The Biodiversity Imperitive

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ~John Muir

When we first looked at our house in Owen Sound, one of its appeals was a beautiful green view from the kitchen window. There is a small back lawn and then a steep hill covered in lovely green plants. Most of which, it turned out, were goutweed.
Formally known as Aegopodium podagraria , this groundcover spreads enthusiastically, both by seeds and by underground tentacles called rhizomes. Every gardener reading this will be groaning by now, recognizing the unending battle we have had to introduce any other plant to the yard. We have long since ceded the victory to the goutweed.

In our backyard, this is nothing more than a cosmetic issue, and to my eyes the view is still a beautiful mish-mash of green. But aggressive, invasive plant species and monocultures can be far more of a problem in other settings.

Purple loosestrife, officially known as lythrum salicaria, was introduced to North America as a garden plant by early settlers and came over in muddy ballast water in sailing ships. With upwards of two million seeds per plant, it cheerfully spread far and wide. You've seen it as you drive along by the edges of wetlands – three to six feet tall with spikes of dense pink-purple flowers. But the next year when you drove by, you may have noticed that there was no wetland – only a huge patch of purple loosestrife.
Gone are the cattails that bound heavy metals and took them out of the environment . And the two or three hundred or more other species of plants, insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and even mammals who used to inhabit the wetland?
Moved on. Or...didn't.

In Saugeen Shores this spring, town council made the very difficult decision to use a selective herbicide on parts of the shoreline to control a plant with the harmless sounding name “Common Reed”. Its technical name is phragmite (pronounced
“frag-mighty”) australis , and it too was introduced from Europe. Along the Great Lakes' shores it has spread more in the past few years with lower lake levels and warmer temperatures, and its toxic roots and shed foliage have eliminated many other species and devasted a delicate shoreline ecology.

For many of us, our presence in Canada is the result of a lack of biodiversity in our great-great-grandparents' native Ireland. The potato blight that caused a famine infected both of the varieties of Irish potatoes. With no resistant varieties to plant, the disease destroyed virtually the whole crop for successive seasons. The resulting starvation, disease and migration changed the face of Ireland for well over a century.
We don't seem to have learned from this habit of monoculture. The taste of bananas may soon be a memory for most human beings as the most widely cultivated variety, Cavendish, becomes susceptible to devastating diseases. 90% of the pesticides used to control them is lost to wind drift, ending up in soil and water. The high use of chemical pesticides on our own apples and corn is partly due to our insistence on popular varieties like MacIntosh and Peaches and Cream.

So here are a few things you can do. First, back to our purple loosestrife. If you see it, remove it and put it in a plastic bag in the garbage, or report it. There are a number of cultivars with pleasant sounding names like Rosy Glow, Gypsy Blood and Happy. They are supposed to be sterile, but when pollinated with naturalized species, they have been known to produce seeds that escape the garden – becoming what some local gardeners call “evasive” species. Ask your nursery not to stock these cultivars and plant alternatives like Lupines or Butterfly Bush.

Look for native species and heritage seeds and plants for the garden and try an old variety of apple or pear or corn at the market.

Read local books or join groups like the field naturalists to learn more about the flora and fauna you live with in Grey and Bruce. Take guided hikes and participate in projects to protect habitat and species, like our recent piping plover families.

It isn't the piping plovers or us. Or beautiful gardens versus chaos. It's finding our place in the ecosystem in which we live. The David Suzuki Foundation puts it succinctly - “the interdependence among organisms and their environments creates and sustains the conditions needed for survival by all living creatures.” In the big picture – our very existence is at stake.

Posted by AnneFS