In 2008 , Douglas W. Tallamy , an unassuming professor of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware , shook up the gardening community with a surprise smasher , “ Bringing Nature Home : How you could support Wildlife with Native Plants . ” In it , he made the case that the relationship between native flora and the dirt ball that have evolve with them is the essential connection in maintain healthy ecosystems . incorporate aboriginal plants into basic garden design is not only desirable , but also imperative , to reverse reject populations of louse and restore balance to an otherwise broken system .

More recently , in his 2019 book “ Nature ’s Best Hope : A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard , ” Tallamy build upon this idea , but he take on a more activist tone . He wants to change the direction we interact with and comprehend the landscape around our homes . It ’s no longer enough to select a works that is pleasing to the human optic , every choice we make must also support a complex WWW of life . He ’s now on a mission to save the world — one garden at a fourth dimension .

Tallamy is an unlikely revolutionary . In person , his genial skill guy demeanor has made him a dearie on the garden nightclub speaking circumference . His writing elan list toward the professorial — a lightly persuasive Socratic method punctuate by the occasional exclamatory assertion . It ’s as if he can barely curb his ebullience . As the book ’s title of respect indicate , Tallamy maintains a generally sunny outlook , which is a welcome disciplinary to the book ’s drab implicit in composition : the instinctive world is in swelled trouble , with many ecosystem in unconscionable , possibly irreversible , decline . In the Anthropocene , humankind are not part of the job , theyarethe problem . as luck would have it , in Tallamy ’s view , they can also be a part of the solution .

In “ Nature ’s Best Hope , ” he aims to invigorate a nationwide , grass roots movement he calls “ Homegrown National Park . ” By awakening those of us who are disconnect from the natural world and interchange the ingrained habit and practices of those who are already gardeners , Tallamy believes that , conjointly , we can make a homeowner - drive patchwork of personal parks that could blanket the land . In doing so , each of us can play a role in mitigating the effects of habitat loss , atomization , and even climate variety . If every landowner pledged to convert just one-half of his or her lawn into a functioning native flora residential district , Homegrown National Park could cover 20 million acres , weaving the fabric of a Brobdingnagian park organisation into every ecosystem in the continent .

It ’s a beguiling concept . But there is a lot of information to digest . The book dedicate entire chapters to wildlife ecology concepts such as carrying capacitance , ecosystem purpose , keystone genera , and fundamental interaction variety . fortuitously , Tallamy is adept at explicate complex scientific concepts in secular term . And as an bug-hunter by education , he devotes one of the lengthiest chapter in the Word of God to how gardeners can become stewards of what E. O Wilson calls “ the minuscule thing that execute the world”—insects . In doing so , he makes a compelling argument for what might be described as dirt ball - driven garden figure .

A recent discipline of native bee populations carry on at Delaware ’s Mt. Cuba Center , a public garden and conservation center consecrate to native plants , appear to tolerate Tallamy ’s argument for a garden - centrical approach to preservation . In conducting a survey of aboriginal bee populations on the 1,000 - acre property , in both the natural areas and the cultivated garden , its researchers found that bee diversity was eminent in the gardens . So human - designed place act as as vital links to the larger landscape — provide oases of multifariousness that sustain the wild areas surrounding them .

horticulture for insects sound a chip creepy . What about gardening for our own welfare , for the rice beer of a beautiful out-of-door space we can call our own ? Tallamy wants to upend our whole feeling of what ’s considered beautiful to admit a imaginativeness that transcends what await good to humans and encompasses what substantiate the other creatures we deal the man with .

Yet , as a scientist , Tallamy ca n’t assist creating hierarchy — much of his and his students ’ enquiry involves ranking various aboriginal industrial plant and the dirt ball coinage they patronise — and I bicker a bit over his preference for sure aboriginal works species over others . While I certainly ca n’t argue with the kudos he lavishes on the oak tree ( the matter of his late book ) nor with his detail that include just one mintage of oak tree in the garden can support C of beneficial insects , he take a chance give shortsighted shrift to other native trees , such as the yellowwood tree , because they support few insects . We have two mature yellowwood tree in our pace and they are unparalleled shade trees , bedeck with sensational displays of fragrant whitened flowers , aswarm with pollinators , in the class they choose to bloom . He also neglects to remark the several metal money of tidy sum mint that , in my reflexion , are late summer attractor for a divers solidifying of aboriginal bees and WASP .

