 So, what I want to do today is tell you three, what I think are the three most important things to think about in this going native movement that I'm working on. And I have been working in the field of native plant conservation and horticulture my whole adult life. I studied plant ecology in college. I then did a bunch of organic horticultural internships and my first real seed propagation work began as a volunteer at the Arnold Arboretum with Jack Alexander. And one of the things I always remember him saying on the first day I was with him was how he, so at the Arnold Arboretum they have woody plants from all over the world, hardy woody plants from all over the world. And he had a great job just being able to germinate seeds of everything. And he'd show me the different strategies they used from sawing, you know, making a little hole in the seed code, pouring boiling water over the seed, putting them in and out of the refrigerator. And then he said, in reality, what works best is if you just throw them outside. And Wild Seed Project, I'm dedicated to demystifying native seed sowing because, you know, the loss of native species from our region is so big we need lots of people to be doing this. So with my talk, I'll talk to show you a little bit more how to do that. But today what I'm going to do is I want to first let you know that our native plants are really beautiful and we have a lot of great species that could be planted in our urban, suburban, you know, all our developed landscapes. I also want you to go away understanding that they are crucial for biodiversity in our local ecosystem. You know, the native plants are the foundation of the food web. So we have to have them. It's not optional. We need to have them. And finally, I want to tell you about the role that gardeners, landscapers, all of us play in, can play in supporting the genetic diversity of our native flora because what's going on in the horticulture industry is counter to preserving the genetic diversity. So I'm going to begin with beauty. Can we turn the lights off? Wouldn't that film better? I feel like the pictures would show up a lot better. So there are, we have so many beautiful native plants that can be substituted for, you know, our common landscaping garden plants in every different situation. And they're great natives for sunny, dry conditions, for instance, where most people think, oh, you can only either do nothing or plant daylilies and beech rows, both are, which are from Eurasia. So not indigenous here. So if you look at this picture, the upper left, that's Aronia, our black choke berry, that's a great native shrub, couldn't tolerate worst, you know, the most infertile, dry, sandy, gravely soil. Next to it, the orange flower is butterfly milkweed. That's one of, it's actually extinct now in Maine, but it did used to grow in Maine. It was it from the coastal sand plain area, like down in the Wells, Kennebunk area. But that is a very easy native wild perennial to grow and thrives in sandy, dry, gravely soil, and it supports a monarch butterfly. Bottom left is our native, we have several native roses that can be substituted for the rosa regosa, that beech rose that is not native, and again thrives in poor soil. And then on the right is black-eyed coneflower or black-eyed susan. Another one that just thrives in sunny, dry conditions. So we have native plants that thrive in infertile soil, so that don't take fussing to plant. You know, wet areas, you know, the ditches, those areas that people usually think are problems that need to be fixed. We have so many great woody plants and wildflower, perennial wildflowers that thrive in ditches. So on the upper left is blue vervein, that's a wetland meadow wildflower. And by the way, a lot of wetland plants are very drought tolerant. So they can be in a ditch or under a downspout, get flooded and then tolerate also bone-dry soil. So they're tolerant of that fluctuating water levels. The top right is our native blue flag iris. The bottom right is the swamp milkweed. So it's another one of our milkweed species that, like all milkweeds, support the monarch butterfly, but also lots of other pollinators. It also makes an excellent garden plant. And then on the bottom left is pussy willow, elderberry, you know, viburnums. We've got a lot of native shrubs that thrive in damp, soggy soil. Then tough shady sites, you know, where especially in Portland, people seem to think that the only solution for the shade is Bart mulch or maybe some hostas. We've got, you know, we are from the great eastern deciduous forest, you know, bioregion. We have so many excellent native plants that can thrive in both dry shade and in more mesic fertile shade. And so you're looking at the picture here, purple-flowering raspberry, which is a shrub, Canada anemone, largely wood aster, and hastened fern. These are some of our toughest native ground covers that could fill large areas that now have nothing growing, you know, maybe in the shade of a building or a tree. We also have, you know, the more delicate woodland wildflowers. This is blood root that make excellent shade garden plants. So again, diversifying beyond the hosta solution, which don't support the other