Have you noticed that growing native plants makes you want to grow more native plants?
Maybe you haven't had success with any other plants, so you start with a black salvia. You water it the first dry season, but it doesn't do much, so you neglect it, but then it flowers and is gorgeous. You don't have a black thumb after all, so you try more natives and discover they're easy to grow. In a few years you're teaching other people about natives. Or you want to replace a lawn with native bunchgrasses and wildflowers. You're sold on the idea, but it takes lots of arguments to persuade your spouse. But once the birds start flocking to your meadow, your spouse is calling you to come look and spends hours taking photos of the birds. And when other people visit, your spouse tells them all about the plants.
Or you plant five different Ceanothus plants. Three of them survive: success! As you pay more attention to your plants, you realize you're also learning about the weather, the soil, the bugs, the birds, architecture, energy, and water conservation. And you're out in the yard so much that you get to know your neighbors.
Or you look closely at your wildflowers and start noticing that tiny bugs like the same flowers you do. Then you learn more about these beneficial insects, and soon you're planting the wildflowers in the vegetable garden, too.
One of the best expositions of the positive feedback loop that's triggered when you start paying attention to plants is in a brilliant new PBS documentary entitled The Botany of Desire. Based on a book by Michael Pollan, it was produced and directed by Michael Schwartz.
Pollan points out that a bee collecting pollen from a plant thinks it's in charge, just as a person planting a garden thinks he's in charge. But the plant is using the bee to carry pollen from one plant to another, and it's using the human to expand its range. To the extent that a plant appeals to people, it will get more copies of itself made and expand its habitat.
Pollan argues that the more you're aware of the symbiotic relationship between plants and people, the less alienated from nature you become and the more you feel yourself a part of the web of life. “Everything we do – what we choose to eat, what flowers we choose to put on our tables, what drugs we choose to take – these are evolutionary votes we're casting every day,” Pollan says.
This exhilarating look at a plant's-eye view of the world focuses on four plants' strategies for getting us to plant more of them, and how they have in turn influenced human culture and consciousness in surprising and revolutionary ways: apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato.
Don't miss it! Tune into Channel 9 (KQED) at 8-10 pm on Wednesday, October 28. The Botany of Desire dvd will also be available next week from ShopPBS.org.
© 2009 Tanya Kucak