As a tech-saturated culture, we’ve gone full-circle in information life-cycle and what I’ve noticed lately is that auto-scraped-and-dumped misinformation is clogging search feeds. It’s now harder to find vetted, human-written and researched information about native plants online than even a year ago.
It’s time to return to considering book (audio and digital inclusive) and print resources in our default-pathways to information seeking. Published books on native plants remain the most vetted, reliable sources of information and, being analogue, retain their information integrity.
On to the fun part: book recommendations
Learning about native plants is a journey not just of ID’ing a plant, but of learning, slowly, how that plant inter/relates to the rest of it’s native ecosystem. The more-than-human world is a galaxy of interdependencies. Each plant has not-yet-known and/or once-known relationships to soil microbiomes, insects, birds, fungi, moulds, lichens, and the four-leggeds and us, two-leggeds.
I highly recommend you buy all of these from your local independent bookstore. If you can only pick one, let it be this first title:
- A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators: Ontario and Great Lakes Edition
Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla created this definitive source that is rich in information, coloured throughout, and highlights which pollinators rely on each plant. Additionally, there are urban and suburban pollinator garden sample designs which are accessible to implement. Most importantly, the interior design and the content lends itsself to being used by everyone. Thoroughly researched, but not academic in style, I return to this regularly.
City of Toronto’s PDF booklet is a hyper-condensed version of the book and serves as a good toe-dipper. The plant information and layout reflects what you find in the more comprehensive book.
2. Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy
You’ll never look at a tree the same way again. This book delves into the inter-connectedness of beings that comprise functional ecosystems. Foundational to the ‘why’ and ‘why it all matters’ to (re)establishing native plant gardens.
3. The New Ontario Naturalized Garden by Lorraine Johnson
This needs to be republished! Woefully out of print, Johnson’s prececessor to “Rusty-patched Bumblebee” contains fantastic pairings of plants based on similar growing conditions – after reading this you won’t accidentally place your cardinal flower next to prickly pear cactus! The book goes deeper in to ethics and deeper considerations and conversations, which I appreciated.
Perhaps your library or an online used book vendor has as copy for you. Highly recommend! In the meantime, it is available on archive.org.
4. Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings by Mary Siisip Geniuz, Anishinaabe Plant Scientist
Geniusz writes from Menominee, Ho-Chunk and Dakhota and Bodwewadmimwen land currently described as eastern Wisconsin. Her writings are critical for settler people to begin to understand and see plants as entire relationships, as friends, and beings that support and sustain us. The plants can go on without us, but we are dependent on the more-than-human world for our survival. Much of her book comes from teachings from Elder Keewaydinoquay and the stories within are nourishing, enriching. There’s so much in this one book; I return to it often.
5. Braiding Sweetgrass and 6. The Serviceberry
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
If you haven’t already heard about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing, please pick up a copy of both! Potowatomi scientist and professor, Kimmerer combines Indigenous plant science with euro-centric science. Again, it is a book to reread. Her essay, The Serviceberry, is a manifesto in the gentlest of ways, urging us to adapt the framework of abundance and anchor our lives in reciprocity. This framework is not only part of her own culture, as she describes, but also reflected in the abundance of acorns, berried trees, and in the more-than-human world we belong to. Her essay asks us to critically evaluate our internalized values and Weltanschauung from living in a culture that is anchored in scarcity and values resource guarding, competitive taking.
Recommended Listening:
Future Ecologies Podcast
Emergence Magazine Podcast