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Planting Ideas

A striking new book lays a path to saving the planet, one garden at a time

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COURTESY OF DK PUBLISHING Paphiopedilum insigne is in the orchid family, which contains some of the most highly specialized and complex adaptations of all flowering plants. It also includes species threatened with extinction.

DOES THE FATE of our environment rely on the practices of home gardeners? When I hear about frog populations decimated by herbicides and stream water polluted by chemical runoff, I wonder. Shouldn't gardeners, of all people, know better?

A gorgeous new book is a call to look at the role gardeners play in the health of the world, no less. The somewhat unfortunately titled "Plant," a big, colorful book edited by Janet Marinelli (DK Publishing, $50), encourages gardeners to foster biodiversity. Lest this sound too scientific, it's stuffed full of wondrous facts and photos, written by eminent botanists whose words ring out passionately in defense of the green world. Not even the most complete plant encyclopedias better illustrate the astounding richness and complexity of plant life covering the earth. The diversity, from abundant rainforests to cycads suspected of being able to alter their sex in order to reproduce, is awe-inspiring. Also disconcerting, when you learn that human-driven destruction of the planet's vegetation is global, not confined to certain areas or species. We appear to be equal-opportunity destroyers.

"There isn't much we can do in our daily lives to save creatures like large mammals," writes Marinelli, "but the good news is that as gardeners, we can play a very personal and important role in the survival of plants." If things continue as they are going, two-thirds of all plant species could disappear by the end of this century. Conifers, orchids, cacti — all include species threatened with extinction. When any plant vanishes, also lost are an unfathomable number of interactions with the insects, birds and animals that evolved with it, impoverishing all that's left behind.

Now In Bloom

Japanese tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) are elegant shrubs with dissected foliage and huge, fragrant blossoms like crinkled tissue paper. Much larger than herbaceous peonies, reaching 4 to 5 feet high and wide, they bloom for several weeks in spring and are long-lived, but resent transplanting. 'Kinkaku,' or 'Golden Temple of Nara' has yellow blossoms edged in orange; 'Renkaku,' or 'Flight of Cranes,' is brilliant white with a yellow center.

ILLUSTRATED BY SUSAN JOUFLAS

Marinelli sees the domestic garden as sanctuary, believing that every gardener has the potential to influence this threatened mass extinction. When we buy wild collected plants, or foster potential invasives in our gardens, we contribute to the problem. When we plant native hedgerows or shun chemicals, we're part of the solution. As the wild areas of the earth shrink, our home gardens grow in importance. It is in this network that the rich variety of plant life will flourish, from orchids to heirloom tomatoes. Already, gardens are the last refuge of a number of plants extinct in the wild, such as the chocolate cosmos and Tulipa sprengeri, both of which survive only in cultivation.

While tidy, traditional gardens interact only in a limited way with each other and the surrounding landscape, gardens designed with ecological principles in mind change that model. Integrated pest management (using the least toxic solution first), wildlife-friendly plantings and organic solutions can restore the ecology of a suburban or city block.

Chapters on various kinds of plants and habitats make up the bulk of the book. Read about carnivorous plants and puzzle over evolution — how did plants ever end up like this? The lengthy section on invasives was written by Dr. Sarah Reichard from the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture. She describes hundreds of escaped plants wreaking havoc on ecosystems, including all-too-familiar Vinca major and Verbena bonariensis. You understand the full enormity of the concept of weeds after reading what Reichard so knowledgeably reports.

Marinelli powerfully articulates the idea that we're on the threshold of a deeper, more coherent kind of ecological gardening. She wants gardeners to create plant communities, not just pretty arrangements of plants. "As the number of such gardens grows," Marinelli writes, "they form a network of corridors crossing ecosystems and continents, connecting fragmented nature reserves to allow wildlife to move freely and seeds to disperse." This book is uniquely impressive because it gathers the worlds of botany, conservation and ecosystem science, wraps them up in fabulous photographs, and translates it all into a timely message.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.