Imagine you meet a gardener who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown Buddleia davidii by a strange nurseryman. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held a shovel in her hands, before she had gotten her first indoor potted succulent, without her parents knowing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time a cultivar more extreme. By ten it seemed normal. By eleven, she was browsing Proven Winners' website regularly on her own. She is calm about this, reassuring you that this has happened to most of her friends.

Would anyone think this was normal? Part of coming-of-age, her healthy development? Exploring colorful ornamentals? Or would we call this abuse?

These days we talk a lot about trauma. We worry about the impact of non-native invasive plants, we agonize about our gardens, we inspect every inch of our mulched paths. But one trauma being tragically ignored, changing the minds and souls of children, is Buddleia.

Modern Buddleia is unlike anything else in history. Children are learning about non-native ornamentals for the first time from social media algorithms designed to drag them toward ever-more depraved content. They are also learning from magazines like Better Homes and Gardens (BHG). This is the glorification of graphic cultivars. We pretend it has always been this way, because it is too painful to accept that it hasn’t.

This type of bold, fragrant inflorescence can traumatize children. Several studies have found that the earlier they are exposed to modern cultivars, the more likely they are to view social media gardening content, and have lower self-esteem. Later in life, Buddleia planting has also been linked to lower garden satisfaction, and a higher likelihood of purchasing sterile, double-flowered natives.

We learned the wrong things about gardening. We gardeners learned that HOAs are brutal, that a neighbor's jealousy is predatory and insatiable, that the only way to be loved is to plant a better cultivar. That garden design isn’t something to be clumsily stumbled through, but a performance to be delivered, “content” to be copied. Of course we did. If a gardener grew up being shown hardcore Buddleia by a stranger, we wouldn’t be surprised if she couldn’t accept native plants as an adult, couldn’t see a native plant's own worth, and feared abandonment from pollinators. We worry that young gardeners have learned to accept invasives and being inundated with suckering thugs. We don't worry enough that they never learned how to accept growing native plants.

So this is not only about the invasive Buddleia. I’m talking about the entire online non-native ornamental industry. The whole thing: seeing plants as color categories instead of habitat and food for native fauna, getting bored and swiping onto something more colorful, betraying ecosystems all the while. Yes, modern Buddleia cultivars are terrifying but my generation is already primed for those. This is what we call progress, having everything except our larval host species. Having intimate access to an ample supply of nectar, but no edible foliage.

For the next generation, for their childhood, for their ecoregions, we have to find our keystone native plants. We have to process the horror of gardeners watching hardcore Buddleia, acknowledge the scale of what is happening, confront what we have done and its consequences. Only by facing it will we find some words of our own. I hope we aren’t afraid to use them.

be kind, don’t rat me out if it is…

Is this viable? It does seem lush and inviting.

Stop infloresceing so densely in the garden if you don't want to be labeled as such.

[Scenic view of wildflowers growing under the Staten Island side of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, New York City. CC-BY-NC, ©lenlibrizzi at iNaturalist.]

I live in a small town in the Adirondack mountains, in upstate New York. I love the wild character of where I live. It's a remote and special place, far away from the degraded environment of the city.

To honor the unique natural character of where I live, I grow a plant in my garden that is native to the lowlands of the Gulf Coast, a thousand miles south of me.

(Maybe the plant is native as far northeast as Virginia. Or maybe only back to Mississippi. And then maybe up to Michigan. When a plant so readily escapes cultivation as lance leaf coreopsis, it gets hard to say.)

I am no purist. If a plant from the southern coastal plains is on the popular list at the Little Nursery on the Prairie™, I'll plant it in my northern highlands garden.

Now, I can sense the native plant gardeners who have purist attitudes, the native plant gardeners who think that native plants should be native, getting uncomfortable here.

I've said that my location is special. That I live very near pristine wilderness. And I've said that lance leaf coreopsis readily escapes cultivation. It's a prolific seeder, with winged seeds that spread with the wind. Is there not a danger that my garden plant might spread to said nearby pristine wilderness areas, displacing and outcompeting the native flora there?

You worrywarts.

This plant has such a pretty yellow flower. It's the clean simple wildflower as grown in Plato's cave. Let me show some off, aside from the ones in my small town garden.

I found this pretty one in a woods opening a few miles west of town. And this one volunteering in sparse vegetation very near by my own garden. It's almost like the wind had blown it there. This one was not far off the road, a few miles east. And I found one, two, three, four while walking along the banks of the upper Hudson River just north of town.

Farther away from my own garden, so I can't take credit for them, but this beauty in the Five Ponds Wilderness Area, and this pretty one in the Debar Mountain Wild Forest.

So at any rate, I hope I have convinced you that stuffy purist fears about garden plants grown outside their native range escaping cultivation, and maybe even invading pristine wilderness areas, are greatly exaggerated.

Are as overblown as the way a lanceleaf coreopsis seed can fly with the wind, to use metaphor.

I've traveled a bit. I've seen the United States. Check out the beautiful lance-leaf tickseeds in the Payette National Forest in Idaho, outright springing from granite; the Sturgeon River State Forest in Minnesota; the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire; and the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico. All of these deserve a big red exclamation mark of approval.

And finally one, two, three lance-leaved coreopsises hanging out on the recently active Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. The native plant gardeners nearby must love seeing the plants in the wild, and marvel how they got to such an unlikely location.

OK, I'll admit, I can sense the snobby purist fears persisting. And perhaps even being strengthened.

My beloved garden plant, Coreopsis lanceolata by binomial, can sprout among the washed up trash at the mouth of the Hudson River; it can also spread along higher quality areas on the upper Hudson near where I live.

It can sprout from granite in Idaho, and from the sides of volcanos in Hawaii. Though probably originating in the subtopics, it can tolerate brutally cold winters in state forests in northern Minnesota.

It can grow damned near anywhere, degraded and pristine environment alike. That starts seeming invasive.

But no, no, it's OK. It's OK for me as a native plant gardener to grow it, even though it isn't native to me.

It's really really pretty, see, and is a pollinator magnet, and therefore can't do any harm to the environment. Of course I want to help spread it around.

Nothing says native New England than the weirdest asters known to man (or they!). After six months of confounding growth with nary a flash of color they have exploded. Now finally in the Autumn I can finally enjoy the aster yellows my neighbor is always warning me about.

One bitter note in my perfect and unimpeachable slice of native Eden: My beautiful milkweed (from a packet shipped from Florida, a place native to many plants), once adorned in beautiful native insects like M O N A R C H C A T E R P I L L A R S and the M I L K W E E D B E E T L E (need to read more about this to see how I feel about it) is now infested with bugs, APHIDS no less, almost certainly from China (please don’t check, at capacity with correction at this time).

I have tried everything, from doing nothing to sighing bigly to using eight bottles of Dawn Dishsoap™️. Any advice? I will disagree and criticize you no matter what you say.

I've been waiting for this to bloom all summer for this post, I couldn't wait any longer.

Can y’all advise on how to ethically remove ticks from my skin in the future so these sweet babies can get their bloodmeal from somebody else next time?

The straight guys might have outdone us....

Been a rough day, bout to do a line of penstemon seeds

Glad to see this guy

earlier post: https://www.reddit.com/r/NativePlantCirclejerk/comments/1s3imvl/i_foraged_more_delicious_meatball_today/