Consider the Consequences of Your Purchases at the Garden Center

Next time you visit your favorite garden center, you may want to contemplate some of these purchases:

If you want plants that offer the greatest ecosystem value to your garden, plant regionally native plants.
A floral Frankenstein?

When buying flowers: The more a plant is manipulated, the less attractive it becomes to wildlife. Manipulating a plant’s natural evolutionary traits that provide the necessary cues that entice wildlife to visit–such as color, size, shape, bloom time, leaf variegation, leaf color, structure, even scent–can confuse wildlife, discourage visits, and greatly diminish a plant’s ecosystem value in your garden. One example (left): native Echinacea purpurea has been cultivated into a floral Frankenstein. The dense and deep structure of the ironically named ‘Butterfly Kisses’ probably keeps most pollinators away.  Additionally, this cultivar’s seedhead has virtually vanished so that it offers fewer winter seeds for birds.

The native flower’s natural, unaltered open structure (right) offers pollinators easy access to nutrients. If you want plants that offer the greatest ecosystem value to your garden, plant regionally native plants. Or, if you include cultivars in your purchases, realize that the more manipulated the plant, the less value it will have for wildlife.

Also, if you want your yard to be pollinator friendly, make sure the flowers, trees, shrubs you purchase are neonicotinoid free. Systemic pesticides can be deadly to pollinators.

When buying mulch: Leave the cypress mulch at the store. Cypress forests are rarely replanted.

When buying mulch: Leave the cypress mulch at the store. Cypress forests are rarely replanted after they are harvested. And because large swaths of mature cypress forests have been harvested, mulch manufacturers are starting to harvest immature trees. Best to leave the cypress mulch behind and consider other options. When buying mulch, ask which mulches are the most sustainable products available, and why. “Wood from the hood” types of mulch–mulch from local city trees trimmed or or downed from storms–are among the more sustainable sources.

Leave the peat moss at the store. Peat bogs are seen by some scientists to be as important and fragile as rainforests and take hundreds of years to evolve.

When buying peat moss/compost/soil amendments: Leave the peat moss at the store. “ Peat bogs are seen by some scientists to be as important and fragile as rainforests, and that’s where the concern lies about the use of peat moss by gardeners. . . Peat companies are destroying these fragile, unique and valuable bog ecosystems by removing the peat.”

According to an article from the Washington Post, “Peatlands store a third of the world’s soil carbon, and their harvesting and use releases carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas driving climate change…For horticultural use, the extraction of peat requires the removal of a bog’s living surface to reach the partially decomposed layers beneath. It grows at a mere sixteenth of an inch a year, and its mining removes layers that take centuries to develop…Peat is the best vegetative carbon sink we have on the planet. Why dig it up?”

Alternatives to peat moss. Using good old-fashioned compost is a environmentally friendly and sustainable way to build soil health.

Beware when buying moss or products made of moss. Do you know where the moss came from? It may have been harvested illegally. “No one knows how long it will take for them [the moss] to grow back. Maybe never. Most of these mats were as old as the trees themselves, and got started when they were just saplings.”–Robin Wall Kimmerer from her book, Gathering Moss.
Moving on to forest moss. If you are contemplating buying sheets of moss, or products made of moss (such as topiary items), consider the following from the book, Gathering Moss: “Since 1990, this luxuriant moss growth has come under attack from commercial moss harvesters, who strip branches completely bare and sell the moss to the horticulture industry.  Legal moss harvest in the Coastal Range of Oregon has been estimated to exceed 230,000 kilograms per year [506,000 lbs, or ~250 tons]. The Forest Service regulates moss harvest on National Forests by a system of permits, but enforcement is minimal.  Illegal harvest is thought to be as much as thirty times higher than the legal quota.”

Perhaps next time skip purchasing moss or moss products and leave it where it belongs: in the forest.

 

 

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