harvard design magazine • back issue Annotated

Courtesy of Layanee and Garden Rant
Excerpts–

Land managers and others who have to deal with the invasive problem on a daily basis know that often as not the old invasive comes back following eradication (reproducing from root sprouts or seeds), or else a new invader moves in to replace the old one. The only thing that seems to turn this dynamic around is cutting down the invasives, treating them with herbicides, and planting native species in the gaps where the invasives once were. After this, the sites require weeding of invasives for an indefe number of years, at least until the natives are big enough to hold their ground without human assistance.(3)

 

Can we put the invasive species genie back in the bottle, or are we looking at a future in which nature itself becomes a cultivated entity?(5)

 

Native plants are great, but without ongoing care and maintenance, they will die just like all the other plants we try to cultivate.

 

The issue of where a given plant comes from must be secondary to the issue of its future survival. Again, the sad thing about the debate over native versus exotic species is that it has become so polarized. At its most simplistic level, native is equated with good, exotic with bad.

 

What I find particularly depressing about the “native species only” argument is that it ends up denying the inevitability of ecological change. Its underlying assumption is that the plant and animal communities that existed in North America before the Europeans arrived can and should be preserved.

 

From the functional perspective, the presence of invasive species in the landscape can be interpreted as symptoms rather than causes of environmental degradation.

 

As a graceful way out of the native versus exotic debate, I recommend using sustainability as the standard for deciding what to plant.