“Tear Out Your Lawn,” with Dr. Doug Tallamy

[This is a computer-generated transcript. While it has been lightly edited, it may include some errors.]

Pauline Bartolone: This is The Secrets of Mastery, a series of conversations with artisans about what it takes to master their craft and what their journey has taught them. I'm Pauline Bartolone, and this is a production of Craftsmanship Magazine, a multimedia publication about artisans and innovators who are creating a world built to last.

Today we're talking with someone who sees the world from a bug's point of view. Dr. Doug Tallamy is an entomologist who's on a personal but far reaching crusade to increase biodiversity on private land. He teaches wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware, and he's also co-founder of an organization called Homegrown National Park, where he's trying to reach millions with a message.

So native plants in your yards, not ornamental, non-natives, in order to restore the natural order of insects and animals that keep our food web strong and help alleviate the climate crisis. He's trying to convince the owners of 44 million acres of lawn across the country to rewild their front and backyards and be part of a movement of conservation on private land.

I interviewed Doug Tallamy about how he's rewild his own land in Pennsylvania and the art of his movement building. I start by asking Doug Tallamy "What's the first step landowners can take to be craftspeople of biodiversity in their own yards?"

Doug Tallamy: Step one is reduce the area of lawn that 44 million acres of lawn is, is literally killing us.

And when you have an area bigger than New England dedicated to this ecological dead scape. It makes it a low hanging fruit. It's something most homeowners do have. Certainly in the east we got a lot of lawn and people don't know why.  It's a status symbol, but we can change status symbols.

Pauline Bartolone: I want to talk to you a little bit more about what you mean by dead scape. Is that your term for a lawn? and what do you mean by 'deadscape?'

Doug Tallamy: Okay. It's a relative dead scape. First of all, you're putting all kinds of insecticides and other things on there to see as few of those things as possible, but compared to what ought to be in that space, it is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the biodiversity that ought to be living there. There are four things every property needs to do. It needs to support the local watershed. It needs to support pollinators, it needs to support the food web by passing on energy that plants capture from the sun and pass it on to other animals and it needs to sequester carbon.

Lawn does none of those things. For example, if you plant an oak tree in your yard instead of a patch of of lawn, that oak tree is doing all four things that your yard needs to do. It's supporting more biodiversity than any other tree genus in the country. Over 950 species of caterpillars depend on oaks across the country.

And caterpillars are the meat and potatoes of terrestrial food webs. So plants that make the most caterpillars are supporting the most life. It has a big root system so that it's managing the watershed well. It's dense and long lives, so that's sequestering lots of carbon. And it even supports pollinators.

That's what I mean by dead scape compared to an oak tree, for example. Lawn is, it's not even measurable.

Pauline Bartolone: I wanna talk to you about biodiversity in native plants. You know, you say one promotes the other. Some people may think of biodiversity and native plants is at odds with each other. Like if you're only planting native plants, you're not bringing in a diverse set of plants.

Can you talk about that? How does one promote the other?

Doug Tallamy: Okay. That's a really good question. Diversity promotes stability and productivity in an ecosystem, but only if the plants that you're bringing into your your yard are interacting with the other living things that are there. And this is where non-native plants fall down.

Plants protect themselves. They really don't wanna be eaten, so they load their tissues with nasty tasting chemicals. And the insects that use plants can only use them if they have the adaptations to get around those defenses. So native insects are really good at getting around the adaptations that native plants have, but they've never seen the defenses of non-native plants.

So, and these are generalizations, but for the most part, our native insects are very poor at using non-native plants. So it's a plant that's there, but it's not contributing ecologically. So therefore it's not really contributing to the diversity. I like to think of them as statues. You can have a diversity of statues in your yard, but it's not part of the living diversity that's running your ecosystem.

Pauline Bartolone:... in terms of the harm of invasive species. If you compare them to people, I know plants aren't people, but people migrate across borders. You know, populations change over time. What's the problem with plants migrating over time?

