Photo Credit: Tom Stovall and William B. Folsom
When patrons walk into our parks, we want them to have a great experience. As a result, we’re rightly focused on facilities—pools, pavilions, campgrounds, ball fields, and interpretive centers. Yet it’s often the landscape and geographic setting that will lure the first-time visitor. A tree-lined drive, river frontage, or inviting trailheads are subtle but effective marketing tools that are rarely recognized. We can build on these assets by using more native plants in the landscape. Over the past 25 years, resurgence in the use of native plants has provided real aesthetic, ecological, and economic value. But there’s much work to be done as native plants are frequently still seen as only a niche pursuit. In reality, these plants are what connect parks to the greater surrounding landscape. Whether you’re operating a park in sub-tropical Florida, the upper Midwest, coastal California, or cool New England, native flora illustrates how unique a location really is.
Trade Exotic For Ecological Integrity
We’ve all seen it—a uniform row of colorful shrubs or tidy conifers lining a path or road into a park. This is the 1970s landscape—neat, supposedly low-maintenance, easy to grow, and ecologically barren. A few years later, native plants decline, bird diversity dips, and the maintenance crew starts removing invasive species instead of focusing on other necessary projects. This is the result of using multiple ornamental trees, shrubs, and perennials, often described as good “performers,” but in reality tomorrow’s invasive weeds. Recent studies have shown these plants attract little wildlife when compared to native species. As stewards of open space, we must strive for an improved standard and promote a park’s true ecological and aesthetic potential.
A sense of place is something most people find keenly appealing. It embodies where we live and recreate, how things smell, feel, and look outside. When we consider a sense of place and the role of native plants in parks, we’re promoting local ecology or ecoregions. Scientifically, ecoregions combine plants, topography, and climate to define a distinctive place. Think the Adirondacks, the Everglades, the Sonoran Desert, the Ozark Mountains, or the Great Lakes forests. These are all ecoregions; a park is located in each one. Currently, there are 115 major ecoregions in North America. Embracing your ecoregion fosters a sense of place that makes a park truly unique to visitors while increasing environmental and aesthetic quality.