 director of the Wild Sea Project, which is now somehow rather, we got her out of mid-coast Maine and down here in Portland and it's been great. I've had a chance to listen to her speak maybe a half a dozen times and every time I just really feel like, oh my gosh, here's this tremendously difficult, complex, fascinating subject even though sort of plants aren't my thing, that she's able to bring not only down to the level of relationship to us, but also ask what I really appreciate so many ideas and so much hard work on how to get traction for you and I who don't maybe need, don't grow that much stuff, how to do it. And so I'm really glad that she's been willing to come out here. I thought it'd be really worthwhile if I could just, I'm going to just read very short, the purpose of the Wild Sea Project and as we mentioned it's a nonprofit that's trying to encourage data plants, well that's a whole concept and I've learned from her that data plants aren't some things that came in since the last Ice Age, but some of these have maybe hundreds of thousands of years of smarts and wisdom in their DNA. In order to conserve the biodiversity and encourage the plant adaptation in the face of what, this huge biodiversity challenge that's happening with climate change, etc. and what's our effects. The project seeks to safeguard wildlife habitat and create pollination and migration corridors for insects and birds. And I think we all know that the science of what we do in terms of conserving land is to try to work to grow microbiology in soils, you know the trees and the shrubs, the birds and the insects and when I get a chance to listen to somebody's expertise like Heather about connecting this whole thing is it just empowers me personally more to get more involved and try to keep the red the red poles going so they can make the Venezuela or the milky week, milky in place like it's happening this year apparently for the monarch so it's terrific. So any rate Heather thanks so much for coming. Thank you I'm thrilled to be here and Tom picked me up in a boat so it was not too rough getting here and obviously the weather is delightful but today I'll tell you a little bit more about wild seed project at the end. I'm gonna I have three hopes to have what I hope to have you learn when you go home today. The first I want you to know that our native plants are beautiful, can everybody hear me by the way, and are deserving of a place in our landscapes. The second is that wild native plants are completely different from our cultivated plants such as vegetables and garden plants and they're crucial to our region's ecosystem functioning and then finally I'm gonna cover what's going on in the nursery trade with our native flora because the modern nursery industry is a very different beast than it was 50 years ago and I'm gonna explain how that all is and so I'm gonna begin with beauty you know we have native plants that can grow in any growing condition that you might have in your yard so for instance sunny dry species which which this group of pictures is and the upper left is the chokeberry the upper right is butterfly milkweed one of our four native milkweed species the lower right is black-eyed coneflower I just saw some blooming on the island the lower left is the wild rose you know when people have sunny dry conditions they often think day lilies or the beach rose are their only solution those are two plants from another part of the world and we have a whole host of flora that thrive in the sunny dry conditions wet areas you know drainage ditches low spots wet meadows these are not areas that are problems that need to be drained or fixed we have hundreds of native species that thrive in the fluctuating water level of wet areas where it can be completely submerged in the spring or early summer like this year and then even dry in the summer so in this picture you're looking at blue vervein on the upper left the flag blue flag iris on the upper right the lower left is pussy willow and the lower right is another milkweed species the swamp or rose milkweed and these two milkweeds that I've just shown you make excellent garden plants they stay as a clump you know they don't run around underground the way the field one does you know in these all these and many other species can do that job in a wet area instead of people thinking they have to change the soil or drain the area you need to do that for agriculture because we've picked crops from other parts of the world you know the shade you know where people think costa and you know the costa and bark mulch are the only solution you know we live in that great eastern deciduous forest bio region you know that ranges from Canada down to Georgia and out to the prairie states there are thousands of different native species of understory tree shrubs wildflowers ferns grasses and sedgicks and many of them make excellent landscaping garden plants so you know especially you know in the last 20 years people have started to think that bark mulch is landscaping and Portland has some great examples of that so in this picture I'm going to show you four great natives that are ground covers which means they cover big areas they're perfect for those dry shady areas where you want to cover a lot of space they're also perfect for the edge of the forest maybe where you remove some invasive species and need some more aggressive plants to fill in quickly so the upper left is purple flowering raspberry the upper right is Canada anemone the lower left is the New York fern which is common in Maine and the lower right is the largely footaster and those three herbaceous species you know will carpet the ground and what I really like to encourage people in their planting is not to just pick one plant and do a ground cover of one species you know don't just replace the Asian pack of sander with a now an acre of fern instead mix several species together that like the same conditions they'll weave together make a beautiful tapestry and have much higher wildlife benefit then you know if you have a shady garden where you want you know smaller more plants that stay as little clumps again we have hundreds of different species that make excellent shade garden plants so the upper left is blood root one of our first wildflowers to bloom in the spring the upper right is Columbine and Columbine's a really interesting wildflower