Doug Tallamy: They don't perform the ecological roles that the native plants perform. Michael Pollan once suggested that we have a statue of limitations on being non-native.

If you're here long enough, all of a sudden you're native. Well, you're native when you act like a native. And, and how do you know? How you act like a native, you go to where that plant is native and see, see what it's contributing. A very good measure is how many species is it supporting? How many species of of insects?

So phragmites, for example, it's a common reed. It's a invasive genotype from Europe. In Europe, it supports 175 species of insects. Well, it has been here for. About 400 years. So after 400 years, it supports five insects here and it supported them the very first year. So in other words, adaptations happens, but really, really slowly.

So that's the problem with non-native plants. And you use the term non-native and invasive as if it was synonymous and it, it's not. So all invasive plants are non-native, but not all non-natives are invasive. So if you plant, for example, a Crape Myrtle throughout the south of the US, or Chameleons or ginkgos.

Ginkgos would be a good example. They're not invasive. They don't move around. They stay where you plant them. For a number of reasons. Yes, they're taking up space where you planting them, but they are not pushing out the native plants that actually do support our food webs, but Pritt and buckthorn and burning bush and, and barberry and calorie and auto olive and porcelain berry and on and on and on and on.

Now occupy many, many, many, many millions of acres in the US monocultures of these things where there are no natives mixing in nicely with them. So you have these non-native plants taking over. Natural areas that are supposed to be supporting our, our food webs. And that's the problem. They're no longer just statues in our yards.

They are in our natural areas. And at least in the east, about a third of the vegetation in most "natural areas" is from Asia not supporting the local food web. So that's why invasive plants are particularly detrimental. And a lot of people think that they are, they're super plants. They deserve to be here.

They're not super plants, it's just that the deer don't like them. Whitetailed deer, we've got overabundance of deer throughout the country and they'll eat the native plants, but not the non-natives. And so of course, what do you end up with? The non-natives?

Pauline Bartolone: So our show is about the art of craftsmanship. Have you done this experiment in your own yard? Created biodiversity? And how did you do it? I'm sure that's a very long answer, but what are some of the basic steps?

Doug Tallamy: It's not as long as you think. Our yard is sizable. We have 10 acres. It was part of a farm that was broken up and the last thing I did was mow it for hay.

So almost no woody plants and very few plants. Period. Most of the plants that actually they were actually mowing were invasive plants from Asia. A whole, whole slew of 'em. So step one was to get rid of them and then replace 'em with the native plants that ought to be in an eastern deciduous forest.

We did that mostly through, it's called Addition by subtraction. We kept getting rid, remove, removing the plants we didn't want, and letting nature put the plants we do want back. And it nature's good at doing that. So, for example, we've got a lot of oak trees and I planted egg corns and that was easy.

But Blue Jays brought in acorns, they can fly a mile from the parent tree and tap that acorn below the soil and they're gonna go get it in the wintertime. But for every four acorns they bear, they only remember where one is. So they're very good at planting oak trees.

They're very good at planting beach trees. All the beaches we have on our properties were planted by blue jays squirrels had planted a lot of things. There was a seed bank. There are native seeds in the soil that can sit there decades, and when they're released you take away the competing plants on top, then they come up.

So now our 10 acres is entirely vegetated with native plants. My measure of how well we're doing in supporting biodiversity is in two ways: the number of breeding birds. Birds that have bread on our property and the number of moth species. Remember maza, the meat and potatoes of local food webs and I have the skillset to be able to count them, which I have been doing for the last seven years and I'm up to 1,268 species of ma I have pictures of.

On our property because we put the plants that they need back and we've recorded 62 species of birds that have bred on our 10 acres because we have the bird food, which is those caterpillars. So that's a measure of how resilient nature is. It's a measure of how successful the homeowner can be.

In terms of rebuilding biodiversity, it's a lot of fun. It empowers us. The earth has some serious issues and a lot of people are upset about that. We've lost 3 billion breeding birds in the US in the last 50 years. We've got global insect decline. We've got serious declines all over the place. But this is something you can do at home and see the the results.

