An Earth Day Call To Conserve Native Plants in American Cities

Before the High Line opened in New York City in 2009, the unsightly remnants of a long-abandoned elevated railroad spur were part of everyday Manhattan life. Now, thanks to the work of local organizations who pressured city officials, it’s a stunning public park, a rare greenway among high-rise buildings and even a conservation area for the city’s native plants. The transformation of a former eyesore into an iconic urban landscaping feat and one of the world’s most Instagrammed locations is a good conversation starter about the wide array of benefits—environmental, fiscal, mental and physical—of conserving America’s beautiful native plants in the places many of us actually live.

U.S. cities need more abundant and more attractive green spaces populated with native plants and protected from invasive plants. That means paying attention to the latest local success stories and avoiding more heavy-handed pushes to plant harmful non-native species.

Benefits of Native Plants

Although the High Line doesn’t exclusively feature native plants, its prominent displays exemplify the benefits of using indigenous plant species in urban landscape design. And New York isn’t alone: American city and town dwellers from coast to coast are increasingly enjoying the perks of American flora in public landscaping projects.

Struggling with the high maintenance costs and lackluster aesthetic of non-native Bermuda grass planted in highway medians, the city of Nacogdoches, Texas, re-landscaped with indigenous seeds, cultivating a highway of blooms that elicited awestruck attention from the public and provided much-needed food for local pollinators.

Planting native flora along our highways is one way to use preexisting policy tools to beautify our communities, conserve at-risk American flowers and pollinators (such as milkweed, native butterflies and native bees) and significantly reduce taxpayer expenditures on public landscaping maintenance. The numbers speak for themselves: Native landscape maintenance costs a mere fifth of what conventional landscape maintenance costs. Landscaping a native prairie garden costs 56% less than landscaping traditional turf. Planting native flowers along highway medians costs an estimated $10,000 annually per mile, compared with the $200,000 price tag of simply installing unsightly asphalt medians. With cities struggling to balance their books, planting native could marginally ease local public expenditures.

And the benefits extend well beyond fiscal savings. Globeville, a neighborhood in north Denver, successfully redeveloped a former brownfield site into a green space with native grasses and wildflowers, helping improve the community’s overall health. Platte Farm Open Space brought new, gorgeous walking trails, native pollinator gardens, a water management pond and a playground to the working-class neighborhood.

Native-planted green spaces are a relatively easy and affordable way to provide greater opportunities for residents to get outside, exercise and connect with nature and each other. The benefits can potentially enhance cognitive function, reduce anxiety and depression, improve overall mental health, reduce chronic illness and obesity and even reduce instances of violent crime through greater community engagement and education. It’s a way for cities to hedge against the erosion of the “third place” (a communal space that’s neither home nor work) by building new—and better maintaining current—green spaces with native gardens.

Then there’s the fact that native wildflower gardens infiltrate storm water at 7.5 inches per hour, in contrast to conventional grass landscaping, which does so at a mere 0.29 inches per hour. Flooding is a top natural disaster threat to communities across America, and native plants can deliver greater flood water management and better water and soil quality in a cost-effective and sustainable way. People also enjoy living in an environment that isn’t regularly sprayed with the toxic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides routinely used or even required on conventional landscaping with non-native plants. Instead, native-planted gardens provide a true habitat for America’s birds, beneficial insects and other wildlife, which act as natural pest control.

The more American cities can sync their urban landscape designs with flora native to their localities, the more aesthetically pleasing and unique our cities will become—and the happier their people will be. That means overcoming what’s still mostly a monoculture of manicured non-native lawns, bland highway shoulders and cookie-cutter plant selections driven by top-down planning that have eroded our communities’ biodiversity. Indeed, 40 million acres of American land are grass lawns, which fail to enhance local ecosystems and drain our resources.

Federal Failures

That’s why the words of Elinor Ostrom now ring truer than ever. A Nobel Prize-winning economist for her analysis of the commons, Ostrom pioneered the understanding that local control and engagement is fundamental for successful natural resource management. The same holds true for American cities conserving their native plants.

There are plenty of reasons for localities to be wary of top-down solutions. The federal government has a long and sordid history of introducing invasive plant species and incentivizing or directly planting them across the country.

Although the invasive Tree of Heaven, native to Asia, was originally brought to the East Coast for commercial use as an ornamental tree and, later, to the West Coast by Chinese immigrants, government officials subsequently supported its use for afforestation purposes, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) distributing its seeds in the early 1900s. Its reach now spans from North America down to Argentina, and it’s the host plant of the invasive spotted lanternfly.

Similarly, in grappling with the Dust Bowl, Franklin Roosevelt’s newly founded Soil Conservation Service, now the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the USDA, grew 70 million seedlings of kudzu from the 1930s through the 1950s and paid farmers $8 per acre to plant the invasive vine that strangles local flora to control soil erosion throughout the South. It’s even permeated American culture, exemplified in James Dickey’s 1963 poem in The New Yorker.

Several decades ago, also in the name of soil erosion control, the federal government planted Russian olive and salt cedar plants across Colorado. These invasive plants have directly increased the state’s wildfire risk. There are a plethora of similar examples, including the proliferation of the Bradford pear tree, a specimen now wildly invasive that was originally brought from Asia to the U.S. by USDA plant explorers.

The cost has been dire, both in economic and environmental terms. Invasive species overall—whether introduced by the government or otherwise—are estimated to cost the U.S. economy $21 billion annually and have decimated local ecosystems by threatening native vegetation, contributing to drought and heightening wildfire risk. For Hawaiians, the failure is palpable: The federal government recently seeded invasive grasses to prevent soil erosion in the aftermath of Maui’s devastating wildfires. But those fires were originally fueled in large part by such invasive grasses. It’s a toxic cycle.

The commons don’t have to be this tragic. This Earth Day, encourage America’s cities to avoid the top-down mistakes of the past and maintain local control and responsibility over urban landscaping. Each city should flourish with the native species it knows best. Who knows? Maybe that native garden space could even become a global tourism attraction.