|
native alternatives for flowers, shrubs, and trees which are equally as attractive Thanks for using plural here. Nothing really wrong with the article, but the focus on single plants is a bit misguided when it comes to biodiversity (and this isn't the only article like that), because it can lead to greenwashing-like 'look I planted X in my lawn and it's good for this amazing number of species so now I'm doing a good thing for nature'. In reality the worst case is that it is actually a netto negative outcome (bit far fetched, but not impossible, via principles like: insects attracted to your plant instead of another one closeby, your plant in its environment offers zero protection from predation because it's completely out in the open vast wasteland a lot of lawns are; or: insect finds hostplant X, lays eggs, in winter you decide to cut the plant 'becomes in cmes back anyway' and the eggs are lost) and best case it is positive; but it could be a lot more positive if instead of just the plant, you have a healthy ecosystem because biodiversity (and that's not just plants and the flying/crawling things one can see, also the nocturnal creatures, the soil life, etc) thrives on that, not individual species. Just like a collection of trees isn't necessarily a forest ecosystem, a bunch of flowering grassland plants isn't necessarily a proper meadow-like ecosystem. How to get that is unfortunately too much to explain in detail here, but a simplified system for a lawn for instance starts with not mowing the whole thing every x weeks. Instead do cut the paths you need and treat the rest as patchwork where each patch has a different age like 1 month not mown, 2 months, etc. There's even no need to manually plant things, the native ones will come automatically. |