Bringing Nature Home: What You Can Do
Posted in Adult Education, Learning Experiences, People, Wildlife on February 9 2012, by Joyce Newman
Meet Doug Tallamy, an expert on the importance of native plants in our landscape and how to care for them — Thursday, February 16, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Doug Tallamy knows how important a diverse native plant community is for other living creatures, especially insects. He has devoted much of his career to understanding the many ways insects interact with plants, creating essential food webs without which our ecosystems would fail.
His award-winning book and website, Bringing Nature Home, is a call to action for gardeners across the country to use native plants to sustain wildlife, promote biodiversity, and protect our ecosystems.
In his book, Tallamy recounts his own “epiphany” when his family moved to 10 acres in southeastern Pennsylvania, an area “farmed for centuries before being subdivided and sold.” He discovered that “at least 35% of the vegetation on our property consisted of aggressive plant species from other continents that were rapidly replacing what native plants we did have.” And he noticed something else: the alien plants on the property, such as the Norway maples and the mile-a-minute weeds, had “very little or no leaf damage from insects.”