Pauline Bartolone: I wanna talk to you a little bit more about how creating biodiversity may be a craft. Do you see it that way? And is it something that you can master?

Doug Tallamy: Sure. You know, the horticultural trade has been built around. Essentially painting our landscapes with pretty plants.

So it's an art form. And landscape designers and landscape architects go to school to learn how to perform this art. And it doesn't mean you have to be a landscape designer to be able to plant a native plant, but there are gardening skills involved. And just like any craft, you have to learn how to do it.

Pauline Bartolone: It seems like you're kind of mastering two things here. You're trying to bring biodiversity to your own yard, but you're also working to create a movement to create biodiversity. What is the like most important thing or skill or lesson that you've learned while trying to create more biodiversity in your own yard?

Doug Tallamy: I think that the most impressive lesson that I have learned is how easy it is. Just follow the few rules, put the native plants back that belong there and nature will repair itself. Don't try to fight it. Don't try to change the soil type. The local natives that belong where you are, they're already adapted to your soil type.

They're adapted to your rainfall patterns. And I'm not talking about climate change where we're changing everything 'cause that's making it harder. But start with what's adapted to your region and life will return. And it's been enormously entertaining. I mean, this year we got wood frogs for the first time in 23 years.

Like they're wood frogs. They want a forest. Well, we started with a field, so now we have a forest and they're back.

Pauline Bartolone: I wanted to ask you lastly about the historical legacy of this craft, of creating more biodiversity. People might think of it as like a trendy thing in gardening, but is there a historical legacy to that craft?

Doug Tallamy: The native plant movement has been around for a while, but it's interesting. My, my brother-in-law for 35 years, he's run a native plant nursery, and I remember early on. Talking about why, you know, why, why do we have a native plant movement? And I would hear, well, you get a sense of place, it's the right thing to do.

They're easier to maintain. But the native plant movement didn't really know why they were important. So that's the history of it. The fact that it's the native plants that are supporting the rest of life around you. When they, when they heard that, they said, Ooh, okay. Now we really are important.

Of course, the history of our reliance on non-native plants comes from our copying the landscapes in, in aristocracy Europe. You know the big lawn, there was a measure of wealth. Only rich landowners that had enough slaves or enough sheep and could afford to not farm every square into their property had lawns.

So of course, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they brought that over here. But until we invented the lawnmower. It still was out of reach for, for the average guy, but the lawnmower made it, made it possible. Okay, now we don't need sheep or slaves. We can actually maintain this ourselves. And then of course, marketing came into it in the big lawn care industry that says, if you don't have a perfect lawn, you're a communist.

That's what they said in the fifties. And people. People bought into it. You gotta be perfect. So you've gotta put these herbicides on it to kill the clover. You might have a chinch bug in there, so you better load it with insecticides. And it really ecologically, it went downhill very, very quickly.

But it's a entrenched part of our culture. It is a status symbol. And if you don't maintain your property in a socially acceptable, neat way, and lawn is the easiest way to do that, then your neighbors don't like you. You know? Then you get cited and everything else. So that's, that's the history we're fighting here.

And, and I do suggest that we in the native plant movement work hard at making attractive socially acceptable landscapes. And if you do it right, your neighbors won't know. You won't even know that you are using native plants. They don't know a native plant from a non-native plant. They do know neat and pretty. So we can do that.

Pauline Bartolone: Thank you so much, Doug, Tallamy, for speaking with us.

Doug Tallamy: You are welcome.

Pauline Bartolone: Doug. Tallamy is an entomologist with the University of Delaware. Check out his work@homegrownnationalpark.org. That's it for this edition of The Secrets of Mastery Music in the series is from Blue dot Sessions. For more Secrets of Mastery episodes or more stories about craft, check out craftsmanship.net.

That's craftsmanship.net. You can find us on substack too. Thanks for listening.