creatures. And, you know, with our woodland plants, you know, they really just need leaf mold to mimic that, you know, the natural soils that they get in the forest. We even have a native pachystandra. You know, people know the ground cover of pachystandra, which is the one that's commonly used is from Asia. Well, we actually have an Appalachian pachystandra. It doesn't grow wild in Maine, but it's perfectly hardy here. And unlike the Asian one, this one supports our local fauna, the pollinators, the birds. By the way, on your handout, you've got the names of a lot of different species. So you can take that home and sort of use it as a plant list. We've got lots of beautiful small flowering trees and shrubs. This is the alternate leaf or pagoda dogwood. It's about to bloom now, and it attracts a lot of the little teeny native bees. And then later on, produce fruit. So, you know, we've got native Hawthorne spice bush, different couple of different species of dogwood, shad, lots of flowering trees and shrubs. And then they all produce fruits that are crucial for migrating songbirds. They also host a lot of butterflies and moths in their foliage, you know, butterflies and moths to live and reproduce. It's not just the nectar that they need. They actually need, in their caterpillar stage, the foliage of native plants. You know, you've learned that about the monarch butterfly, but that's not a unique situation in nature. All of our butterfly and moth species need host plants. And so a lot of our native trees and shrubs support a lot of different butterflies and moths in their juvenile stage. We have a native evergreen rhododendron. This is the Rose Bay rhododendron. The northernmost population of this plant is down near Samford, Maine, so about 45 minutes from here. There's a huge stand of, with hundreds of plants, it's a protected site owned by the New England Wildflower Society. It, these bloom in July, so it's a late blooming rhododendron, has big dark green evergreen leaves. We also have a handful of native azaleas native to Maine and then quite a few more species native south to us that are perfectly hardy. Again, most people's gardens are planted with hybrids of the exotics or, you know, an exotic one, but we have our own native species. And this one bumblebees the love. You know, a lot of people are familiar with garden spireas. Again, it's usually one of the European or Asian species, but we have two native ones. This is called steeplebush and we have another one called white spirea. These are butterfly and pollinator magnets. They're nice, small shrubs. They only get a couple feet tall and are easy to grow. So again, we could be substituting these native species for the common horticultural plants that are not part of our ecosystem. We even have a native hydrangea. Now it doesn't grow wild in Maine. It grows wild in southern New England, out to the Midwest and down to Georgia, but it's perfectly hardy here. This is hydrangea arborescens. There's a common cultivar of this with big white pom-pom flowers called Annabelle. And that it was a naturally occurring sport or freak that somebody found in the wild and it's a double flowered form. So when you look at this plant, you see those big petals that are ringing it? Those are actually infertile and then the fertile flowers are that cluster in the little and the wild form of this plant is covered with little pollinating insects and bumblebees when it's blooming. The double flowered form, most of the hydrangeas, whether they're the native or the Asian, are those pom-pom ones. What happens is with double flowers is that the stamens and pistols, which are the sex organs of the plant, they've mutated and they look like petals. That's why, so there's no nectar, there's no pollen, so there's nothing for the insects to do. That's why they bloom for so long, they don't do anything. So it's very interesting to see the wild form of this blooming next to a double flowered one where I've seen like a bumblebee dive into the double flowered one and then give up and go away because there's no nectar for it. Now I can't promise you, I know everybody loves the blue hydrangea and we don't have a native one that does that. But we have tons of beautiful native perennial wildflowers that are blue. So the upper left is the blue wood flocks, upper right is Jacob's ladder, both of those are blooming right now. Bottom left is Bottle Gentian that blooms in August, September and the bottom right is the Great Blue Lobelia. I'll talk about that plant again in a minute. Then we see the upper left is Blue Flag Iris. The upper right is our true native lupine, the Sundial Lupin, which is also extinct in Maine. It grew like that orange butterfly weed, it grew in the sand plains like down in the Wells, Kennebunk area. And the sandy soils are the first to get developed because they're so easy to build on. So there's none of it left in Maine. It's rare throughout New England. It still grows a bit down south and all the way up to the prairie states. Very easy lupin to grow. The one that you see growing wild in Maine is actually from the Pacific Northwest. Then on the bottom left, that's our little Campanula. And the bottom right is one of our many