Conserving Locality

We all have a place in our World. A place where we set down our roots and call home — our corner of the planet that is our region or district. So it is with plants and all other growing things. Many of us travel to other exotic locations where we admire the variations in the landscape. Through the whole age of mankind we have imported and exported elements of foreign culture and this includes plants and trees. Sometimes this was a wholesale importation to create European gardens with varying degrees of success. The labor required to maintain a foreign garden was too much for many and their gardens and estates soon reverted to the wilderness. But we have found that some species faired better than others by adapting to their new landscape environments and the sparse landscape we inherited on Long Island is all the better for these invasions. We now have a great knowledge of what does and what does not, flourish.

There is still an abundance of plants in our nurseries that do not readily adapt and will demand high maintenance, but equally there is a growing stock of low maintenance varieties that may have originated abroad bur over time, have gone native.