How can we as individuals do our part to enhance biodiversity?.........If you own a home with a yard, "studies have shown that even a modest expansion of the native plant cover significantly increases the number and species of breeding birds, including birds of conservation concern"........... "As gardeners and stewards of our land, we have never been so empowered to help save biodiversity from extinction, (with) the need to do so never greater"................ All we need to do is plant native plants indigenous to your part of the Country.........Mimic the natural areas near your home by creating horizontal and vertical "tangles" of trees, shrubs and flowers that provide cover and shelter for life to flourish................Then, provide some type of water source(birdbath, pond, etc)...........And almost overnight, watch your once quiet yard begin to be a magnet for insects, birds, reptiles and mammals..........By creating your native plant garden, you expand the ability of our local, state and National Parks, Reserves and Open Space Easements to sustain life................. "Years of research by evolutionary biologists have shown that the area required to sustain biodiversity is pretty much the same as the area required to generate it in the first place"............. "The consequence of this simple relationship is profound"................ "Since we have taken 95% of the U.S. from nature we can expect to lose 95% of the species that once lived here unless we learn how to share our living, working, and agricultural spaces with biodiversity, that is,95% of all plants and animals!"..............."Studies of habitat islands with known histories, such as Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal and Ashdown Forest in England, have so far shown these predictions to be accurate"........... "Species are lost at the same proportion with which a habitat is reduced in size"............. "The good news is that extinction takes awhile, so if we start sharing our landscapes with other living things, we should be able to save much of the biodiversity that still exists"

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Your Garden Has a Function

In the past we didn’t design gardens that play a critical ecological role in the landscape.

 We must do so in the future if we hope to avoid a mass extinction from which we humans are not likely to recover.

 As quickly as possible we need to replace unnecessary lawn with densely planted woodlots that can serve as habitat for our local biodiversity.

 New England Native Plant Garden

California Native Plant Garden

Why We Need Biodiversity

 Few people feel personally threatened by the loss of biodiversity. Here’s why you should. Biodiversity losses are a clear sign that our own life-support systems are failing. The ecosystems that support us - - that determine the carrying capacity of the earth and our local spaces - - are run by biodiversity.

 It is biodiversity that generates oxygen and clean water; that creates topsoil out of rock and buffers extreme weather events like droughts and floods; and that recycles the mountains of garbage we create every day.

 And now, with human induced climate change threatening the planet, it is biodiversity that will suck that carbon out of the air and sequester it in living plants if given half a chance.

 Humans cannot live as the only species on this planet because it is other species that create the ecosystem services essential to us. Every time we force a species to extinction we are encouraging our own demise. Despite the disdain with which we have treated it in the past, biodiversity is not an option, it is an imperative!


Texas Native Plant Garden

Oregon Native Plant Garden

Florida Native Plant Garden

Redesigning Suburbia

For over a century we have favored ornamental landscape plants from China and Europe over those that evolved right here. If all plants were created equal, that would be fine. But every plant species protects its leaves with a species-specific mixture of nasty chemicals. With few exceptions, only insect species that have shared a long evolutionary history with a particular plant lineage have developed the physiological adaptations required to digest the chemicals in their host’s leaves. They have specialized over time to eat only the plants sharing those particular chemicals.

 When we present insects from Pennsylvania with plants that evolved on another continent, chances are those insects will be unable to eat them. We used to think this was good. Kill all insects before they eat our plants! But an insect that cannot eat part of a leaf cannot fulfill its role in the food web.

 We have planted Kousa dogwood, a species from China that supports no insect herbivores, instead of our native flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) that supports 117 species of moths and butterflies alone. In hundreds of thousands of acres we have planted goldenraintree from China instead of one of our beautiful oaks and lost the chance to grow 532 species of caterpillars, all of them nutritious bird food.  Research has shown that alien ornamentals support 29 times less biodiversity than do native ornamentals.