Going Native

Fifty two years ago, we celebrated our first Earth Day.   I remember it quite well. I was in 5th Grade, attending The Green Avenue Elementary School in Sayville.  As a ten year old, I was already mostly covered in mud and scratches as I hunted the frogs, turtles, and snakes in the swamps, ponds, creeks and rivers of my town.   Inspired by Earth Day, I remember planting 300 daffodils all around the school, all by myself one Saturday afternoon.  For decades I saw them bloom every spring – until the front lawn of the school became a parking lot.

As I have come to understand lately, losing the daffodils wasn’t necessarily so awful.   I came to know that since daffodils are plants imported from elsewhere, that is non-native, their contribution to the local ecosystem is negligible.   Peel back the onion, and one quickly finds that the bulk of what we have planted in our yards, our estates, our parks and arboretums over the last several hundred years have been non-native, even invasive, and this has had a devastating effect on our local environment.   

You won’t find insect bites on crocuses, or irises, or dandelions, tulips.   Our local insects are adapted to feeding from native plants, in an evolutionary process that takes eons.  We hear how dandelions provide any nourishment to bees, but it is a food of last resort, lacking key nutrients.   Note that garden stores sell ornamental plants imported from alien ecosystems because they won’t attract insects and won’t be fed on.   The running result is there before our eyes if we know to look, and for our ears to hear.   These non-native plants have helped turn our suburban yards into ecological dead zones, lifeless, silent.  95% from elsewhere, generally. 


Do You Know What Is Growing In Your Yard?

The typical suburban yard is a mishmash of trees, plants, flowers, and shrubs from every corner of the globe, some planted intentionally, some run wild as invasive species. We see the highly invasive callery or bradford pear being planted in our yards and most frustratingly along our streets.  Japanese Maple, arbor vitae, Norway Maple, Privet, English Ivy, are all familiar features of our lifeless properties.   Then there is the lawn itself.  Nothing native here.  Any inspection of our lawns today reveals anything but native grasses.  There’s chickweed, clover, hairy bittercress, purple dead nettle, zoysia, and ultimately an entire UN of weeds.   It is astonishing what you start to find in your yard with, say, the right iPhone app.  I like Picturethis!  The technology here keeps getting better, and what it reveals is just how much local nature is being overwhelmed.

I can hardly say I am any sort of expert in plants.   It is a recent passion despite my years working as an environmentalist.   To be honest, it took the pandemic.  It took my being basically confined to my .44 acre yard at the house I grew up in to really learn to stop and learn, to come to a new understanding of Nature.    From 2012 until March 2020, I was with Save The Great South Bay – a Co-Founder, and then for seven years its Executive Director.   What I came gradually to see was that the problems of The Great South Bay were mostly symptoms of a sick mainland.   We needed therefore to improve the water quality of what was flowing into the bay if we were to have any hope of healing that bay, or any bay.  That meant habitat restoration in the estuary itself, in the watershed that fed the bay.   We established in response The Bay Friendly Yards program, and The Creek Defender Program, emphasizing in each case what each of us in our own communities in our own yards can do to rebuild local nature.

When in March 2020 the world shut down, I elected to put down over 3000 native plants in the yard of the house I grew up in here in Sayville. As fate would have it, I had been brought home with the responsibility of restoring the house, an old Victorian whose .44 acres was about 5% native plants, and overrun with invasive ones.   There were several large Norway Maples.  Most maples on Long Island are of this type.  They were brought in to replace the elms that were decimated by Dutch Elm Disease.  They grow quickly, but their wood is soft as a result.   In a good storm, their fallen limbs contribute to a number of downed power lines in LI.  They don’t belong here, and it shows.   And again, as they are non-native, they are a poor food source for our local animals.  A red maple, a silver maple, a sugar maple?   They are a completely different story.  So the Norway Maples went.  And the 150 feet of privet, and the 200 feet of 15 foot yews.   

The more I learned what was in my yard and what was growing here, the more it became a fight for every square inch of it.  Much of the issues in the yard were self-inflicted over the years.   Around the time that I was filling the flower beds of Green Avenue with daffodil bulbs, I was also putting in zoysia plugs all over my yard.  I remember the racks of them arriving!   Now zoysia is fairly pervasive in my neighborhood.  It is like the bamboo of grass.  It is a tough, fibrous monoculture, asian in origin, and therefore of little use for local wildlife.  

Zoysia is favored for tee boxes and putting greens.  And it is as lifeless as a plastic doormat.   Trust me, there are no native insects that would find zoysia at all appetizing.  It takes millions of years for an insect to evolve to the point where it can get past the plant’s natural defenses to feed on them.   So with the spread and the continued promotion of this invasive grass, we continue to shrink what little habitat we have left, and that has to include our own yards.  Fifty years on, I can attest to how lifeless this part of the property has become.  Even the dandelions have a tough time fighting through, which may be the point.  

Then there were all the various bulbs, vines, bushes, grasses, flowers and trees that come ultimately from every continent – escapees from various gardens.  Each invasive has its own history.  Some came with the Dutch with their flowers and their cattle grasses, and yes, the dandelion too, accidentally or intentionally.  WIth the English came all the pretension to English gentry life – the lawn, the privet, the ivy.   The problem is, all three are invasive.  European lawn grass has displaced native grass.  

An English Invasion

Privet now sprouts up in our woodlands, disrupting ecosystems, even hundreds of miles from where a particular bird ate that particular seed.  The same with English Ivy.  Millions of trees are being strangled by these alien vines.  They have no native enemy, no insect biologically capable of digesting them.   I learned, reading from the work of Douglas Tallamy in particular, then witnessing with my own eyes in my increasingly native yard how Insects have very particular niches, specific plants they evolved over eons to eat from.   If that plant is not here, then the insects that feed off it are gone too, and so up the food chain.    

