Some plants are just a little too weird

 Echium

Gardeners can’t help their obsessions with strange-looking plants. And usually, with the hard-core gardeners that I know, the weirder the better. But new research suggests that these far-flung oddities do not benefit much in the environment. Doug Tallamy, professor entomology at University of Delaware, and his student Karin Burghardt, conducted a three-year study to see how herbivores responded to planted yards full of either exotic or native plants. Not surprisingly, there was not as much insect diversity found on the exotic plants as compared to native plantings. They further found out that there were even less species on exotic plants that did not have a close native relative. For example, exotic Norway maples are kin to our native red maples, and shared nearly similar insect diversity. While the far flung exotics that had no close native relative supported little life. Burghardt noted that “If you think about it, you're driving around the suburban environment, and every time a new development goes in, you have a lot of decision making happening as to what plant species are going to be planted around those properties. If we do all that landscaping with non-native plants, are we limiting the wildlife and conservation support system that could be available within that given plot of land? What the gardens we constructed for the study are trying to replicate are landscaping decisions that people might make if they wanted to support native insect communities that in turn support much of the diversity around us.” Their paper was published in the October 2015 issue of Ecology Letters.

Conserving Vacant Lots in Detroit for Stormwater Control

One of the more impressive ideas for reusing vacant land in downtown Detroit is to create gardens for stormwater control. An article in the Detroit News by writer Kim Kozlowski (December 14, 2015) states that the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and the Detroit Landbank Authority have partnered to utilize a few  open lots for rain gardens. Rain gardens store water temporarily before releasing it to city stormwater systems. And this is important in cities like Detroit that have had problems with overloaded storm systems that can dump urban water, and raw sewage, directly into the Rouge River. In 2014, polluted urban runoff from Detroit and its surrounding areas created undrinkable water supplies for parts of Michigan and Ohio. Joan Nassauer, professor of landscape architecture at University of Michigan, is leading the project’s effort to slow the urban runoff. Nassauer states in the article, “If during a storm we can keep much more water here just below the ground, that reduces the pressure on a city’s system and so there won’t be a big untreatable amount of water that comes into the system” (Article available from the Detroit News online at http://detnews.com/)