species of aster. This is the smooth blue aster. So we have lots of great blue plants, but I can't give you a blue hydrangea. So anyone can substitute some of these native plants for exotics and whether you want to make a whole garden of natives like this one here, or whether you just want to choose one species to plant and add to your garden. This is New England aster, which this person planted it right in front of her fence along the street. And in September and October, it just covered with bumblebees and the migrating monarch butterflies. If you live in the city or an apartment and have no earth to plant, you can still do something. Native plants can grow in planters, window boxes, or get out there and plant your health strip, that terrible soil between the street and the sidewalk. So everybody can do something. But the real reason to go native to start planting natives is if we want our region to stay resilient and diverse, because people are everywhere and we're taking up the space that used to be the local flora and fauna. This picture is taken right along the Przomska River in Portland, so you can see the suburbia creeping into the woods. That's a very diverse, there's a lot of woodland wildflowers in the front of that picture. There's trilium, there's wood anemone, there's trout lily. So a lot of the slow growing woodland wildflowers that are indicative of land that has always remained forested. And in Portland in the 17 and 1800s, their river was so polluted, we treated it like a dump, that nobody wanted to live along the river. And so it actually protected some of the native plants. The other places around Portland where you still see a really diverse population of woodland wildflowers is Evergreen Cemetery and Robinson Woods. That also has a lot. But along the Przomska River, but here if you look at this picture, this is so typical where we are creeping up and isolating the natural landscape. And when you get isolated populations, they get smaller and smaller over time and become inbred. So we need to figure out how to reconnect up these remnant habitats. And we can do that by planting the native plants in our developed landstakescapes and creating corridors. Same things in open areas. We are mowing the native flora and fauna away. And mowing, this is the Eastern Proms Cemetery. And cemeteries often have a lot of still remnant meadow wildflowers because they were never, they were turned into cemeteries early. They tend to have sandy soils, which the lawn grasses don't thrive in as well. But they get mowed right when the blue it and the wild strawberry and the little violets start blooming, which is right around now. What happens? The mowing guys come out and start mowing it. So if we want to have diverse meadows, we need to not mow them during the growing season. Mowing mid-season, and by mid-season, I mean before November, is the equivalent of a clear cut to meadow species, whether it's the wildflowers or all the creatures that live in there. It is a clear cut for them. And the mowing in mid-season, that comes from agriculture and hang. So of course, if you're harvesting a hay crop, you need to mow it in the summer. But if you're not, let it grow. And like these asters, I don't collect the astr seeds till the first or second week in November. So if you have asters blooming in August or September or any other wildflower, and then you mow it then, you cut back it. Don't let it reproduce from seed. A lot of them are perennials. And they'll come back from their roots for a while. But perennials die out over time. So it's one of the ways that we are really setting back the native species. Now, it doesn't mean that we can do nothing and just stop mowing everywhere. And the reason is, is because of invasive species. We have introduced all our invasive species were purposefully introduced by horticulture, actually, and widely planted. And so luckily, the invasives aren't hard to identify. It's much easier to learn the common invasives in your meadow and just keep cutting them back. And you can do it if you've just got them popping up here and there. You can just be persistent and clip them right at the ground level. And if they're one of the nasty ones, it might take five years. If they're one of the easier ones, any plant has to photosynthesize to survive. So if you can keep it from growing back, it will eventually give up the go. So we can't do nothing. But we are mowing what remnant wildflowers we still have in meadows away. We need to protect where we do still have existing diverse, healthy habitat. This is the Rachel Carson Reserves and Wells. And this is a really beautiful little remnant piece of forest with a lot of diversity of both mature canopy trees understory. That arching shrub is a witch hazel and then a lot of different wildflowers on the forest floor. But these areas are all being isolated and cut off by us. And we need to protect them and make sure we start connecting up these remnant habitats through our developed landscapes. So what do I mean by the word native? It's a very loaded word. Europeans, especially Germans, won't even use it anymore because what happened during World War II within Nazis. But the term native is relative. And