because it grows in a wide range of situations from deep rich fertile woodlands in rocky ledges and then it will grow on the cliffs I don't know there's any cliff on any of these islands out here I see it a lot in Maine what it needs is ledgy soil but full shade and full sun the lower right is our wild geranium and the lower left is packer or golden ground soil or acid soils where people have pines or spruce or fir trees you know those those trees grow in soil that tends to be a very acidic and then their leaf litter also is very acid and people often think there's nothing that they can plant there well we've got a whole host of flora that thrive in those conditions one of them is the wild strawberry an excellent native ground cover bunch berry on the upper right which is actually a plant that grows all around the northern hemisphere in New England Canada all the way across Canada to the Pacific Northwest in the Soviet Union and all the way to northern New York we have our own gene you know pool here but it's a circumvoreal plant that loves the northern acidic spruce fir forest on the lower left is Canada Mayflower one of our little woodland lilies and the lower right is a mixture of low bush blueberry and rock floss rock flocks is grows wild in sort of New York State up in the mountains there and it's very adaptable to dry acid soils here so we my point is we've got great plants for all these conditions you have you don't have to change the soil change your yard and then make it have a tool for plants we've also got lots of great trees especially understory and woodland edge flowering trees this is pagoda dogwood Hawthorne sorry shad we've got lots of small flowering trees we've got canopy trees our native oak beach maple birch these are all high wildlife value trees that are also beautiful and we should be planting them in our yards and landscapes instead of going to the nursery and getting back what's usually planted instead of our native dogwoods are the Japanese dogwood and they're the one that actually 30 years ago brought a fungus in that killed off a lot of the Florida dogwood which was a wide-ranging dogwood from Maine down to Georgia so we have in our flora all the plants that have the ornamental look that you're looking for along with we also have a lot of native shrubs the viburnums and shrub dogwoods are really beautiful durable landscape plants that have you know white flowers in the spring that the pollinators like and then they all have these fleshy fruits that have a high wildlife value particularly for migrating birds so in this picture the upper left is the viburnum lentego the nanny berry viburnum the mid one is high bush cranberry and the right is silky dogwood and you go to a nursery what do they offer mostly European and Asian honey suckles and barberries luckily some of those now are illegal to sell in Maine because they're so invasive I know you're tackling them here but one of the problems with those exotic berry producing fruits along with them spreading easily by the birds is that the fruits are really high in sugars which the migrating birds in Eurasia must need a lot of sugar to get where they need to go our birds need more fats and proteins which are native dogwoods and viburnums have and we have a dozen native viburnums and a dozen native dogwoods we even have our own native evergreen rhododendron this is the great Rose Bay rhododendron there's a sanctuary of these in southern Maine right in Alfred Maine I just let a field trip there a couple weeks ago for the native plant trust it's the largest northern most population of this plant this is you know your classic evergreen largely rhododendron it's beautiful it blooms in mid-July it's beloved by bumberbees we also have several species of azalea native to Maine and we have mountain laurels in other Maine native species another evergreen you know we have from our floor of beautiful plants that could be planted instead of you go to a nursery what do they usually offer you you know rhododendron or a hybrid from Asia we even have a native two species of native spirea this is the steeple bush spirea and then there's also the white spirea there's also a native hydrangea this is the hydrangea arborescence it's not a Maine native it is native in Massachusetts and then all the way down to Georgia but there's a lot of this planted in Maine this is the wild form of it and it's a classic as you can see sort of lace cap hydrangea flower what do you see when you go around there's probably a lot plants on the island here these white ones with huge pom pom flowers so this is what the plant looks like in the wild and those larger petaled flowers on the outer ring those are actually infertile flowers and the little teeny ones in the center are the ones with the stamens and pistols that have the nectar and then the pollen and with the pom pom one what's happened is you know and this happened you know hundred years ago someone found a mutation and all those little flowers mutated and just looked like petals so that's what a double flower typically is the stamens and pistols have mutated and they look like petals so there's no nectar there's no pollen they don't produce seed and so if you have the is there's a cultivator called Annabelle that's widely available and widely planted so if you see this straight species form blooming it's covered with different pollinating insects and the double flowered form isn't so we have a native hydrangea that will both be beautiful in your yard and support nature now we don't have a blue hydrangea and I know everybody in Maine loves the blue hydrangea and I can't solve that problem for you but luckily lots of our wild flowers perennial wild flowers are blue and there's some species that make great garden plants the upper left is the blue wood flocks the middle is Jacob's ladder the lower left is the closed gentian and the lower right is blue Lobelia a couple more the upper left is the blue iris the upper right is the true native lupine this is the sundial lupine it is the lupine that we see every everybody sees in loves in Maine is actually not a Maine native it's native to the Pacific Northwest of the US so that lupine lady story really is a true story it's a you know garden escapee and the native lupine is extinct in Maine it hasn't been seen I think in about 40 years it's a it grows in a completely different environment