The Dark Side of Native Plants: Fandoms, Gatekeeping, Anxiety, Pretense, and What You Can Do To Avoid Their Pitfalls

Episode Introduction

In today’s episode, The Dark Side of Native Plants: Fandoms, Gatekeeping, Anxiety, Pretense, and What You Can Do To Avoid Their Pitfalls, we discuss exactly that.

Host Stephanie Barelman

Stephanie Barelman is the founder of the Bellevue Native Plant Society, a midwest motivational speaker surrounding the native plants dialogue, and host of the Plant Native Nebraska Podcast.

Episode Sponsors

Today's episode is sponsored by:

Midwest Natives Nursery

www.midwestnativesnursery.com/

https://www.facebook.com/midwestnatives

https://www.instagram.com/midwest_natives_nursery

Lauritzen Gardens

laurtizengardens.org

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Episode Content

ATTENTION: Today’s episode is marked explicit for a single, well-placed F-bomb.

Roadblocks to Our New Way of Life

• Interesting opinions-from surprising sources! 
• Expensive workshops
• Paywalls
• Feeling like you have to sign up for email lists 

Today’s Public Service Announcement:

Beware of the Gatekeepers 

You DON’T need to buy a certain book, or take certain classes. There are wonderful organizations that work very hard to provide this education to you for FREE such as:

• The Xerces Society 
• Pollinator Partnership
• Homegrown National Park 
• National Wildlife Federation

That being said, we DO recommend wonderful authors on our show such as:

• Heather Holm
• Douglas Tallamy 
• Jim Locklear 
• Rick Darke 
• Enrique Salmon 
• Benjamin Vogt 

We also DO recommend local plant suppliers that provide affordable plant material such as:

• Midwest Natives Nursery
• Bumbling Bee Native Wildflowers 
• Prairie Legacy 
• Prairie Plains Institute 
• Nebraska Statewide Arboretum

And remember: there’s no one way to do anything! 

Patreon Disclaimer

We (if the gods allow) occasionally put content on our Patreon. But if you need this info for FREE, please email plantnativenebraska@outlook.com. Just because I am trying to make a living doesn’t mean we will keep you from the good stuff. 

Examples of Negative (and Subjective) Plant Opinions

Just because you are enthusiastic about native plants doesn’t mean you have to accept EVERYTHING a (sort of)native plants person you admire says.

As said by Piet Oudolf, natural landscapes garden designer, in one of his books:

• Joe Pye weed= nothing more than ‘not unattractive’ 
• sneezeweed = too exuberant 
• goldenrod and sunflower= overfamiliar
• foliage of rudbeckia is “uninspiring”
• Rudbeckia flowers are uninteresting
• goldenrod is a “garish yellow” 

As said by Piet Oudolf and landscape designer and host John McGee on the Native Plant Podcast (not to be confused with our podcast:)

• Adding prairie dropseed is enough to make a landscape “look” wild
• The primary point of a garden is to give people pleasure
• Nettles in a design would put someone out of work
• Certain natives are invasive (leading to endless mental and actual debate, more on that in a minute)
• It’s not our place to make nature in our gardens... wait, what?

Controversial statement by the late Toby Hemenway, a 2000s garden author, professor, environmentalist:

• Native gardens are pointless in the grand scheme of things when it comes to conservation and that your little suburban garden isn’t going to save any species… 

Ben Vogt, Lincoln landscape designer and seeming native plant activist:

• Gray-headed coneflower looks overgrown and overwhelms spaces, trees and shrubs should be short or narrow and very limited in the landscape

Traditional seeming negative opinions I've heard and read:

• Violets are an invasive weed worthy of spraying chemicals on their lawn to remove I.e. kill. 
• Butterflies and caterpillars are pests!

Hold on, Can Native Plants be Invasive?

Depends who you are asking...

Although, can something be invasive if it isn’t foreign or is it just robust? Is a plant civilization truly noxious and undesirable simply because it has evolved to be such a strong survivor in prime conditions? Maybe something like complete obliteration of its natural ecosystem where more checks and balances were in place?!?!

Some Important Differences Between Being a Native Plant Person vs. Being a Landscape Designer: 

Native plant expert: promotes native plants in the landscape

Designer: promotes certain plants in the landscape

Native plant expert: motivated by ecology

Designer: motivated by income flow

The Whole Point of the Native Plants Movement

to use native plants to reintroduce nature to our landscapes, right?

DON'T Conflate Opinion with Academic Expertise

Before you take someone’s advice on what plants could be considered, consider considering them.

But surprise this whole episode is my opinion! 

Have You Been Told To Avoid Any of the Following?

• Indian grass
• big bluestem
• common milkweed
• Verbena stricta
• goldenrod
• sunflowers
• New England aster
• tall boneset
• hyssops
• obedient plant
• all Silphium sp.

Have You Heard the Following Terms:

• opportunistic
• aggressive
• invasive
• problematic
• garden thuggery
• and the new one I’ve heard lately: gregarious

Have You Been Told Things Using This Language:

• well-behaved
• safe
• low-maitenence
• no-fuss
• “not too tall…”

In Defense of Common Milkweed…

“Perhaps most of us fall in love with the idea of milkweeds, when we hear they host the very beloved monarch butterfly.  We do our best to plant natives and inevitably we may come across someone giving away loads of common milkweed. Later on, we may regard anyone giving away hoards of a single variety of plant as a red flag. We may start to talk to our garden people about plants that are “too aggressive.” We may come to view plants like common milkweed as not worthy of our gardens and banish them along with native sunflowers, roses, wild mint, and other spreading plants into some dark recess of the native plants mindset. But, and hear me out on this, have you gone up to a common milkweed in bloom and stuck your nose right up in the flowers? Have you? Because by God, it smells like a fever dream. It’s a marvelously nutritious plant for humans and wildlife. It looks unique. It’s always buzzing with activity. It’s a fucking symbol of the prairie and we can’t banish it, guys. Give common milkweed a chance. Find somewhere to put it and for the love of all things garden worthy, stop and smell it once in a while.”

Keep It Simple

Plant what you, pollinators, and your kids love. Do your best to know what plants better support ecology and don’t let other people’s opinions be the gatekeeper for your gardens. Remember that the lite