Gardening for Life: keynote address

With as many as 33,000 species imperiled in the U.S., it is clear that we must change our approach to gardening and landscaping if we hope to share the spaces we live and work with other living things. Native plants will play a key role in the restoration of our landscapes because only natives provide the coevolved relationships required by animals. By supporting a diversity of insect herbivores, native plants provide food for a large and healthy community of natural enemies that keep herbivores in balance and our gardens aesthetically pleasing. Gardening in our crowded world carries both moral and ecological responsibilities that we can no longer ignore