when we say native, we tend to mean what plants were growing here pre-Columbian. Because when Columbus came, that was the beginning of the great big disturbance. This is a picture from the Camden Hills. But 13,000 years ago when the glaciers were treated, this was nothing but gravel and sand and gravel and rock. There were no plants here. All our flora got pushed south to the coastal sand plain, to some remnant areas in the southern Smoky Mountains and to the Gulf area. So our flora has had to migrate north and south. There have been at least six ice ages in the last couple million years. And then before that, our flora, our eastern North American flora, most of those plants are millions of years old. And some of them began when we were still Pangea, one big island. And then the continents started breaking up. So our plants have undergone climatic change before. They have adapted to that. What they haven't adapted to is the rapidity and the obstacles that we have put in place via us. After the last ice age, it was, as the plants migrated north, there was basically unbroken up landscape for them to migrate. And that's what we've changed. So the term native still refers to not the new plants that have come since then. But yes, all these new plants that have come since then. Some day we will have to consider them native. But as far as them becoming part of our ecosystem, that takes millions of years. After the last biggest extinction at the end of the dinosaurs, it didn't take 50 years. It didn't take 500 years for new ecosystems. It takes millions of years for that to happen. That's why we need to keep the native diversity that we still have around for as long as we can. So what's the difference between a wild plant and a domesticated plant? Because there's a big difference. So our native plants have only recently been adapted, taken on by horticultures. So they're still wild. So this is a New England aster. So remember, flowers are all about sex and reproduction. And the petals, that color is to attract the pollinators. It's not, we're not the pollinators. It wasn't invented for us. It was for the different insects that they've co-evolved for. And then the stamens and pistols are usually in the center. And those are the sex organs. And so wild plants, there are some species that are wind pollinated. But three quarters of them need some other creature. And in the north, it's mostly insects. Hummingbirds are our only bird pollinator. If we were from the tropics, there are a lot of more birds that are pollinators. But for us, it's just the mostly butterfly bees, beetles, flies. But the bees are the big ones. And we end the butterflies in moths. And we have about, I think, something like 270 native bee species in Maine. And so with wild plants, their different insects are attracted to different plants. So if you want to have pollinator diversity, you've got to have plant diversity. And these wild plants are the base of the food chain. Plants, they're what all the other creatures need to live. In the oceans, it's the microorganisms that are the base of the food chain. But on land, it's the plants. The other characteristic of a wild plant is that it doesn't grow alone. It grows as part of a community. So this is our native iris. There's no such thing as a monoculture in nature. There's always, even what might look to you like only one species, it's not really. There's many species of plants and then all the different fungi and bacteria, all the microorganisms of the soil. So there's lots of diversity. There's no monoculture in nature. Then the other thing about how plants are is how they get their nutrients. Plants don't need food the way animals do. They make their energy, their food, from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. And then they get their micronutrients from the minerals in the soil. So it's like the equivalent of their vitamins almost. And in decay, so think of what happens in a healthy forest every year. Every year, copious amount of leaves, animal poop, dead animals, insects, branches fall down to the forest floor and begin the process of decay. And that decay happens with bacteria and fungi and all the little creatures of the soil. And what do most gardeners or humans do? We rake all that away. And we've been trained to think by the horticulture industry that we need to feed our plants. We don't. We need to just let the natural recycle process happen. So how do you do that in our developed landscapes? You start by letting the leaves stay. Now you can rake them off your paths. Or if you have them in lawn, they will smother the lawn because the lawn grasses need shade. But everywhere else, leave them where they fall. If you're creating a new garden, you may need to even bring more leaves in. And like Portland composts all its leaves. In fact, it's great that they're not getting dumped. They're getting composted. But it's made people who might have let their leaves fall where they may. Instead, they're raking them up and sending them off. So they're completely ruining the nutrient cycling. So leaves, our native plants are not domesticated. They don't. Vegetables, they've been bred. And then we eat them and take the nutrients away. So