Year by year, the lifeless moonscapes spread, local habitat shrinks, the skies and our yards grow quieter.   Bays turning over, ecosystems in collapse.   We know how to draw the trend lines and where they lead us.   We have lost 45% of our insects since 1974 (E.O. Wilson), and not coincidentally 1% of our songbirds each year since 1964.  And all that is part of what has been termed The Holocene Extinction, the sixth great extinction in Earth’s history, where over a million species will go extinct.   

Indeed, as Long Islanders, we have been seeing this play out in real time, and it is not at all a gradual process.   The algal blooms for instance grow exponentially, and Long Island has some world record blooms of various sorts regularly.  More generally, there is often a cascade effect.  A key species is decimated, and there’s a collapse.   An example close to home: An extensive long lasting brown tide of 1985 blocked sunlight and caused much of the eel grass in The Great South Bay to die so that clam harvests plummeted over 90% and over 6000 baymen lost their jobs one year to the next, with the bay yet to recover.   

Leading The World In Harmful Algal Blooms


But what was fueling the brown tides?  Or the rust tides in Peconic Bay?  Mahogany tides, red tides?  Long Island was breaking records while becoming hot spots for new harmful algal blooms.  All these blooms are feeding off excess nutrients coming from the mainland – septic systems, runoff, fertilizers.   How does one combat this?  How does one do this in what is in fact one of the most densely populated places on the planet?   Long Island, if it were its own country, would be the 4th most densely populated country on earth.   Yet 74% of Suffolk (1.5 million people) are on cesspools.  We happen to live on top of our drinking water, left by the glacier 11,000 years ago as it melted and retreated, leaving all this sand that we now live on.   We’ve  560,000 (and counting) cesspools that are leaching nitrogen into the ground, which then shows up as surface water in our ponds and streams and creeks and rivers.  As a result, each year nitrogen levels in our drinking water continue to climb.  These heightened nitrogen levels have in turn been correlated with cancer.

So what can we do to reverse locally what is a global catastrophe, with wildlife from soil bacteria to marine mammals all dwindling in numbers?   The Long Island Conservancy champions local stewardship.   What if every community made habitat restoration a value?  What if the towns and villages that make up Nassau and Suffolk County selected native only trees for their streets and parks?   What if homeowners could shift from a 50’s vintage approach to yard care and came to embrace nature instead?

What happened to me in my yard during two years of lockdown was transformative.   I was suffering, it seems, from a very common ailment – Plant blindness.   Despite years of championing the importance of native habitat in our yards and along our creeks as a means of improving water quality, I really had no idea what I was looking at.   So when the truck arrived and unloaded June 21, 2020, I had to learn each plant – Purple Cone Flower, Blazing Star, Sensitive Fern, Red Bud, Scarlet Oak, Winterberry, Red Chokeberry, Little Blue Stem, Seaside Goldenrod, Pitch Pine, Beech, Beach Plum, White Bone Set, Compact Inkberry, Blue Lobelia, Black Willow, Bayberry, Butterfly Milkweed – about 40 varieties in all.   An ancient blacktop driveway became a meadow for 50 monarch butterflies within a year.   5 times a day I venture  out into my yard, and every time I see something new.  

Like many, I spent these two years learning how to be still and observe.   That we are now experiencing an explosion of interest in native plants is no coincidence.  We have been seeking our solace in Nature, and really experiencing it for the first time.  Here at least was a place of quiet, beauty, and repose.  Our yards!

We Need To Go Native


The Long Island Conservancy was born out of this yearning to return Nature to our island.  For those with long memories, we have witnessed a devastating decline.   What the island was in the 60’s though, pales in comparison to what was here before, and what was before that, before 99% of the Hempstead plains became farms and then tract housing, before the island’s quadrupling of its population Post WWII.  Our mission is to put back what would be there if we weren’t, to plant the right plant in the right place so that we can rebuild habitat everywhere we can.  The oaks and scrub pines of The Pine Barrens grow well in a sandy patch in my yard.  The bioswale, which takes up street runoff, is lined with hundreds of pollinating plants,mitigating flooding, and drawing in the local birds.

Once you start to see what is in fact growing around us that shouldn’t be, you can’t unsee it.   There is bamboo and japanese knotweed and oriental bittersweet inundating Sayville’s Main Street.  Foster Marina Park, eight acres on the water, has been of particular concern.   At least ten truckloads of invasive plants have been removed so far, and very much thanks to the collective efforts of the community. 

The problems that Sayville faces, that each community faces, will take everyone’s involvement over a decades.   It will require a change of mindset, an overcoming of plant blindness, and will be fueled by the passion that Nature herself inspires in us.  

With Sayville Goes Native! On April 23rd, we are galvanizing the whole community, teaching people about the importance of native plants, and selling them as well.   Every community needs to adopt a spirit of local stewardship.   Given how little open space we have left for wildlife, it is imperative that we create habitat everywhere we can if our fellow creatures have a future here, if we do.  

This is not about Earth Day, or Earth Week for that matter.   We need a change in awareness, a reconnection with Nature and with Beauty.  In the process, we can then learn to reconnect with each other. 

Marshall Brown

Executive Director

Long Island Conservancy

1 comment

  1. Wonderful post. Thank you. Do you know how I can get rid of Zoysa grass? It’s been trying to take over my backyard. I’d prefer clover and native flowers over that stuff.

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