Linking About: That NYT article

Over the past few weeks, many people have asked me the same question the same way in the same voice: “Have you read that NYT article?” (Gift link.) I had not until two days ago, despite its having been sitting open in a tab the whole time. Along the way, I had read several reactions (pro and con) on various platforms, but had been waiting to read the article itself until I had time to focus on it.

The nutshell version, if you haven’t read it, is that writer Ferris Jabr (author of Becoming Earth) attempts to pinpoint, once and for all, the merits of gardening with native plants. He’s spent several years creating a garden for himself, becomes tuned in somewhere along the way to the ecological gardening discussion, and decides to find out whether he needs to revise his approach at all: “I had been thinking of our garden as a miniature Eden, replete with everything local wildlife needed. Now it seemed more like a poorly stocked international aisle at a supermarket, offering a few exotic curiosities yet lacking the familiar essentials.”

Fearful of being led down the garden path, as it were, he sets himself up as a skeptic: “Given how drastically different the world is today compared with even a century ago, I wondered whether the bygone circumstances in which species evolved could really be so important.” To get to the bottom of it, he spends quality time with Doug Tallamy — of Homegrown National Park, etc — in Tallamy’s mostly-native garden, and speaks to numerous other sources with somewhat varying views.

Along the way, he sets up a straw man for himself to knock down, before concluding that incorporating more native plants into his own garden is a worthwhile effort after all, quickly producing results he can see with his own two eyes. The end.

Here’s the straw man:

“Gardening with an ecological mind-set can be empowering, rekindling a sense of agency that is all too easily extinguished by the overwhelming pressure of a planetary crisis. But when green-thumbed idealism grows to ungainly proportions, blocking out the wider world — when it begins to seed the public with the impression that their backyard oases alone can decide the fate of life on Earth — it risks becoming a dangerously smug and naïve conceit.”

I don’t know a single gardener — much less “the public” — who believes backyards alone can “decide the fate of life on Earth.” If there is one out there, maybe Jabr will have disabused them of the misconception that they’re definitively saving the world. But I imagine that in writing the piece, he has brought the important matter of biodiversity loss to some readers who had never thought to wonder about it before, or realized a potted native plant on their steps might help. Hopefully they’ll come to the same conclusion he did and pick up a native plant or two.

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I went into this post planning to round up links to some of the related responses — which predictably range from ‘it’s a Tallamy hit piece’ to ‘he climbed in bed with Tallamy’ and all points in between — but I honestly don’t have the stomach for it. (I will share Homegrown National Park’s thoroughly civilized response.)

And here’s two cents from me, random gardener on the internet: There are loads of beautiful native plants in the world (from the threatened to the flourishing), and they are becoming ever more accessible to gardeners who want to include them in their gardens, both because they are great plants and because they are adapted to their locations and support biodiversity and wildlife. While I appreciate a thoughtful debate (it does happen) about whether some non-native plants can be viewed as harmless or even beneficial in a climate-changing world (as Jabr notes Tallamy acknowledges), I can see no downside to the desire to incorporate native plants into a garden, and do not understand why some people are so bothered by the notion.

As I say of just about everything here: Try it, you might like it.