxes are going to eat their dogs, the raccoons are going to chew through the walls of their homes, the ticks are going to crawl in their ears.... it goes on and on. Other people are always the biggest roadblocks. What everyone else calls progress, I see as destruction.
Thank you for this wonderful interview.Our modern society is terribly unbalanced .Suburbia is a wasteland of lawns being treated with neonics and pretty plants that are also sprayed and have little biological use.
I heard Dr. Tallamy speak in Louisville, KY several years ago and it changed my life as a gardener! I have his books, I've given his books to others, and I speak to garden clubs about his findings and the whole approach to gardening as environmental restoration philosophy and practice. I'm thrilled to see this video of his actual garden! Thank you!
The small trees behind Kim and Doug growing against the fence are seedling Pawpaw, asimina triloba. Quite appropriate as this is the largest native north American fruit. Great interview.
Yeah I let my yard get taken over by bidens this winter and never once got stung. On the flip side my son did get stung but he was running through bear foot knowing it could happen.
Really wish I could join a community of people who care about nature the way I do. Sometimes I feel like a pebble in the ocean. The apathy the average person has about the environment makes me feel overwhelmed with sadness at times. It all started for me when I found a caterpillar on a weed I was yanking out of my yard. It was a blue vine milkweed. That was it. There are now 8 species of native milkweeds in my yard, 19 native pollinator friendly shrubs & large areas of native grasses and pollinator flowers. It's beautiful & there's still so much boring lawn turf to smother & replace with good plants. I thoroughly enjoyed this video, thank you!
I feel the same way I wish I was around more people I could talk to who cares and knows what I'm talking about. Recently I took out a burning bush and planting all natives. I told My HOA president if with the upcoming plantings can we implement natives. She said what is a Native and what is invasive this lady is in charge of the grounds . Makes me so sad and hopeless.
Great video! Love your RU-vid channel. I bought Dr. Tallamy's book a couple years ago and love it. It has been an inspiration for my yard. Can't wait for his next book. Thanks for posting :)
"We can't wait for them... WE need to be the change"; "If we can do that by accident...!" #eyeswide (Besides oak, what trees should I love seeing pop up in the field that used to be farmed for potatoes & beans? Beech & Birch tend to be my first loves. Zone 5ish in Maine for ref...) Enjoyed morning coffee & knitting along to this chat ♥
There are also oaks that are fast-growing natives, like Scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), Nuttal oak (Q. nuttallii), Valley oak (Q. lobata), Northern Red Oak (Q. rubra), Swamp Spanish oak (Q. palustris), and Water oak (Q. nigra).
This is a good interview. In suburbia, I have found that my garden pond has done more good than the native plants. Kinda frustrating. Maybe it's just suburbia.
Am surprised to learn some plants are invaders :) My first day class given this book (Plant Invaders of Mid-Atlantic Natural Areas ) I call it the warning book at day 1class:). you want to grow plants , here is interesting book... it' s exciting already. And to find out there are history in creating A garden with Native plants...Books can introduce you what is foreign to you sometimes. I love indoor plants and gardens, but wanting to be gardener... a lot to learn.
Thanks for this video presenting a talk with Dr.Douglas Tallamy ,my brother Dr.Shreeram Inamdar a Professor of environmental sciences is also a lecturer in the University of Delaware and has met him, I enjoyed Dr.Douglas talk with such clarity and passionate understanding of saving nature.Hope many read his book " Nature best hope ".
I believe what we need to do is to embrace this world with compassion and love. I agree that we need to plant more natives. We need to think in terms of building habitats in our suburbs, cities and agricultural areas. Where I would differ (a bit) is in terms of "invasive" species. We have a hard time talking about this topic without calling for total ruthless war. These species might also called newly emerging species as they are in the process of adapting to their new homes. Separated from their native ranges evolution is pushing them in different directions. These introduced species are also driving evolution in native species as well. To give an example garlic mustard has caused a decline in lepidoptera that laid eggs on it. Most of the caterpillars were killed by the plants chemical defences. But only most, some of the caterpillars were able utilize garlic mustard and reproduce. These survivors are the founders of new species. Also most invasive species specialize in disturbed/degraded habitats rather than overrunning more pristine habitats in many cases. On top of that the poisons we are told to use to "control" these plants are worse for the environment than the invasives. I would work to have a native rich landscape but embrace imperfection. For example there is that out of the way corner that difficult to deal. Maybe its covered with oriental bittersweet. Perhaps it is a better use of time and money is bring native-rich wildlife friendly habitat into the easier parts of the property. Maybe leave the bittersweet to provide nest sites and hungry-gap late winter food. The genus celastrus is native to north america also, thus adaption by the local ecosystem should be fairly rapid. I have run on long enough but one of the greatest habitat improvements that can be made is simply to be cheap and lazy with the lawn. Forgo the use of all the pesticides and fertilizers. No need to water, set the blades on the mower high and use it casually and watch the life come back.
I am not sure what you are driving at, Tad. Take garlic mustard, for instance. It seems overwhelming to try to get rid of it in places where it has taken over, but you can just plug away at it WITHOUT spraying it, and it can be controlled and even eliminated in a few years. What I have found out by doing that is that if you reduce the invasives, the natives who have been hunkered down will return and come back. Sometimes you need to spray, but it needs to be done very selectively, using techniques like lopping them off and spraying the stumps, and if done right, it does not kill the adjacent natives who have been laying in wait. An ecosystem is a delicate, interwoven fabric, and if you can provide enough of that fabric to remain, many other native species will be able to hang on. Letting invasive species to take over creates a food desert, and to many species will not have enough numbers left to remain viable. That is not evolution, it's extirpation.