it loves sandy or gravelly well-drained soil so where it grows is like pine barrens Kenny bunk area where it wells you know if you've seen the soil there there's some pine barrens and Brunswick so that it was never the places where you see the exotic one is not where this plant would grow anyways but this is a really easy to grow plant I sell the seeds of it the lower right we have lots of blue asters and the lower left is one of our little bell flowers so we have plenty of great blue plants to choose so you know substituting or adding some natives instead of just always planting exotics in your garden is a really easy thing that anyone can do whether you you choose to do your whole garden native which is obviously what I've chosen to do this is my garden up in Brooksville where I used to live and that's a begota dogwood in the picture in a lot of the woodland wildflowers in front there's ferns Solomon seal some of those blue flowers that you already saw or you know if you just start with one species this is New England Aster this is one of my board members gender who lives in well and she grew out a bunch of our seed and then planted a whole row right along the street and in October it's covered with the monarch butterflies are there sipping the nectar because you know the monarch they need the milkweed for their reproduction but they also need all our late season wildflowers to fuel their migration south it's also covered with bumblebees this plant will bloom into early November and you know just adding that one species and a population of it not just one individual she created a huge amount of biodiversity just with that one plant or you know if you live in the city or an apartment this is something anyone can do plant some natives in a window box that's my little window box that has low bush blueberry New York fern a little blueberry and some wild oats or black-eyed coneflower is a really great tough plant for your hell strip you know that narrow strip between the sidewalk and the garden you know but the real the reason we all need to care about planting natives is not just that they're beautiful but because we are everywhere now and our native plants really have been pushed aside and this is a picture from Portland over in the four river area out Washington Avenue and along the river there there is remnant deciduous forests with lots of the slow growing woodland wildflowers like Trillium and Ginger and trout lily that you don't see very often anymore because these slow growing woodland wildflowers were wiped out during colonial times with the grazing animals and the plowing they can handle some tree cutting but they can't once they've been removed from the landscape they don't come back the seeds are dispersed by ants so that they don't travel through the wind they don't travel across a lot of the broad landscape so right in Portland there's some amazing biodiversity but it's now isolated patches surrounded by suburb like you know there's a bunch of new houses in and you know literally where it's all native there's a dead zone of you know the just either paving or lawn or pretty much all the landscape plants are from another part of the world you know this doesn't mean that we can't do nothing anymore but we have we are really moe where there are still remnant native plants we are mowing them away literally our mowing practices it was in the 70s that the big you know people went from having just their little push mower to the the power mowers and riding mowers became available widespread and that was really the final nail in the coffin of meadow species you know our meadow when you go in an open meadow area particularly often 50% of the plants or more are not the native species so we are really setting back the native plants with our mowing when you mow in the middle no you know we all need some lawn to walk on there's no other plant that can handle us treating it like a rug but but everywhere else when you mow mid season it is the equivalent of clear cutting for all you know the plants and all the other creatures that live in there literally poof in an instant everything that they needed is gone and the mid season mowing really only favors the the grasses most of our meadow grasses are Eurasian and they evolved with grazing and early agriculture so they they can thrive with that mid seeding mowsing and then a lot of the invasives thrive with it too and it's really setting back our natives and you know this is New York Aster so this is blooming in October New England Aster is blooming in to early November those seeds don't ripen until November and so what do most people do when they have a meadow they start moving it mowing it now in the middle of the summer now if you need to harvest a hay crop mid season mowing is the right time to do it you know that's what stem from agriculture but if you're just trying to keep it in open area you only need to mow once a year at the most and to let the native species reproduce you need to wait till November now that still doesn't leave out that still doesn't that still wipes out the overwintering habitat for birds and a lot of pollinators and other little animals so ideally when you have a meadow you only mow part of it every year so you divide it into sections of mowing this one this year and this one next this doesn't mean that we can do nothing in a meadow and as you guys I know battle on these islands and the reason is invasive species you know we have moved so many plants around the world and we now have to always be out there monitoring them and when you have a meadow overtaken within invasives like bittersweet which I'm sure all of you know that that takes a lot of persistence for a number of years to get rid of it before you can really have a thriving meadow that's not you know doesn't have to be all native but you but you wanted to have at least a good percentage of natives because they're the ones who are going to support the wildlife so we can't go back to carefree and do nothing anymore anywhere we're all gonna have to be diligent monitoring the natives but the other issue is that people don't know our plants anymore our modern lifestyle doesn't force us to know the landscape anymore and so it's really important to understand that so many of our landscapes are degraded and we're lucky in Maine we have lots of beautiful beautiful natural areas find someone's