Paradigm shifts seldom happen without contention . Tallamy has take some heating plant for his insistence on the transcendence of garden with native plants and , particularly , his insistency that we make a point of exterminate invasive plants in the landscape painting . A mostly laudatory April 2020 article inSmithsonianmagazine devoted place for a rebutter to Tallamy ’s research from Arthur Shapiro , a professor of bugology at UC Davis . In theSmithsonianstory and a late espouse - up , Shapiro noted that non - native eucalyptus trees in California bread and butter winter crowned head butterflies and that other introduced plant species do support insects that , in some cases , have see them to be satisfactory and even superior food sources . He also present grounds that some insect species can exhibit evolutionary adjustment to non - aboriginal plant in hundreds of generations , rather than the thousands posited by Tallamy . In other Scripture , some insects , even so - called specialists , may accommodate to feeding on plant that they have n’t co - evolved with in something approaching a human lifetime .

This latter point is especially important when considering climate change , another ecological crisis — and perhaps the most pressing one — that Shapiro and his supporters believe Tallamy largely ignores . If native plants can not compete in a deepen climate and are displaced by more aggressive or beneficial adapted invasives , then the wildlife associate with them either adapts or dies , Shapiro argues . Invasives are the consequence of climate change , not the grounds of associated plant or animal extinctions .

That debate , though , seems to me to reenforce Tallamy ’s plea for a fresh preservation approaching to gardening , one that gives native species a fighting chance to survive climate change . Leaving large - scale aboriginal plant restoration apart , Tallamy ’s one - garden - at - a - time attack to maintaining the habitat we ’ve constructed , either on purpose or unintentionally , as productive for wildlife as possible , is eminently realizable . Controlling invasives on a backyard basis can be achieve with a little sweat equity . Not planting them at all is even honorable . Placing a non - aboriginal azalea in the yard or allowing a monoculture of autumn olive to overhaul your landscape may support a few dirt ball metal money at certain times of the year , but it ’s a bit like asking a famish person to go on a dieting in the middle of a shortage . A level-headed , balanced landscape is better capable to corroborate a greater motley of species in what is sure to be many thought-provoking ten to make out .

In an extensive Q&A section , Tallamy attempt to deal questions and criticisms of his approach . After read his Holy Writ , my preferred habitat is somewhere out in the squishy center priming coat . seek to return the landscape to a misty prelapsarian Eden is an task that would make Sisyphus despair . So it ’s okay to incorporate some non - native , noninvasive plants into your garden design . My personal preference is to incorporate about 80 % natives into the garden with the residual of the space reserve for exotics . Planting early - flower bulb , for example , is a relatively benignant way to bring in a welcome burst of color to the spring landscape . I have intercourse the structure , superlative , and heady purpleness of Tatarian asters in the late evenfall , so I ’ve mixed them in with native aster and goldenrods , the star of the late season garden .

InNature ’s Best Hope , one of Tallamy ’s aha moment comes when he mention three milkweed butterfly butterflies flitting from milkweed to milkweed along the minute strip of native plants on New York City ’s gamy Line . If these highly specialised insects could find their host plant in the eye of one of the domain ’s most urban configurations , then why not exercise with nature ’s resiliency to create a matrix of living that begins with a lowly backyard ? The Homegrown National Park could comprise windowpane box overlooking Central Park , a stamp stamp prairie in a Milwaukee railyard , or a desert garden in the exurbs of Los Angeles . It ’s a vision — and a challenge — that Tallamy presents the home base gardener , and one well deserving considering .

niggling things add up to big things , but in the end it ’s the little things that may save the world .

References :

“ newfangled view extend a glimmer of hope for declining native bee populations,”Washington Post(2025-05-22 )

“ Meet the Ecologist Who require You to loose the Wild on Your Backyard,”Smithsonianmag.com(April 2020 )

“ Doug Tallamy talk . . . Art Shapiro responds … Million Trees fulfil in the gaps,”milliontrees.me(March 2020 )