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Back-to-natives gardening doesn't require a lush suburban spread; tiny Edens can sprout within the biggest cities. Ten years ago, video producer Jack Schmidling began constructing a woodland, a prairie and a wetland in the small backyard of his Chicago bungalow. Now his miniature ecosystems attract a wealth of winged wildlife, from birds to butterflies. While Schmidling is delighted, some of his neighbors are not. Although the enclave is concealed behind a high fence, they have reported him to the city, charging that his secret garden is an overgrown mess.
In places with fewer neighbors and more space, nativescapers can be more adventurous. Marti Springer of Tallahassee, Florida, surrounded her home with native plants and planted parsley as a special caterpillar food. She asked the county not to spray her bog for mosquitoes because they are eaten by bats. Now she is planning to set up a bat house. "Bats should just love it here," she predicts.
The goal is not always to create a wildlife refuge. Many gardeners just want a landscape that is easy and inexpensive to maintain and not particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. Barbara Humberger of Austin began going native in 1989 after an unusual cold spell killed many of the nonnative shrubs that surrounded her lakeside home. Her property shimmers with blackfoot daisies that bloom from early spring until the first fall frost. UCLA neurologist Andrew Charles wanted an attractive but drought-resistant cover for the steep hillside behind his house. His solution was to plant deep-rooted California lilacs punctuated by the orchid-like blossoms of sticky monkey flowers.
Because native plants are well adapted to the regions in which they grow, they require little in the way of care. They seldom, if ever, need watering, and they tolerate insect pests as well as extremes of heat and cold. They are, for the most part, resistant to disease, and will flourish without chemical fertilizer. By contrast, says John Dromgoole, who runs the Garden-Ville nursery in Austin, "poorly adapted plants put gardeners on a chemical treadmill, a treadmill we're trying to help them get off." Dromgoole, host of a popular radio and TV garden show, tells his audiences to get rid of Kentucky bluegrass and seed their lawns with buffalo grass, a robust short-stemmed native needing only occasional mowing. Instead of finicky azaleas, Dromgoole recommends lantana, an attractive flowering shrub that, in central Texas at least, thrives on benign neglect.
As gardens become extensions of the natural world, the gardeners who tend them inevitably see themselves as caretakers of a precious and endangered heritage. "In the U.S.," estimates Donald Falk, director of the Center for Plant Conservation in St. Louis, Missouri, "we have around 20,000 kinds of native plants. And 1 of every 5 is presently in trouble." Midwestern gardeners affiliated with the Nature Conservancy have started to grow some of the rarer species of prairie plants, incorporating them into their flower borders and carefully harvesting their seeds for replanting elsewhere. Other nativescapers play the role of modern Johnny Appleseeds. Andrew Charles admits that he has been sprinkling the seeds of California wildflowers ever more widely, "even on land we ourselves don't own."