@@kenlassman3725 What I am saying is that there is more one truth out there and that none of them can be ignored, only imperfectly navigated between. Where professor Tallamy absolutely has it right is in pointing out the need for a diverse landscape full of native plants to sustain food webs. But even he has said its not the presence of exotic species in a landscape that causes the issues, its the lack of native flora. But to often there is an attempt to build a fortress native in our thinking that would exterminate every invasive everywhere without a second thought. But there are many reasons for second thoughts. To say that something is invasive is to say that it has found a niche in the local ecosystem and is on its way to becoming a new native species. It is meeting an unmet need in the local environment. The invasives isolation from its parent population will drive it to become a new species. Its presence will drive speciation among the natives as well as they adapt to the new neighbor. This is a truth. Some invasives (feral pigs, feral horses) fill niches in ecosystems left vacant by extinction. This is a truth. Invasives have become essential to many native species at various times throughout the year for protection from predation/ herbivory or late winter food sources. This is a truth. So do we need native species in our yards? Yes. Do we need to drive all invasives out everywhere? No.
@@tadblackington1676 Thanks for your considered response. What I am proposing is that the key to successful restoration is neither complete obliteration of all invasives nor abandonment of invasive management techniques. Like so much of life, careful discernment is what is required, and what makes sense in one ecoregion may not be the case at all in another. Let's talk specifics. Sericea lespedeza/Lespedeza cuneata was introduced locally as a legume that would do well as a groundcover on steep slopes and have good nutritional value for some grazers. Unfortunately, because it has almost no competition/local pests in a North American grassland, it is quite capable of rapidly reproducing and turning a diverse, native prairie ecosystem with hundreds of plant species and accompanying insect and other ecological consumers into an ecological desert, converting it into a near monoculture that wipes out literally thousands of years of ecological trophic structure in a decade if left unchecked. At least this is the case in my ecoregion. There may be some other parts of North America where this is not true. Sweet clover is a nuisance to native grasslands around here, but its invasive qualities and ability to wipe out ecosystem diversity gets worse as you head north. These are just a tiny sampling and I could give you many more where the local landscape, if direct and active management of an invasive species is not taken, will result in a collapse of that local landscape's trophic structure. In fact I would say that there is at least one such invasive species in almost all of the ecoregions on the planet. So what I am saying is that each ecoregion needs to take stock of the kind of invasive threats there are, determine which species represent an existential threat to the local ecosystems, and act accordingly. There will be some discussions about whether a non-native is just a nuisance or an existential threat, and these designations may very well shift in a time of climate change, ecosystem fragmentation and species mobility in this very mobile world we live in. But do not doubt for a moment that such species are out there and require direct action in order to protect a local ecosystem from becoming a shadow of is former self and a serious degradation of all of the ecosystems services that it provided to the landscapes--and cultures-- that are contained in those landscapes.
@@kenlassman3725 I have no experiance with lespedeza of any sort but bouncing around the internet a bit brings questions to mind. First lespedeza is a genus native to North America and used by a variety of natve lepidoptera and other wildlife. Two things can be expected going forward. First, the invasive lespedeza are likely to start hybridizing with native lespedeza. In a time of climate change that isn't a bad thing. It isn't a bad thing in general as hybridization is now being acknowledged as an engine of speciation, and a very hybrid species like ours shouldn't go casting aspersions on other hybrids. Second, there is a cast of native butterfies and moths adapted to use very similar species. Sooner or later some of these lepdoptera are going make the not so large jump to using the invasive lespedeza. You brought up thousands of years of evolution in the tallgrass prairie. You also have to take into account the number of keystones that have been knocked out of this ecoregion over time. Every native species evolved in the shadow of and spent 90%+ of its time on this planet alongside pleistocene megafauna. In Kansas you would be looking at 2 sorts of elephants, 2 sorts of ground sloths, 2 or 3 sorts of camels/llamas, peccaries, horses, temperate zone musk-ox and tapirs alongside the deer, pronghorns and bison. Many mouths eating different plants in different ways. This generates diversity of vegetation. How many of these keystones are still missing where invasive lespedeza is running rampant? One of the approaches for dealing with lespedeza mentioned was bringing in goats (a proxy for bootherium and euceratherium) to eat it. Finally, being a legume the invasive lespedeza is likely a natural match for degraded sites. If the area is at all disturbed the invasives are bound to show up. This isn't saying do nothing to support the natives. But all these facts need to be kept in mind when we think about what we need to do, or not do.
Xeriscaping is simply gardening or landscaping that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental watering. The focus is on using drought-tolerant plants suited to the site, typically, but not always, native plants.
I know what it means, but to many folks it conjures a landscape of rocks and cactus. So many other terms that, IMO, are better suited for our cause.. One that we use in San Antonio, Tx... Water Saver Gardens... Just saying. Thanks for the quick response.
I highly recommend Sara Stein's books, starting with Noah's Garden, which were written well before Dr. Tallamy's books, as well; in fact they speak to me more than Doug's books do.