you have to add a lot back to the soil when you're growing vegetables and when you're growing the really cultivated plants. But with native plants, they don't even like that super high fertility of a really rich compost. They don't need that. It's really leaf mold is the perfect soil amendment. Or you can't get that a good decayed hardwood bark mulch. So now I want to just focus on what's going on in the horticulture industry. And I use the word industry on purpose because it has really changed in my adult lifetime with native plants. So right now you're looking at this is a cultivar of our native red maple or swamp maple tree. The red maple, it's not the Norway maple that has those purple leaves. It's a green leaf tree. It's called red maple because the flowers in the spring are red. The keys are red. And then it turns a brilliant color in the fall. And it's one of our native trees that does really well as a street tree. So it's widely planted as a street tree. But there are almost always cultivars. Now cultivars are clones. And so what a cultivar is, it can be a naturally occurring sport or freak that some nurseryman found and decided that one was more superior. And you can recognize it at the nursery because it has the names in quotes. So this one that was chosen was chosen because the branches are very vertical and going upright. And if you look in the nursery catalog, they market it as a street tree. They say, this is a great street tree because the branches won't grow out and hit your building or hit the trucks. Well, anyone who's ever taken a pruning class, the very first thing you learn is that when a tree like apple, if you've done apple pruning, the crotch in a tree, that's where the trunk and the branch comes out. If it's narrow, there's very little tissue, and it makes a really weak branch. And so those branches always break off. So apple growers prune those out because it's got to hold the weight of the apples. So you can see in these trees, half the branches are dead because they've all been ripped off by the ice and snow load. And half the tree is dead because it's not a good selection. The other thing is this tree is all a clone. So there's only one, this whole line of them, there's probably 10 different clones of our native red maple that are widely marketed for street trees and widely planted. So they're all one individual gene. So remember the Irish potato famine, why did all the potatoes get wiped out in Ireland? Because it was one individual, and a disease or pest comes along, there's no genetic diversity. And so here we actually have a great native tree that even does well in our poor urban environment, but yet we're not planting any genetic diversity of it. These are our two native lobelia species. The left is the great blue lobelia and the right is cardinal flower. Both of them grow wild in Maine. The blue lobelia is quite rare. They both make great garden plants. They're very easy to grow from seed. The red cardinal flower is a hummingbird plant. And you can always tell plants that the hummingbird's light because the flower has a long throat that fits that hummingbird beak. Well, if you go to a nursery, most of what they sell are either hybrids between our two native species or between the cardinal flower and there's lots of tropical lobilias. And when you hybridize plants, you can mess up their sex organs. Again, think of a donkey and a horse makes a mule that has messed up sex organs and can't reproduce. So the same thing can happen with plants. And when you hybridize plants, sometimes they'll still be fertile, but they'll be more deformed. So they won't produce the same amount in nectar or pollen. And so these plants are often marketed as great for hummingbird plants, but the hummingbird comes and either there's no nectar or there's not as much nectar and hummingbirds are already stressed because we've damaged the ecosystem. So hybridizing is not what we want with if we want to support the pollinators and other fauna. Both of these plants are really easy to grow from seed. Purple cone flower, if anyone's been an herb gardener for decades, you know, the cone flower. So on the right, you're seeing the wild form of purple cone flower. This is a prairie wild flower. It ranges naturally into Southwestern Pennsylvania, but it's a very hardy plant and it's a great pollinator attractor. Birds love the seeds. Well, in the last 25 years, it's become a very popular perennial garden plan and the nurseries have started hybridizing it. There's about a dozen different cone flower species all native to the Midwest. And if you look at the picture on the left, you can see yellow one and orange ones. And then right in the middle, this, that's a double flowered form. So there's no nectar, there's no pollen. These plants are now being patented. So, you know, they're, which means they're controlled. So if you had a little nursery here, you're not even allowed to propagate them. So, and they've totally, they're also not hardy anymore. A lot of these Echinaceae hybrids are all coming from a big nursery and greenhouse grower in Texas. You know, when you mass produce plants in a greenhouse, so they're often propagated by tissue culture where that's, you