particularly with the woodlands try to find one that's a representative of a diverse healthy woodland this picture is taken from the Rachel Carson Reserve in Wells that's a nice short little woodland trail and what I want you to notice in this picture what is a characteristic of a healthy diverse forest it's mixed age of trees you know tall canopy trees then in the mid-story it's juvenile canopy trees and also there's a whole group of trees and shrubs that live in that mid-story and then on the forest floor there's no bare ground ferns wild flowers understory trees and shrubs and then seedlings of the next generation of forest so that's not typical in a lot of wood so you do have to kind of seek it out to get it and to understand what it really means and then of course where we do have you know great natural areas be proactive and support them and defend them and I just want to describe what the word native means because it's a very political word that's kind of loaded I don't even quite like the word native I'm thinking of switching to the word indigenous but you know native means the plants that were here you know 500 years ago before Columbus came and the reason that point in time is chosen is that was the time of great disturbance when the Europeans started really exploring the world and moving the world's flora and fauna around so this is a picture from the Camden Hills and 12,000 years ago the glaciers had just retreated remember there was nothing growing here in Maine so where were all our native plants well they moved they had to migrate south and they were off the coastal plain you know down in the southeast they were a few in the mountain refuges in the southern Appalachian Mountains and then in the Gulf of Mexico all of our plants had to migrate down there and in the last two and a half million years we've had multiple ice ages so our plants have moved north and south many times Maine has about 2100 species of wild plants 1600 of those are the indigenous native species the other third are actually exotics from other parts of the world and mostly it's from the Eurasia because Eurasia this is this wide landmass that goes east west and a lot of it is temperate just like us so most of the exotic plants that live in the wild here are all from there you go down to Massachusetts there is more like 35 I think 3500 native species you go down to Virginia there's 5000 the farther south you go the more diversity because the plants that didn't have to migrate as far after the ice ages to get back north and south and so and so more species probably would continue to be migrating north if we hadn't come and then broken up the habitat and now we put so many obstacles in the way for plant and animal migration with our development but you know it's important to understand that plants do migrate and that 500 years ago was just a snapshot in time and yes we will have to accept that all these exotic species that have now made their home here you know someday we will have to consider them native but it takes you know tens of thousands to millions of years for these relationships that I'm going to explain in a minute to happen to make a species truly indigenous and part of the habitat so how is a wild plant different from a cultivated plant so most of our native wildflowers are actually perennial you know we have we have a few annuals but most of the wildflowers are perennial and then obviously trees and shrubs you know live for many years but the flowers on a plant flowers are all about sex and reproduction and you know we have always thought they're there for our beauty but how a flower looks tells you is an indicator of who pollinates it so plants like a lot of trees are wind pollinated that's why they don't have showy flowers grasses are wind pollinated so that's why they just they don't need to attract an insect but the relationship between our the plants and the reproduction and the insects goes back you know evolutionary for a long time it takes a long time to develop so if you look at this this is a New England aster and the purple petals that color is there to attract the pollinators and the pollinators are after food that's why they're not trying to help the plant mix up its genes they're just after nectar and pollen which they eat and then they fly between the plants and that mixes up the genes the other way that a wild plant is really different from what we are used to doing in our garden is that all wild plants grow in habitats with other species there's no such thing as a monoculture in nature so this is the blue flag iris you know very common wet meadows and stream size and ponds pondsides in Maine and it just in this picture I can see that not only the iris but there's the spirea there's violets there's blue it's there's grasses and sedges and then there's all the other little plants that I can't see in this picture but also the other little creatures of the soil and that that combination of living organisms is what makes a ecosystem and what makes them function now the other thing the third thing that's really different about wild plants versus cultivated plants is how they're nutrient needs so again from farming we have grown to think that we need to feed our plants plants make they are the land they are the land-based creatures that can take you know energy from the sunlight water and carbon dioxide and turn it into their food most of their energy they make themselves they don't need food the way animals do they make their own food then they get their micronutrients from decaying vegetation and from the minerals in the soil so think about what happens in a forest every year massive quantities of leaves fall down in the fall and begin the process of decay the other things that are falling down onto the earth under those leaves are dead insects animal feces little animals when they die they don't get eaten by big animals they tend to decay under the leaf litter and then it's the fungi and bacteria and all the little creatures of the soil they'll break those nutrients down and release them to the plants so there's no fertilizer that happens the plant is making it from the sunlight and adding it and releasing it to the plants through also through the decayed vegetation now if you are a really good organic vegetable gardener you know that you have to add lots of compost and manures and water to that plants