As environmental awareness grows among the general population, and as the benefits that can come from creating even small-scale wildlife resources grow more apparent, I’m often asked for advice on plants to use for wildlife-friendly landscaping.
It’s a surprisingly complex question, and a meaningful answer depends on a lot of variables. What wildlife are you interested in encouraging? How much effort can you devote to sourcing plant material and maintaining plantings? And perhaps the knottiest question of them all: Where do you stand, philosophically, on the importance of native vegetation?
Regarding this last point, there is no question that native plant species — for our purposes, I mean plants that occurred on the Vineyard before European settlement — offer many advantages. Island natives come pre-evolved for at least a subset of Vineyard soil types and water regimes. And, most importantly, native insects of many kinds co-evolved with our native plants, resulting in countless examples of close and specific associations between plants and bugs.
But Island native plants pose challenges from a practical perspective. For one thing, the supply of truly native stock, descended unmodified from wild-growing, local populations, is limited in both diversity and quantity. Even a broader vision of native — plant species native to southern New England, if not the Vineyard — results in a constrained selection on the commercial market. Many of the best native wildlife plants, deemed weedy or insufficiently showy by commercial growers, simply aren’t available unless you collect seeds and grow your own.
Moreover, many of the most interesting Island native plants are quirky. They may be slow to germinate, or require special conditions to do so. And while they may have evolved to live here, they may still have very stringent habitat requirements if they’re going to flourish.
So for my own wildlife landscaping needs, I’ve somewhat reluctantly discarded a strictly native approach, and have tolerated, and indeed embraced, what plant people sometimes term “near-native” plants: species from the Northeast, or at least Eastern North America, that are adaptable enough to flourish in a range of settings on Martha’s Vineyard.
A good example would be lance-leaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), a rugged, yellow-flowered plant originating in the Southern and Central U.S. Readily available commercially, sometimes in the form of selectively bred cultivars, sometimes in a form close to the original wild type, this broadly adaptable, easily maintained perennial plant offers a host of benefits for wildlife.
My own experience with this plant is illustrative. While coreopsis is a major component in the small meadow that I’ve created in our front yard, the current population established itself from just two individual plants that I put in a flower border many years ago. Those plants seeded themselves into what was at the time a singularly scraggly lawn. And since that time, despite any lack of genetic diversity resulting from such a small founder population, coreopsis has maintained itself with almost no intervention from me.
During its late spring/early summer bloom period, coreopsis is wildly popular with bees, wasps, butterflies, and hoverflies. Most interesting has been the recurring presence of a longhorn bee, Melissodes subillatus: Well-known as a coreopsis specialist, this bee was recorded for the first time on the Vineyard in my yard, and to date, all the Island records I’m aware of come from our scant quarter-acre in Oak Bluffs.
Once flowering is over, coreopsis attracts the attention of seed-eating birds. Most notably, American goldfinches love the stuff, perching on seedheads and bobbing precariously in the wind as they eat their fill.
They miss enough seed, though, so that my plants keep reproducing. While it’s vigorous, drought-resistant, and self-sustaining, coreopsis has two traits that help keep it from being truly invasive in most settings. For one thing, it does not spread by runners or rhizomes, so it doesn’t form dense monocultures. And for another, it does not have extensive basal leaves, which can shade the ground and choke out other plant species. While plentiful, the coreopsis in our yard politely co-exists with many other plant species, both native and nonnative.
I’m in no way denying the unique benefits of truly native plant stock. Especially if your goal is the restoration or maintenance of a good example of a native habitat type, using native species with native genes is the gold standard for how to proceed. And even used sparingly, true natives add unique value to habitat (and still play a major role in our yard).
But in most settings, such as a yard or existing meadow, you’re already dealing with a species mix that includes many near-native or flatly nonnative species. Without extraordinary efforts, you’ll never be able to get rid of them. And from a practical perspective, near-natives often supply resources that all but the most specialized native birds and insects can use.
Context and purpose, then, really matter. A restoration of true native habitat is one thing. But adding wildlife value to a site that already mixes native and exotic species is something else. In that setting, where the goal is more to offer resources than to produce an example of native habitat, near-native plant species can be a useful part of the mix.