know, the old fashioned way to clone a plant was just to dig up and divide the root system and you have two, you know, the same individual or maybe do cuttings. Now they're more often done in a laboratory in a process called tissue culture where they take, they can just take a small number of cells from the mother plant and then culture it and literally in a Petri dish, get thousands of plants and then they prick them out and grow them under very sterile conditions which means they use a lot of nasty chemicals to keep it sterile and then eventually they can put them in a big greenhouse and then eventually move them outside. And again, they're often controlled through patenting so you can't even propagate them. So this is what we don't wanna happen to our native plants because they won't be supporting all the other organisms. This is one of our great native shrubs called dwarf yellow honeysuckle, direvilla lunissera. It's a bumblebee pollinated plant, the little yellow flowers. After the bee has visited them, they turn red so you can tell with this group here, some the bee has already been to and others have just opened up and haven't been pollinated. And right when they leaf out in the spring, like right now, if you look on the left, see that coppery color on the leaves? So lots of plants have that purple or reddish coppery color when they leaf out in the spring. And it's deter herbivores, so insects, browsing mammals just for a week or two as they're photosynthesizing because they're desperate to photosynthesize and get some energy into their root system. And then they turn green after that. Well, this direvilla plant is now really popular in the nursery trade and there's now this, somebody found one that stayed purple all growing season and you can now get that. But so there are five species of leptopter moths that have to have the foliage of this plant during their caterpillar stage. And the caterpillars hate that purple chemical. They won't eat it. So imagine if we found a purple leaf form of milkweed. The monarch butterfly would lay its eggs on it and then the caterpillars would hatch and they go, tastes terrible and they wouldn't be able to eat it and they would die. That's what when we start selecting for these traits that we might think are beautiful. And I'm not making an aesthetic judge. It's fine if you think this is beautiful but if you want to support our ecosystem and all the other creatures, these unusual forms will not do that. And like I said, the caterpillars don't even like this one. This is wild geranium, which is now just starting to bloom. Wild great native perennial for sort of part shade to full shade. And there's a, I mean, I don't know why people just think this brown leaf form is pretty, but somebody does. So if you go to a nursery, you'll see I think it's called geranium chocolate. And it stays brown, like I said, all season and there are 24 species of butterflies and moths that feed on the foliage of the wild geranium. So if we start planting this purple leaf form everywhere, we will not be supporting them. It will even start hybridizing or crossing. It's not hybrid because it's the same species, but that one clone will mix with the wild form and start changing it. This is not what we want to have happen with our native plants. The other thing that's different with wild plants and wild seed is how the seeds need to break dormancy to germinate. So these are some seedlings of that same wild geranium. And the seeds release in the summer and if I sowed 100 seeds, they actually have to go through a winter before they'll break dormancy and germinate the next spring. So this little pot you're looking at has, the bigger leaves are the ones that germinated last year. So about a third of that plant seeds will germinate the next year. And then the rest of them germinated this spring. And so that is a really good strategy in a wild plant to disperse the germination of your seedlings over time. So for instance, remember the drought we had last year? Well, and the year before too. Probably a lot of the wild geranium seeds that did germinate last year ended up shriveling up and dying because it never rained over the whole summer. So that's a wild, you know, a lot of our native plants have this double dormancy where some of the seeds will wait and germinate a couple of years later. And that is a good strategy in a wild plant and something that we don't want to lose as these plants come into the nursery trade. The other thing you need to be aware of if you're interested in planting natives is not purchasing wild collected native plants. This is the Pink Lady Slipper Orchid. Some of our wild plants don't take the cultivation. Lady Slipper Orchids, the seed takes about 12 years from seed to reach blooming size. The seeds have to have some different soil fungi for the seed to germinate or for the plant to grow. You know, so this plant is, you know, common, still common in more acid woodlands, but when you see it, like a lot of people will call me up and say, oh, you know, some trees came down in that storm this winter and now we have Pink Lady Slippers came in or blooming everywhere and they just appeared. Well, they didn't just appear. Those