News — plants

Cover image adapted from Corms by Gerrit Davidse, CC by NC SA. Breaking with my usual practice, I am NOT going to cite this source, because the whole point of this post is how incredibly freakin’ stupid it is, and in any case, what we have here is one plant-ignorant person posing as an expert and printing bullshit who has copied this misinformation from some other plant-ignorant person posing as an expert, so it’s a whole serpent-eating-its-own-tail type of mess and there’s definitely not a single guilty party to point to as an originator. [1] And my goal here is not mockery...

Urban Ecology Center takes lesser celandine, which is non-native to the U.S. and is now classified as a nasty invasive, as its case study in this blog post to illustrate why we should care about growing native plants and why we need to be so careful about growing non-native ones. I’ll just quote a bit of a summary paragraph, but you should read the whole post. So, we’ve got an aggressive plant with no natural predators to keep its population in check. This plant emerges sooner than native spring ephemerals, and therefore has the advantage of size when competing for space and...