D&R Greenway Land Trust has a native plant nursery specializing in plants, shrubs and trees indigenous to New Jersey Native plants in New Jersey are deeply imperiled. Roughly 40% of New Jersey’s indigenous flora is listed as rare, threatened or endangered. Four primary factors are causing the collapse in plant diversity and abundance: development; habitat destruction; the deer overpopulation crisis; and exotic invasive plants.
The Nursery aims to re-establish indigenous plants in their native habitats, by supplying a diverse array of plants to those engaged in stewardship of New Jersey’s remaining wild places. Moreover, the Nursery recognizes that the human landscape needs to function in harmony with the natural landscape. At present, ornamental plantings in residential areas not only deprive wildlife of traditional food sources, they supply much of the exotic plant material that continually invades natural areas.
It is no longer possible to assume that native ecosystems will restore themselves. We envision being at the forefront of a growing recognition that the restoration of local ecosystems is one of the most significant acts one can take to address global environmental imbalances and crises, like global warming and mass extinctions.
According to eminent ecological landscape architect Leslie Jones Sauer, “The subspecies level of biodiversity is the least understood and the most endangered. So to retain these often very localized plants, the restorationist will need a new kind of nursery centered on local diversity.” (The Once and Future Forest: A Guide to Forest Restoration Strategies, p. 62)
While native plants have some limited availability at commercial nurseries, these are often cultivars and come from stock propagated from North Carolina, Tennessee, and other states. The Nursery’s unique focus on provenance will situate it as a nursery embedded in the local community and concerned with the local environment. The vast majority of our plants will be grown from responsibly collected seed and cutting stock from the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain, Princeton Ridge and surrounding region. Indigenous to central New Jersey, our plants are well-adapted for the local ecology. They represent ecotypes and genetic variations specific to the region and thus preserve diversity at the sub-species level.
The following four goals steer the nursery’s propagation efforts:
- Preservation of at-risk species: The Nursery features many species of plants not currently available through other nurseries, or only sparsely available, and not from local ecotypes. Conservative and niche species are especially at-risk in New Jersey because of the scale of habitat destruction and disturbance.
- Replacements for exotic invasives: An important role for the Nursery is propagating native replacements for exotic invasives currently utilized by homeowners and professional landscapers. Education will play a primary role in bringing about this environmentally critical transition.
- Utilitarian plants: Many native plant foods, medicines and craft materials are well-known but have fallen into disuse in the globalized economy. The Nursery will encourage the rediscovery of the promise of these native plants for home gardens, locally-based agriculture, and alternative medicine.
- Plants for wildlife: One of the primary concerns of conservationists witnessing the disappearance of native plant diversity is the fate of wildlife dependent on these traditional food sources. The pipevine swallowtail butterfly, which hosts only on plants of the genus Aristolochia, is an example of the kind of wildlife which is highly vulnerable to the disappearance of particular native plants. Wood thrushes, who feed heavily on the lipid-rich Spicebush drupes just before initiating their long southward migration, are another prime example: the berries of equivalent exotic shrubs which are currently invading the landscape are nutritionally inferior and leave thrushes and other neo-tropical birds vulnerable to starvation and exhaustion during migration.
Native plants comprise the fundamental basis for both above-ground and below-ground ecosystems. Individual species of plants form relationships with soil microorganisms, insects and other animals that are mutually interdependent. These relationships are particular to species and are dependent on the presence of both partners.
Replacement of native plant communities by non-native plants destroys these interdependencies, thus compromising ecosystem processes. Ecosystem processes that are regarded as essential to human survival include: climate regulation; air purification; water purification and cycling; pest regulation; flood mitigation; erosion control; carbon sequestration; and soil nutrient uptake.
Invasive plants replace native plants and simultaneously alter fundamental ecosystem properties. They frequently lack the mutually beneficial associations intrinsic to plants native to a given ecosystem. Deleterious effects of invasive plants include:
- Reducing habitat for federally endangered wildlife which are dependent on native plant communities
- Establishing vast monocultures to the exclusion of whole suites of native plants
- Causing higher rates of soil erosion than displaced native plant communities
- Significantly altering soil chemistry, including pH and nutrient availability
- Altering natural fire regimes
- Reducing carbon sequestration in invaded ecosystems
- Monopolizing scarce water resources and altering hydrological regimes
Ecosystems degraded by invasive plants are less capable of sustaining fundamental ecosystem processes because the relationships intrinsic to that ecosystem have been disrupted by the removal of one or more fundamental components. Restoration of ecosystems is therefore a practice that removes non-native elements, restores appropriate native elements, and thus improves the function of the ecosystem as a whole.
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Updated October 21, 2010
