Does This Mean The Bees' Knees Is an Influencer?

(Well...it's prolly correlation, not causation. But still!)

It’s odd how much alike all of our American yards look. I’d be willing to bet that if you surveyed our homes, you’d find far more variation among the interiors than the exteriors. Most of us put at least some thought into ensuring the insides of our homes reflect our individual tastes and personalities. We’d be disturbed to visit a neighbor and discover their living room was a carbon copy of our own. When it comes to the outsides, though, it’s as if we’re all following a shared Stepford playbook – one that calls for an immaculate turfgrass lawn edged by heavily pruned foundation shrubs, an ornamental tree or two, and possibly a heavily-mulched bed of cultivated annual or perennial flowers. We seem to aspire to sameness.

How did that happen? I’m sure an anthropologist could give us a more fulsome answer. But I think there’s a large element of tribalism in play. As divided as we are along so many political and social axes in this country, we have broad consensus on one topic: the aesthetics of our front yards. Whether we’re driven by aspiration or peer pressure, we feel compelled to signal our membership in the community of upstanding property owners. This means conforming to the playbook.

In other words, the appearance of our yards is a reflection of our culture. As we think about the ecological imperative of converting turfgrass lawns to native plantings, the good news is that cultures can and do change; they’re in fact always in flux. The bad news is that cultural change can be frustratingly slow. If you’ve ever tried to alter dysfunctional habits at your workplace, you’ll be nodding your head in rueful recognition.

I was delighted, then, to see “The Rise – and Beauty – of the Native Plant” as the cover article of the Washington Post Magazine yesterday.

The prominent placement in a national publication suggests the Magazine’s editorial board, at least, considers the topic significant. With any luck, the article will attract further attention to the cause, and perhaps mark a small step forward in the cultural transition.

University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy, whose book Nature’s Best Hope got me started on this journey, is quoted liberally in the article. Here’s a pithy one: “People don’t realize that their two acres of lawn have just wrecked the watershed, killed all the pollinators, not sequestered enough carbon and destroyed the food web.”

Journalist Chris Moody’s basic message is that there’s a “growing movement of homeowners who are forsaking traditional turf-grass yards in favor of native plants,” with the added grace note that native plants are now “all the rage in gardening circles.” I don’t know whether this is empirically true, but I sure like to hear it.

Encouragingly, Moody says “nurseries are stocking up on natives to meet demand, and a new generation of landscapers touts expertise in native plant design.” In my own experience, as discussed here, native plants can still be hard to source. But if supply and demand are increasing, I’m here for it.

I wrote here about my disappointment that so many public gardens celebrate exoticism at the expense of promoting ecologically-sound landscaping. So I was pleasantly surprised to see a quote from a representative of the Atlanta Botanical Garden that visitors increasingly come to the site to visit its collection of native plants, and that they arrive “with an awareness of natives.” Keep at it, folks.

The story points to government initiatives in Pennsylvania, LA and Colorado to incentivize families to replace turfgrass with more ecologically-sustainable alternatives. Maryland has passed a law preventing homeowners’ associations from requiring residents to plant turfgrass on their property. DC recently banned gas-powered leaf blowers in an effort to reduce noise pollution. I hope we’ll see more and more of these efforts.

Wild Ones and Homegrown National Park, two organizations close to my heart, get well-deserved shoutouts. Woot!

The big takeaway is that we all need to keep up the drumbeat. Yes, cultural change is hard and slow. Remember the concept of circles of engagement, though? This is the idea that our interactions with the world take place within concentric spheres representing, respectively, what we can control, what we can influence, and what concerns us. It’s within all of our “circles of control” to change our own behaviors and gardening habits. In addition, it’s within our “circles of influence” to educate our neighbors and raise expectations for our public gardens, commercial nurseries and political representatives.

We can and should be cultural influencers. So let’s get on with it!