Favorite Garden Books: Bringing Nature Home

I first learned about Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy (Timber Press, 2007) from a post at Carolyn’s Shade Gardens. Intrigued, I bought a copy of the book; and almost as soon as I began reading it, I was totally hooked. Tallamy is a gardener, a scientist, and a teacher (professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at University of Delaware), and it is the combination of passion for his subject, a gardener’s perspective, solid science, and clear explanations  that makes his book so persuasive and helpful.

Tallamy’s target audience is suburban gardeners, and his goal is to convince them that they can be part of the solution to the problem of habitat degradation. As we look at the increasing fragmentation of wildlife habitat and the increasing danger of extinction, he argues, we often feel helpless. But that is because we have been taught to see the preservation of pristine wilderness as the solution to our ecological problems. Instead, he urges us to look to our own back yards, understanding how we can make our gardens part of a thriving local ecosystem. To do that, we need to grow more native plants in those gardens.

Douglas Tallamy is hardly the first author to urge gardeners to grow more native plants. What I find distinctive about his approach is his emphasis on the essential role of insects in ecosystem survival. He wants us to think differently about insects in our gardens.

Somehow along the way we have come to expect perfection in our gardens: the plastic quality of artificial flowers is now seen as normal and healthy. It is neither. Instead, it is a clear sign of a garden so contrived that it is no longer a living community, so unbalanced that any life form other than the desired plants is viewed as an enemy and quickly eliminated…. Ironically, a sterile garden is one teetering on the brink of destruction. It can no longer function as a dynamic community of interacting organisms…. (p. 95)

“A plant that has fed nothing,” Tallamy tells us, “has not done its job.” Insects are critical not only as pollinators of plants but as sources of food for birds and other wildlife.

Tallamy knows that convincing gardeners that it is good to have insects munching on their plants will be a tough sell; so he begins with the insects we most love to see in our gardens – butterflies. He notes that while many alien plants, including favorites like Buddleia, can provide nectar for butterflies, only native plants provide the food and habitats our native butterfly species need to reproduce. He devotes an entire chapter to advice about which plants (mostly trees) support the largest number of Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) species. Then he moves on to insect species that are more likely to evoke a “yuck” response, emphasizing their role in the well-being of the birds we want to welcome to our gardens. The chapter that catalogs all the different types of native insects we may find in our gardens is cleverly entitled “What does bird food look like?”

Part of the reason Tallamy is so persuasive is that he is not preachy. He doesn’t expect us all to rush out, rip out all the alien ornamental plants in our gardens, and replace them with native plants. Instead, he suggests that gardeners increase the proportion of native plants in their gardens gradually, by replacing alien plants that die with appropriate natives and by focusing on natives when we expand our gardens. This book is full of practical advice, including how to educate our (human) neighbors about the importance of native plants without alienating them and an appendix with extensive lists of desirable native plants for six different regions of the United States.

In a little over 300 pages, Douglas Tallamy has had a profound impact on the way I think about gardening. Not only do I now have a better understanding of why I should include native plants, but I also have a new understanding of the insect life in my garden. I will still pick off and drown the Japanese and oriental beetles I find on my plants, because these insects are themselves aliens who arrived as hitchhikers on alien ornamental plants and who don’t have any natural enemies in our ecosystems; but I probably won’t be so quick to wash all the aphids off my Heliopsis plants. And I can relax about the tent caterpillars in the wild cherry trees behind my house. Not only will these tent caterpillars not spread to my other trees if I ignore them (they are cherry tree specialists), but they will also provide food for the birds.

Bringing Nature Home is a book that every gardener should read. It has moved from the place beside my favorite reading chair that it has occupied for the past two weeks to a well-deserved location on my shelf of essential garden reference books.