Folks, if you are talking about or sharing anything about “native plants”, please mention *your* location and *where* the plants are native to, not only country-wise but environment-wise.
So many people are learning about rewilding, gathering, foraging and gardening for food in harmony with the environment entirely online. Making your information clear for those people takes you little effort and limits confusion and misinformation getting out there.
The internet isn’t only “not just America”; many nations contain different environments with materially different conditions.
I live in Scotland. Most of the gardening and foraging information I get in the UK is calibrated for the south of England, which is a really different environment from mine - spring can come up to a month later and the south is semi-arid, which Scotland is *not*.
These days I actually look at a lot of Danish and Swedish gardening advice because their environment is a lot closer to mine. And that’s within one small nation. The world is wide and full of incredible diversity.
I am seeing UK-based pages sharing information about “native lawns” which contain plants from arid areas of the US because there’s no specificity in the original post. A small amount of information in the post, even a few lines, about locations, environments, context and goals would prevent this sort of confusion and incorrect information from spreading.
A lot of people are really enthusiastic and ready to be engaged in gardening for food, rewilding, gardening in harmony with the environment, soil preservation etc, but confusion and feeling they can’t trust information sources can really kill that. Make it easy for people new to the movement where you can, please.
ID: some photos of my native rewilded lawn from Scotland, UK, containing buttercups with butterfly eggs on them, yellow rattle, a willow tree, wild orchids, and many different grasses, and my small garden pond upcycled from a Belfast Sink surrounded by wild grasses, ladies’ mantle and wild geraniums and with woundwort and pondweed growing in it. There is a short path mowed in the lawn to allow safe passage of mobility devices and a wooden bench sitting in the long grass. A somewhat overgrown gravel drive and a front door with three steps up to it can be seen. The photos were taken in early June 2023.