and that's because those are domesticated plants that have been you know we made this deal with plants start you know with our food crops about 10,000 years ago you grow bigger fruits or leafier greens or non-bitter greens and I will keep all the pest away I will keep all the weeds away I will water and lavish you with the tension and you will feed me well you know we don't our native plants fortunately don't need all that extra nutrients in fact you will only favor the weedy species when you do that you know there there's been some interesting new research on just all the dog poop on the sides of trails adding such a nutrient load that it you know is helping the invasive species get established so how do you mimic that this with your plantings with native species you just leave the leads leave the leaves don't break them away at you know when you're making a new garden leaf litter is the perfect soil amendment for a new planting of native plants if you can't get access to it we're lucky here in Maine you know coast of Maine has a really nice aged hardwood bark mulch you can add that but we don't need you know when you plant native you don't need to change the soil and add all this effort extra stuff you just need to let those natural processes keep happening and leaves are like gold so now I'm going to talk a little bit about what's going on in the nursery trade with our native plants because the nerve I studied organic horticulture when I was in college I got my start propagating at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston and all the books I used back then all talked about growing plants from seed there was a hint at the promise of cloning and tissue culture but that was only you know a wish back then not happening so this is purple cone flower that's a picture up on the right that's the wild form of it it's a plant that ranges from the prairie straights east into western Pennsylvania upper-state New York so it's not a Maine native but it's a calm it's been you know a common in the herb and garden perennial garden world for decades and if you've been growing it for a long time you know it to be a really tough garden plant that the butterflies and bees love and then the birds eat the seeds in the winter well about 25 years ago the nursery industry gave it the perennial plant of the year award and all kinds of breeding started happening with it and there's about a dozen Echinacea species native to the prairie states and so they're hybridizing the different species and you know one of the ways plant breeders operate now is not just mixing the genes with hybridization but they'll actually irradiate the seeds to cause mutations or they'll treat them with chemicals to cause mutations you know it is not a natural process anymore most of the new cultivate cultivars of the purple cone flower which you can see picture of on the left they're all coming from a producer in Texas and they're there after they've you know either hybridize them or bred them they are then you know propagating them in a process called tissue culture where they take some cells from the tip of the plant and they can culture them in a petri dish and end up with thousands of genetically identical individuals those are then pricked out they're grown in these massive greenhouses you know hundreds of thousands of genetically identical individuals and so they use a lot of nasty chemicals and insecticides to you know keep pests and disease at Bay and you know if any of you have Irish ancestry who ended up over here because of the Irish potato famine you know what happens when you have no genetic diversity you know Ireland was planted in one variety of potato the whole country and when that disease came through it literally wiped the whole crop out within a month and some of our ancestors came over here that's why cloning is not a good solution to our plants it has no genetic diversity also a lot of these new cultivars they're patented so if you are a nursery you can't propagate them yourself this is not what I want to have happen to our native plants fact a lot of these new ones they're not even hardy so I'll give you another example of a great native plant that's now being bred a lot on the right is cardinal flower and on the left is the blue Lobelia these are two of our native Lobelia species there's a lot of tropical Lobelias that are grown as annuals these two species are both hybridized and the plant on the right is a hummingbird plant it has a long kind of throat on the flower and that's how you can tell a hummingbird plant it doesn't have to be red it just it's the beak was designed you know matches the long throat the one on the left is not a hummingbird pollinated plant it's pollinated by bumblebees and so if you go to a nursery mostly what they sell are either hybrids between these two species and so when you hybridize things you often mess up the sex organs so think of a horse and a donkey and how the mule you know their descendant can't reproduce well that can also happen in the plant world and there's a woman from the University of Vermont who got her whole PhD and studying the different cultivated forms and hybrids of our native plants and whether they were as supportive to the pollinating pollinators as the straight species and so she literally spent three summers every day taking the nectar out of the different both the wild type of the cardinal flower and then the different cultivars and measuring the amount of nectar and pollen in them and she found in the different cultivated forms they typically had 10% of the nectar of the straight species so take a hummingbird you know all of our native birds are stressed and they go and visit the cultivated form they're just getting a fraction of the fuel that they need you know so again these are two really easy plants to go from seed we sell seeds of these that we grow ourselves one another example of cloning this is a red maple tree it's a it's a cultivated form this is right in Portland and this is a form that the nursery industry has been selling for about 40 years and it's you read in a catalog it's marketed because the branches go very vertical and they say makes a great street tree because the branches don't go out it won't hit your building and it won't hit your car well if anyone's taken a pruning class before the first thing you learn is that you want wide crotches on the