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Published online 12 December 2007 | Nature 450, 937-939 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450937a
News Feature
Gardening: A garden for all climates
Accustomed to adapting to nature's whims, gardeners are more prepared than most to take on the challenge of climate change. Emma Marris asks them what to grow in a greenhouse world.
“This concept that gardening puts you in harmony with nature is a big lie,” says Peter Del Tredici, a botanist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Gardening is really about preventing nature from doing what it wants to do, which is to destroy your landscape, and gardeners know this at their core.
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I support the use of plants to curb GHGs, however, the article and the "green gardener" attachment seem to miss the point on what green gardening/ Naturescaping really means. Examples include the paving of property to avoid GHG emissions (actually renders soil useless for GHG sequestering and destroys watersheds), waste to landfill instead of decomposition (ignores the fact that composting actually reduces GHG emissions and landfills add to the problem) and discouraging the use of native plants. Gardeners should not be focusing on preventing nature from doing what she wants to do. This is precisely the philosophy which has gotten the human race into the position it is today. We must work with and include nature in our urban gardens and greenspaces. We seem to forget that prime real estate for us is also prime real estate for the vast majority of Earth's species. The use of native plant species to provide habitat for other animal species in urban areas is an essential component of the restoration of our planet. I agree climates and ecosystems are shifting and our plant choices may as well. This does not mean we should start bringing in more exotic species which currently play havoc with our natural ecosystems.
I concur that native plants should be selected over the elaborate, showy-flowered and often nectar-poor hybrids marketed to the gadening community by the large nursery and seed retailers. It has been my observation in Houston, Texas that native bees tend to specialize on particular wildflower species in contrast to their more promiscuous cousins, the European and sometimes Africanized bees in this region.that will visit just about any misbegotten hybrid flower. A gardener who wants a miscellany of native bees should cultivate a variety of native wildflowers, bearing in mind that some species are short bloomers, so species must also be selected to succeed each other's bloom period. I also want my own garden to be attractive to butterflies, so cultivation of native plants that serve as lep host plants is one of my priorities. I Houston continues to hot up, I shall gather seed further down the Coastal Bend and into the Lower Rio Grande Valley to supplement the local natives that I already cultivate. We have had numerous sightings of Julia Heliconian butterflies around Houston this year, up to the present date, which is the Winter Solstice, so tropical lep species are showing up here with greater frequency. I am ready to garden for them. And my choice of natives holds out nicely against the landscape-destroying propensities of nature, thank you.