Native Plants
How far can one go with fear of the "other"? I recently read a fascinating book by Robert Sullivan called Rats (more at my book note). My attention was drawn to the observations in this footnote about things "native":
The term native when used in regards to plants and animals can be complicated. In an essay entitled "The Mania for Native Plants in Nazi Germany," published in a collection called Concrete Jungle, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, the director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dunbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., says "The missionary zeal with which so-called foreign plants are condemned as aggressive is significant. Such characterizations do not contribute to a rational discussion about the future development of our natural and cultural environment, but possibly promote xenophobia." Wolschke-Bulmahn points out that some plants that are considered "native" to the United States may have been carried over from Siberia by people immigrating to America over a land bridge, and he writes of an early proponent of native plants, Jens Jensen, a landscape architect who lived in Wisconsin, who advocated the destruction of "foreign" plants, especially "Latin" or "Oriental" plants. Jensen had close ties to Nazi landscape architects in Germany. In a journal, Jensen wrote: "The gardens that I crated myself…shall express a spirit of America, and therefore shall be free of foreign character as far as possible." In 1938, Rudolph Borchardt, a Jewish writer persecuted by the Nazis, wrote this of native plant advocates like Jensen: "If this kind of garden-owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gillyflower nor a rosemary, neither a peach-tree nor a myrtle sapling nor a tea-rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect people, time and latitudes…. The garden of humanity is a huge democracy. Is it not the only democracy which such clumsy advocates threaten to dehumanize."
[Robert Sullivan, Rats : Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. New York : Bloomsbury, 2004. Footnote on p. 29.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, The Art of Conversation
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Saturday, 24 February 2007 at 05.10
Permalink
Ack. Escaped ornamentals are some big weed problems in the western US.
Leafy Spurge is a plant that migrated to the US from eastern Europe "on the soles of immigrant shoes". It is highly aggressive, and takes over by both fecundity and suppression of other vegetation. Visitors to the Ukraine and other points East are surprised to see the plant growing there, but it is demure and sparse. What keeps it in check in its native habitat compared to the western US is a mystery.