branch of your tree because that has a lot of tissue which makes a strong branch it's particularly important for fruit tree growers because when they're laid in with fruit so because this was a you know this was a naturally occurring freak that somebody found in the 70s but so this plant because the branches all go upright they get damaged every winter with our ice and rain and snow so half of them are dead so on this street is all one cultivar so if those are cloned and so there's no genetic diversity and it's also a poor selection this is your red maple makes a great tough street tree but you need to grow them from seed and have the genetic diversity so some days probably some red maple disease is going to come by and if these were all grown from seed there'd be the chance that one individual to handle that pester disease better this is the yellow bush honey suckle I'd imagine there's a lot of this on your islands it's a great native shrub and it blooms now and it's pollinated by bumble bees and then if you look on this one it's kind of hard because the light's not that bright but I think you can see it at the very top see that reddish color on the edge and the picture on the left is it in the spring when it leaves out a lot of our native trees and shrubs right when they leaf out in the spring they have this red chemical in them that deters herbivores first thing in the spring and then it goes away and so and that chemical just keeps it from being eaten in that first week or two that is photosynthesizing so everybody knows how the monarch butterfly needs milk weed this is not some unique relationship in nature between an insect and a plant all of our native plants have other insects that need them for part of their life cycle so Douglas Tallamy who's an entomologists University of Delaware who's done all the research on the relationship between the butterfly and moth family and their host plants I called him up to see which species need this and he said there's five species of butterfly and moth that use the yellow bush honeysuckle as its host plant and somebody about five years ago found probably a naturally occurring sport that stayed red all season long and he said they won't the the butterfly and moth species that lay their eggs in this plant will not eat the red one so if you go to a garden center now they're filled with red foliage form and a lot of our native plants there are all these unusual forms that are starting to pop up I've seen a wild geranium with dark brown foliage why somebody thinks that pretty I'm not sure but you know the the nursery trades always looking for these unusual forms so if somebody found a red foliage form of milkweed the monarch butterfly wouldn't be able to use that plant then the final way our native plants wild plants are really different from cultivated plants is in their seeds and what the seeds need to germinate this is wild geranium so typically most of our native seed needs to go through a winter cold period to germinate and it takes the freeze and thaw of our New England winter to help break up that heavy seed coat you know if you're used to growing again vegetables from seed you know if your seed doesn't germinate in a week it's 70 degrees you know that seeds probably not viable but that's because those plants again are domesticated one of the things that domestication does is select for the quick germinating species and it eliminates the heavy seed coat well wild geranium is typical from a lot of our wildflower woodland particularly our woodland and meadow wildflowers and that has a seed that has to go through a winter the seeds ripen in early July they shoot out from the plant in the perfect scenario is for them to land in the leaf litter kind of make their way under the soil surface and hang out there through the next winter that spring so in this pot typically you know if I were to sow a hundred seeds about a third of them would germinate the next spring and the rest would germinate the second spring so having not all of your seeds germinate at once is a really good wild plant strategy so you remember this year we had a lot of rain but the last three years we've had hardly any rain in the spring or summer so lots of the wild seeds out there in the world if they germinated in early spring they ended up dying because there was not enough moisture for the them to germinate and grow so all the wild geranium that had dispersed a year ago and germinated that spring didn't make it this year those extra seeds that were hanging out would have this is a good strategy in a wild plant and what we want to keep in our native plants as people start growing them in the garden and I'm going to show you how to do that in a minute and then there's some native plants that don't want to be cultivated and this is the Pink Lady slipper orchid and like many of our orchids it's dependent on certain fungi in the soil for its whole life cycle for the seeds to germinate and for the whole plant to grow this is not a rare plant in Maine which means it's not protected people can dig it up unfortunately and do whatever they want with it it's pollinated by bumblebees and it's quite a trick for the bumblebee to get down inside that plant because just got a little opening and then they get down to the bottom and remember the pollinators are after food so they're usually after nectar is the you know perfect high value food and they'll also eat pollen while the lady slipper orchids don't have any nectar and so typically when you see say a hundred lady slipper orchids blooming only about 10% of them ended up getting pollinated because after a while the bees like forget that luckily one seed pod produces tens of thousands of teeny dust-like plants but those seeds have to land in soil that's you know healthy woodland soil and you know that specific fungi doesn't exist in people's you know suburban and urban garden and they typically take a dozen or more years to reach blooming size they also don't transplant well so you know sadly lots of our woodland wildflowers are still dug from the wild and sold in the nursery trade ferns are often also sold that way so you realize be careful when you're at a nursery to ask did you grow that you know how are these plants propagated it is not propagation if you're just digging them from the wild and potting them up that's not making more plants and it also undercuts