Tallamy - let your yard go wild! [smithsonianmag.com]
Soooo important! Tallamy has quite a few interviews and lectures available on YouTube. Well worth watching. I listened to the entire audiobook version of his earlier book, "Bringing Nature Home," just a couple months ago, and it was eye opening to say the least. Fully 30% of all vegitation in the U.S. is not native to where it is growing. Only a couple of percent roughly of all U.S. land surface is still in wild state; the rest has been significantly altered. Insects, the food web foundation for all animals above them, including us, are incredibly dependent on very specific plant species, that they evolved with, for survival and are in deep trouble. His central premise: That trying to preserve wilderness "somewhere else" away from our homes is already a failed quest, because we have claimed nearly all the land for our purposes already. The only option for stopping mass species extinctions currently happening is to return to planting native plants right where we are. We have to stop poisoning everything and stop worshipping the "almighty" manicured lawn. It is literally destroying our ecosystem. Most exciting is seeing how planting native actually makes gardening easier.🥰
@Allamanda agreed. I think perennial food crops are hopeful. Most are fruit. Muskadines(sp?) and pawpaw trees and dewberries are all native and perennial.
That would cause my HOA to clutch their pearls.