Evan X. Merz

The movement toward native plants has been hugely successful over the last twenty years. In the 2000s, it was rare to see a yard that wasn't a vast wasteland of lawn and hardscaping that was utterly unusable to any local wildlife. Today, I can walk down the streets of my neighborhood and identify at least one native plant in most yards. The turnaround I've witnessed in my adult life is truly amazing.

Yet, this success hasn't translated into success in the lofty goals of the native plant community. The wider availability of milkweed in gardens hasn't led to a rebound in monarch butterfly populations. They continue on a downward spiral toward eventual extinction. The same story can be told about native pollinators all over the world.

Now, we could veer off into talking about pesticides here. I think pesticide usage may be a bigger issue than the lack of native plants for some species.

However, I think there is also an issue of penetration into the public consciousness. I think there is an issue of awareness. I don't think that most people are even aware that the native plant movement exists. I don't think they have any understanding of why picking native plants is good for wildlife. I think that we see more and more native plants in gardens mostly because of conservation aware landscapers.

I think that for us to solve the problem of habitat loss in a bottom up way (outside of legislation and NGOs), we need to integrate native plants into the daily lives of regular people. We need to make native plants desirable as aesthetic objects. In order to do that we need to take native plants out of the garden and bring them into the home. This will require citizen scientists to find easy ways to use natives as both house plants and cut flowers.

Native plants as house plants

When was the last time you saw a native plant in the house plant section of a nursery? Maybe in some places on the east coast of the US you can find a few things here and there, but I've never seen California native plants in California nurseries.

It's true that California has a reputation for being sunny, and the sun is impossible to replicate when growing indoors. But California has plenty of shade loving plants.

The ferns are the natural choice for California natives that might work as house plants. I've tried using Blechnum Spicant (Deer Fern) as a house plant several times, but I've failed each time. I'm not a very experienced house plant gardener, and the care for Deer Fern is just different enough from the care for my spider plants, that I have messed it up.

We need enthusiastic native plant people to figure out how to grow native plants indoors. We need them to breed versions of the plants that can thrive in low light situations. We need to get the native plants onto the nursery store shelves so that those are the plants that average consumers are choosing.

Native plants in the cut flower industry

Native plant activists also need to build a presence in the cut flower industry. California is overrun with beautiful flowers. Why aren't any of the flowers available at the local florist? Why can't we order native bouquets online?

The reason native flowers aren't available in flower arrangements is that propagating native plants is more difficult than propagating domesticated plants such as cut flowers. The plants available in stores are partly the plants that people like, but they're also the plants that are easy to propagate.

So the challenge for native plant enthusiasts is to find the native plants that are easy to propagate and grow well for use in bouquets and cut flowers.

My instincts say that Matilijia Poppy would be great for cut flowers. The long stems and beautiful open flowers seem like a natural pick for bouquets. I also know that California has a number of native Ranunculus flowers, and Ranunculus are widely used in the cut flower industry, but I don't know how easy the California native Ranunculus are to propagate or use for cut flowers. Finally, I feel like native wildflowers like Clarkia would be terrific as cut flowers, but outside of making bouquets for my family, I have never tried.

Now is the time for bold experimentation

We have seen that native plants are great for landscaping. Now it's time for the native plant community to solve the other challenges facing native plant adoption. We need bold growers and citizen scientists to figure out how to use native plants in new ways. We need to bring native plants into the home, both as house plants and as cut flowers.

If we can make native plants more desirable as aesthetic objects, then the problem of native plants in the landscape will solve itself.