plants were there already. Either that person didn't recognize them because they didn't bloom because it had been such dense shade or Lady Slipper Orchids can even live underground for a number of years and then come up when their conditions are right. So this is a wildflower that doesn't want to be tamed. And if you see it for sale in a nursery, don't buy it. I can guarantee it's been wild collected. A lot of ferns are still wild collected in mains. Same with bunchberry and blueberry sods. So you need to be the savvy buyer. And, you know, if you see these plants for sale, did you propagate them or were they dug from the wild? Because our wild areas are having enough trouble. They don't need us digging up the plants and selling them. So what's the solution? You know, growing them from seed. It's seed grown plants where the genetic diversity is. And so, you know, either, you know, I'm gonna show you how to do it yourself or support the nurseries that are doing it. And right now a lot of nurseries aren't so you need to ask. You need to be polite when you ask, but tell them you want seed grown, genetically diverse native plants, not just cultivars. Because the cultivars aren't gonna support the genetic diversity to let our plants, you know, make it into the future. Because every individual, whether it's a human, an animal, or a plant, when, you know, when you are a result of sexual reproduction, you are unique. So if any of you have siblings, you know how different you're gonna have turned out from your, you know, with the same parents. Well, the same is true of plants. And when you grow plants from seeds, some of them are gonna like the hotter climate we have, some are gonna like it if it's hotter and drier, other are gonna do better if it's hotter and moisture, and others, if the ice age comes back, are gonna, you know, that's where we will help these plants make it over time. So the easiest way to do it is to, if you have been used to growing annuals or vegetables from seeds, everything you've learned doesn't apply to the native plants. The warm spring weather or a greenhouse is not what our native seeds want. The time to sow them is in the fall or even winter. You can sow them in pots. You know, so in these three pots, this is a seed sowing I did on New Year's Day. The left is black-eyed coneflower. The middle is New England aster. The right is the swamp milkweed. You can sow a lot of species seeds close together. You then cover them with sand, and then you put them outside. Doesn't matter what the weather is. Ice, snow, wind, rain. You put them outside, and you usually have to cover them with wire because squirrels and chipmunks, you know, are like the local juvenile delinquent and they'll either decide to pull your labels out or to put their acorns in there. So cover them with just some wire and then wait till the spring. And so this picture is taken in mid-May. So in little four-inch pots, you know, in nine four-inch pots, you can have 50 to 100 seedlings in each of those four-inch pots. In one square foot, you can produce hundreds of different genetically diverse native plants. You can then just grow them on through the summer. I like to just take those four-inch pots and move them up to bigger pots and wait till September to plant them out in your garden. The reason is, these are perennials. You know, most of our native plants are not annuals. You know, in the Northern climate, most species are perennials, which means they're slower growing and they put more of their growth into the root system. You know, the annuals that you might know, jewelweed's an annual, but that's the exception. So most of them won't bloom the first year. Black-eyed Susan well, but most won't. So put them outside, once they germinate in the spring, just move that whole little pot to a much bigger pot and then in the fall, you can divide them up and plant them out. You know, if you're really attentive and you're gonna fuss over them over the summer, you could do it in June, but think of the weather we keep happening where we have droughts and these are juveniles. If you keep them in a little nursery area, you can also get to know that plant and the seedlings are really cute. You know, it's fun. It's fun. It's a great way to learn to recognize the plants and then you'll start noticing them either in your landscape or even out. When you're hiking, you'll start to recognize what the juveniles look like. So, you know, I studied plant ecology in college and everything is worse since then. When I look at my old college copy of Newcombe's Wildflower Guide and read through, you know, all the different plants and that were listed as abundant and common, it's shocking how, you know, a lot of the species, you know, are not necessarily on the endangered species list, but they're not abundant anymore. And, you know, these plants need us caring about them and they need us being proactive and sowing their seeds and bringing them back. And despite the situation in nature being worse, what makes me really hopeful is that, unlike 40 years ago, today, more people care. More regular people know we need to change our relationship with nature. They know that something wrong and they wanna do something. And