Right.

Um, but polite visitors from afar.

Okay, this spring I've been doing a lot of speaking about the book, um, at bookstores and with garden clubs, and, you know, a couple weeks ago peonies were in bloom in New York and New Jersey where I was speaking, and people, people wanted to know if they could keep their peonies.

And the answer is, yes, you can keep your peonies, you know, provided you've got...

You're working toward, and in making a new garden, that's an important thing to bear in mind, provided you're working towards 70% native.

If you wanna keep peonies, um, if you wanna keep...

You know, I'd like to say roses, and people bring up roses, and I would say if you can sustain them without the addition of a lot of fertilizer and certainly without, uh, pesticides, then yes, those polite non-natives can find a place in your garden.

You know? And then I thought, "Wow, what if I were just starting a whole landscape right now?" [laughs]

Yep.

So, so the first thing is not to introduce those plants that are taking over landscapes and displacing native plants, um, right? And then the second thing is when you find them on your property, you know, invasive plants are noxious plants.

They are doing damage to the ecosystem, so it's good to work on their removal.

But I will say that's another pain point, and that's a pain point for me.

Right now I'm working with a two-acre garden that is new to me.

In, in the book I talk a lot about my main garden, and I actually had exactly the same problems there.

I've moved to Western Massachusetts, uh, and I am dealing with bittersweet and goutweed and lily of the valley and burning bush and honeysuckle.

Yeah

Yeah, I think one of the other things I noticed in the book, I think, was they also take into account like its functional use in the environment and whether it's like supporting things in that area, essentially.

But I think that gets to the question of so so the general prescription and it varies and it varies from I'll tell you, 50 to 100 percent.

But there is kind of a conventional wisdom that if you plant 70 percent locally native plants in your garden, and if you get rid of the invasive plants from elsewhere in your garden, then you're really doing sufficient work to support local wildlife populations, right? And as I said, some people think that number can be as low as 50 and some people feel very strongly that it should be 100% and that it also should be local ecotypes, meaning plants that have originated in your area as opposed to being the same species mail ordered from three states away.

So there's that.

And then once you've got that established, if you look at, well, what's the next thing I can bring in to my area? then maybe you're looking at near native plants.

And that gets to a lot of those really functionally useful plants in the garden.

So is it a garden that feeds many generalist species? Or is it a garden that provides fantastic shelter, berries for overwintering plants? Do animals love to eat the leaves or make cocoons out of them? So you can look next at those near native plants that support generalist species.

There's a lot of different ways to kind of approach those rehabs and you don't have to bite it all off at once.