any of the nurseries who are doing that the other plants you should be suspicious of are bunch berry and low bush blueberry when they're sold as sods you know that's just stripped off somewhere and typically from blueberry barrens and you know they're using a lot of nasty chemicals on the blueberry fields these days so you do not want that in your garden so what is the solution it's growing the native plants from seed and this is not rocket science I've grown thousands of different species from the eastern half of the country I've grown the really tricky woodland ones that some of which take a dozen or more years to reach blooming size and then the easy ones and you know we need a lot of people helping both boast the population of our native plants so one of the things Wild Seed Project does is we hand collect from our members land we also have stock beds of wild type native plants and we collect the seeds clean and process it by hand and sell them through our website and I also teach seed collecting classes but I consider that's something that people should only learn to do after they've learned to sow the seeds I'm not at all interested in having people out there collecting the seeds and then killing them and it's not how you handle the seeds is all different lots of species the seeds have to be sown fresh off the plant other seeds have to dry for a certain period of time some need to be sown in their green they're all different but there's a lot of species that are really easy to grow and the best time of year to do it is late fall or early winter and you can just do it I'm in pots I'm going to walk you through the process you know go get some good organic compost bait potting soil and fill either four or six inch pots with it in this picture the upper right is milkweed the middle is aster in the left is black-eyed cone flower so you sow the seeds on the surface of the soil and then you cover them with coarse sand and what the coarse sand does it helps keep the seeds splash out in the rain it also the grittiness prevents damping off and other issues that people often have when they're growing plants closely together in potting soil you then literally cover them outside so I typically do this after new year so it's great you can do it after you you know been stuck inside for the holidays you've eaten too much you're sick of people you know it's not something that you know people think was fall they think September no I have not finished all my seed collecting really until November that's how late it is that some of the seeds are right and so it's really something for late fall and into early winter then you can't you you cover them with sand and a good rule of thumb is to cover the seeds to the thickness of the depth of the seed so if you're planting an acorn you're going to cover it with an inch of sand if you're planting a sesame seed you're going to do an eighth of an inch and then we have quite a few seeds that are really tiny and dust-like and they you really just sew on the surface of the soil then you carry it outside you find a place in the shade on the you know north side of your house away from the drip line under like patio table if it's one of those wire ones that the rain can go through you cover it with wire to keep the rodents out you push the labels down and then in the spring the seeds will germinate and some spray seeds germinate as early as late March even when it's still dipping below freezing regularly other species wait till later in the spring to germinate all of this is written in detail on our website and different articles in our magazine this is so you know these are four inch pots so in one square foot you can have nine different species and hundreds of different genetically diverse individuals germinating then what I like to have people do is take those four inch pots and not divide them up and plant them in their garden right away which is what everybody wants to do but you have to remember our native species are perennials and perennials put or have slower growth and they put more energy into their root system and you know you're we unless you're an incredibly attentive person in your garden I suggest you just take those pots and put the whole the whole clump of seed linked into a much bigger pot and grow it like that over the summer and then in September you can divide them up and plant them out in the landscape so milk weed will grow this much in that first season and even with no blooms the modern butterflies will still find it and lay their eggs on it you know some of the faster growing species to bloom are like the asters and milkweed blue verve and then other species a perennial will take three four five years if there's some of the slow-growing woodland wildflowers this is this is an easy thing to do you know I still have my field guide from when I studied plant ecology in college my old Newcombe's field guide and one of the neat thing in those field guides is they'd always say common rare abundant you know everywhere and the habitat you saw it in it what's really depressing to me is how all these species that used to be bund abundant they might not be technically rare yet but they are not out there anymore you know the the loss of abundancy of our native plants is shocking to me and you know this is something that we can all do something about by becoming seeds you know propog actually becoming propagators you know what everything basically is worse than when I studied in school but the thing that has really shifted in the last decade is is the awareness of the general population that we need to find another way to you know live on this planet and they want something proactive to do in the 90s you know that's when the organic agriculture movement really took off and it happened with the scare about all our the pesticide that was used on apple tree on apples and everybody was feeding their children massive quantities of applesauce and apple juice and they became a big awareness around it and that's when the organic farming movement really took off and I feel like in the landscape nursery world where you know there's a same level of unawareness of the general public of what's you know our garden plants are not genetically diverse they're not good for wildlife they're all from another part of the world and planting native species is something really positive that anybody can