April is Native Plant Month. What Does This Mean? Why Should We Care?

First, and before you read any further, please read the accompanying Position Paper from the Garden Club of America. It’s short and clear.

The GCA Position Papers are prepared every two years and updated regularly by members of the Conservation and NAL (National Affairs and Legislation) Committees.) These documents are the only specific publications by the GCA of political positions which GCA not only supports passively but encourages each club to espouse and use as a basis for action and programming. They are based on well-documented science and fact.

History

A few years ago, Nancy Linz of the Garden Club of Cincinnati spearheaded an effort to have April named as “Native Plant Month” in the state of Ohio. The speakers supporting her proposal to the Ohio state legislature were primarily members of the third grade class at the Birchwood School of Hawken on Cleveland’s near west side, under the leadership of their teacher Lauren Miller. The Shaker Lakes Garden Club had, through Charitable Projects, funded the creation of a native plant garden at the school for the students to plant and study, and had subsequently successfully proposed Miller as a winner of the Elizabeth Abernathy Hull Award of the GCA, for outstanding teaching of horticulture and the environment subjects to children below the age of 16. Our club has been involved in this effort since its beginnings.

Ohio voted to accept Linz’s designation, the first of 49 states to have done this so far.

It’s Not a Month; It’s Forever

We are all pleased to see that our Native Plant Month initiative has set its roots into a national publicity campaign. But publicity is not enough. Native plants are essential to the survival of a healthy ecosystem, and, as GCA has clarified in the Position Paper above, our ecosystems are no longer healthy. We must do what we can to bring them to a basis for a resilient future.

There is no going backward; we cannot “restore” a native ecosystem now that huge essential changes have been made to it. The genie does not go back in the bottle; the kudzu does not scamper back to East Asia; the Dutch elm disease does not flee back to the Netherlands and the American elms do not magically regrow. Extinct Luna moths do not come back to life. The passenger pigeon is gone forever.

Now we must create an ecosystem that, from the basis we have in place today, can be made to support the interconnected complex of life that in turn supports us. That means reweaving a healthy web that cares for humans, for trees, for food plants, for pollinators, for birds, for butterflies, for beavers, for bumblebees, for brown-eyed susans, for black cherries, for beagles, for buntings…for us all.

What Can I, an Individual, Do?

This is straightforward, and laid out clearly in the Position Paper on Native Plants. Please begin with these few requests.

1. Do not use pesticides in your garden. Ever. Or in your home.

2. Reduce the area of your home landscape given over to lawn, a monoculture that requires watering and regular mowing. Give it instead to native plant landscape.

3. Remove invasive nonnative plants from your home landscape. Not all nonnative plants, but the invasive ones that supplant the natives.

4. Support private and governmental projects that increase awareness of the need for native plantings, and to fund research programs that will forward these endeavours.

5. Spread the word.

Does SLGC Have an Initiative to Spread the Word?

YES. read the position paper.