that's what's really great about planting natives and sowing the seeds. You know, you can go to a nursery and buy one, you know, native swamp milkweed and plant it in your garden and you'll pay five to 10 bucks for that one plant and you'll be doing a good thing. But, you know, you sow some seeds, you're gonna end up with a whole population. And if you don't need it in your landscape, you can share it with your friends. They'll probably like you better than if you give them giant zucchinis. You know, it's a really positive action that we can all make. And, you know, these plants need us caring about them. And I hope some of you will consider doing it. So the beauty of right now is this isn't something, you don't need to sow the seeds right now. You got the whole growing season to get out in your yard and to get out in nature and to figure out what's in your yard or what could be in your yard. And, you know, we have a great annual magazine that's all about gardening with natives. Our website has a wealth of free information. Every month, we have a different native plant blog and it's just an article about some aspect of planting, gardening or planting with natives. We sell 65 different species of seeds, all grown in Maine, all wild type, either collected from our nursery stock beds or from private people's lands who've given us permission and correctly identified and lots of great propagation information on the website. We're a 501C3 nonprofit, which means we're supported by membership and donation and seed sales. So I really encourage you to both come up here and take a look at our magazine. There's no advertising in it. There's really great writing. And take a look at what you can see on the website. And I'm happy to answer any questions since we still have a few minutes. If you have any native plant dilemmas that you want the answer to. Lots of plants are growing faster because of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. A lot of the worst invasives, they're growing better with the increased CO2. And poison ivy, you know how poison ivy is a native species, so you cannot call a native plant invasive. It's aggressive, but it's not invasive, but it thrives on disturbance. So think where you see it. The side of the road. Right where it gets the extra COT from the exhaust. So it's the increased CO2 in the atmosphere. It's creeping into my passion. But it was very aggressive in the last five or seven years. Yes, yes. So borrow some CO2. Yes. And disturb it. Get some goats. There's actually somebody in Kenny Bunker who you can rent their goats. They love it and they're not bothered by the poison ivy. That's a lot of it. What they do is out-compete them. Take the Norway maple tree, which is a healthy part of a deciduous mixed forest in Europe. It's just, for some reason, and they don't really understand completely why. When some plants get taken to another part of the world, so you remove all the fungi, bacteria, insects, animals that traditionally eat it and help keep it in check when they come to a new place. And our plants can be invasive in Europe and Asia. It's just removing some plants. It doesn't happen to all plants, but some, a percentage of them, end up just being completely out of control. But it's not all exotic plants that cause a problem. But more and more, what to me is shocking is, take vinca, I don't know if people know vinca. When I studied ecology in 1980, that was not considered invasive. And now it is, and they don't know. Is it the increased CO2? Is it just time? And there's been a genetic mutation in the plant that after being, vinca was brought over in colonial times. It's been here for 150 years and now suddenly it's taking off. So it's more, we've just been playing, we've been playing God in the garden. And to me, we have so many beautiful native plants. Turn all that passion about beauty into learning the natives. Cause I promise you, there are plenty to choose from that will make your yard. I'm not wanting people to have ugly landscape. And there's so much more dynamic. It's so much more interesting to sit out on your deck or terrace and watch butterflies and bumblebees and birds coming in and out because there's something for them. That's where the exotics, they don't offer much to our fauna the way that natives do. But we just got a grant from the DOT to do a roadside manual about how to support the native plants. And you can get this right now from the DOT. And the real thing is not mowing during the growing season and all that information is in here. So I mean, it's a long, slow process. One thing you can do is make a little sign that says, please don't mow for the pollinators. You can even get one from the National Wildlife Federation or from Monarch Watch and put that out there that will sometimes deter the mowing people cause most people just don't know. And then you always have to have the job of making sure, cause if you're in South Portland there are plenty of invasives there. So it's a long, slow process. Getting people. And that's what, like I said, that's what our annual magazine has a lot of articles about this. Donate one to your library. Or give them one to your city. Yeah, well thank you everybody.