do and it's not hard and it's what you know I founded wild seed project because I felt like there's everybody saying plant native now but the nurseries don't even know how to do it they don't know the plants they don't know how to propagate anymore most nurseries just buy in now you know all these cultivated forms they you know they have legal rights so people can't propagate them and they're coming in from other parts of the country which are bringing in diseases from other parts of the world and you know sowing the seeds you can do it at a time of year when you're not busy it's fun you if you have too many to share you can sell them with your land trust you can do a seed swap it's really a proactive thing to do so one of the things that I've brought with me today the land trust here was nice enough to purchase a bunch of copies of our different annual publication for you all to take home and enjoy and read this is our newest issue they're all different they all I've sleeved off my old colleagues everybody has contributed their writing for free this is self-published it's still a lot of work to produce this they have we have beautiful artwork in it so come up and pick one to take I also brought our little sets of three species of seeds for different growing conditions I have I've brought the most for sunny dry because we're getting a lot of hot dry weather but there's also a shady one and sunny moist mix and this isn't for you to go home and plant them today what you're going to do is go home and stick them in your refrigerator and then you're going to mark your calendar in November and say hey time to start thinking you don't have to do it yet you just have to go hey time to start thinking that I want to do this maybe between Christmas and New Year so I'm happy you know we're a 501c3 nonprofit which means we're dependent on membership and donations and I am very proud of the group of people we have a membership of about 700 we're just in our fifth year and I've we've really brought a wide range of people together and it's a great group of people we have a membership gathering coming up in a couple weeks up in round pond which is near Demerscota but I'm happy to answer people's questions or chat with you I do want everyone to come up here and go home with something today thank you hi I'm Roger Burley working two shifts here today one for Portland Media Center and one for Oceanside Conservation Trust and we are here today on Long Island in Maine the law in the Maine Long Island the better one and we have two hosts here John Lordy and Michael Johnson so what does it mean to you and the Long Island to be hosting the annual meeting this year Michael yeah no we all take turns our member islands basically in Casco Bay we have our our properties that we work with and we like to rotate in between gives each island a chance the members of OCT a chance to see the different island properties on occasion get out on the boat for the day and get to see a different island and we've had other new meetings over here and this is the first time we've had it in a beautiful facility here it's a real treat so what did you think of Heather's oh it was great very impressive you know it's a full hour long talk full of information about native lands and why they're important how to grow them so I found it very is there a core of people here on Long Island who are likely to already doing it are likely to pick up on yeah I mean this is a pretty strong gardening community here and we have a lot of diversity of native habitats here between the deciduous and carnivorous forest and the whole backside of the islands are rich diversity of shrubs because of the the wind blowdowns and whatnot we have there so I think there's going to a lot of interest and now I'm here with Harry Pringle who lives on Little Diamond Island as well as important sometimes and Heather also talked quite a bit about the monarchs and milkweed and I know that you are particularly devoted to that concept so tell us a little bit more about how you're doing over in Little Diamond with milkweed and all your efforts well this has been a so far at least an incredible summer I've never seen so much milkweed on the island never seen so many monarchs never seen so many catapultors it's the long-term prognosis isn't particularly good so when you get a really good year like this you've got a sort of rubble in it a lot of things came together it's a good winter in Mexico not a lot of storms fair amount of precipitation as the monarchs have ignored so it was milkweed that got to me and the milkweed has done really well with all the rain that we had in the spring so it's going to be a really good year real question is about next year and the year after that and now I'm standing here with Gene Gallick who lives on Peaks Island and what did this talk to you in this meeting talking to you today you know it really inspired me I have a lot of lawn in my yard personally and I would love to see it be support biodiversity to a greater extent and you know I'm a big advocate for our open spaces to do that but you know somehow you know lawn is just so easy but this really really inspired me and made me think I could do a better job to support biodiversity by planting some native seeds you're gonna give away a lawnmower and become a meadow work I would really like to I think that the really hard part and I'm sure you've experienced the same thing is you know when you let the lawn grow the invasive come in so if you kind of give those native plants a head start by doing some of the stuff that Heather was talking about you know maybe maybe we could fight back that knot and all that stuff with the native plants and now I'm standing here with John Lordy who was the other host is the other host for Mullen Island John thank you so much for setting this up and what did this talk today mean to you and and will it inspire a lot of long hours here today will Heather's talk inspire people yeah I think so I think it was fascinating talk to learn about the native plants and how much of our landscape is losing on native diversity so it's pretty easy it seems to propagate native seeds and do plant the plants so I think people get excited and certainly the materials she brought down in the seedpads packs that she brought down are all gone so so people are excited and I think they're gonna take off take off with it