'Burbs as the new biodiversity frontier

Perhaps we've villified the suburbs for long enough.

Some of the latest thinking holds that all these myriad small properties would well be the key to our biodiversity future.

Consider what Rick Darke told the Inquirer's garden writer, Virginia Smith, for her excellent story this morning. "The suburbs are the new frontier. This is going to be the place where all these living things find refuge."

Darke is an ecologist, horticulturist, and landscape designer who designs with native species, which support the local populations of bugs, birds and other organisms. Non-native ornamentals may look nice, but they don't get the job of helping the ecosystem done.

He and University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy are thinking along the same lines.

"Your yard has to be all those things because we don't have enough nature left anymore," he told Smith.

The two Chester County men collaborated on a recently-released book, "The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden," from Timber Press.

Tallamy spoke at the Schuylkill Environmental Education Center in 2012, and even then he was envisioning something big.

He proposed a new national park that he would call Homegrown National Park. It would be 20 million acres of household yards, reinvented to support biodiversity. It would trump a dozen or more "real" national parks in size and, more than likely, effect.

The men say it would work because all this property is under homeowner control.

"We don't have to get the government involved," Tallamy told an audience who was by then looking infinitely happier than when he had been detailing all the ways we were losing biodiversity. "We can put these native plants in our yard and see conservation right before our eyes."

So each of us can do our part, and get pleasure out of it to boot.

When Ed Bonsell of Hatfield transformed his property, he was rewarded with a chorus of birdsong he'd not heard before.

Speaking of which: I recently read a book that looked at where the greatest biodiversity of birds is.

Take Seattle, where much of the research was done. The largest number of bird species, perhaps not surprisingly, it wasn't in the city. But neither was it in the pristine forests outside of town. It was in the 'burbs.

The peak in bird diversity, concludes author John Marzluff, in Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife, is where "the creative hand of urbanization surpasses the destructive hand."

Meaning, perhaps, that we can all create our own little caches of biodiversity right outside our homes.

"My message has always been, your property does count. It's part of the larger local ecosystem," Tallamy told Smith. "Everybody's property is."