social science | Garden Ecology Lab

The Garden Ecology Lab engages in research that aims to inform sustainable gardening practices in the Pacific Northwest. Some of our research is conducted as controlled field trials at Oregon State University-owned research sites. Other research projects occur in community and private gardens, across the state. We also use surveys to better understand how gardeners perceive different aspects of a garden ecosystem.

The questions we seek to answer with our research are guided by interests and expertise of Garden Ecology Lab members, but are also informed by the questions that gardeners ask us, the online chatter we see in online gardening groups, and the responses we receive on surveys. Our work thus occurs in close partnership with Oregon’s gardeners and gardening communities. Because of this, we are committed to sharing the results of our research with the general public, in a format that is engaging and useful to gardeners.

This is why we created the Garden Ecology Lab Briefs, or GEL Briefs. GEL Briefs are short, free-to-use 2-page documents that can be downloaded, printed, and used as handouts at a retail nursery, community garden fair, public talk or presentation, plant sale, or other event.

Each Brief includes a visually-engaging infographic, and text that provides a summary of our research, results, and how you can apply the research findings in your garden. The seven NEW briefs that we have just published are mostly drawn from our research on pollinators’ use of native plants and native cultivars.

We provide an overview of pollinator visitation (abundance) and pollinator richness (# of unique species) on native plants and their cultivars. Pollinator visitation and richness were generally depressed on native cultivars, compared to native plants. In only one instance (Douglas’ Aster ‘Sauvie Star’) were pollinators significantly more abundant and as species rich as the native counterpart.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled ‘Pollinators on Native Cultivars versus Native Plants‘

You may notice that the ‘Sauvie Snow’ cultivar had as many pollinator species as the native (29 pollinator species, each) and significantly more pollinator visits than the native. The ‘Sauvie Star’ cultivar had almost as many pollinator species, and more (but not significantly different, statistically) pollinator visits than the native. We think that there are two possible explanations for these results. First, the ‘Sauvie Snow’ and ‘Sauvie Star’ cultivars represent naturally occurring, regional variants of the native. They thus represent forms of the plant that pollinators may encounter (albeit rarely) in nature. Second, the ‘Sauvie Star’ and ‘Sauvie Snow’ cultivars had as many flowers as the native, but since these plants were taller, the flowers were more spread out along a vertical axis. This may provide pollinators more space to forage, which could have reduced competition for floral resources.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled ‘Layering Garden Plants for Pollinators‘

We also provide data that shows how the act of breeding a native plant, to create a native cultivar, can have unintended impacts on floral resources for pollinators. Drawing from our data for California Poppy and Farewell-to-Spring, we show that pollen lipid (fat) content, pollen protein content, can sometimes be increased or decreased in native cultivars, relative to the native plant. California poppy does not produce nectar, so we only provide nectar data for farewell-to-spring. Although nectar volume is unchanged between the native and its cultivars, nectar sugar content is decreased in the ‘Dwarf White’ native cultivar, relative to the native plant.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled ‘Breeding Native Plants has Ecological Trade-Offs‘

We share data on what surveyed gardeners thought of the aesthetic appeal of native plants versus cultivars. Note that these survey results were heavily influenced by the fact that most of the respondents identified as native plant gardeners. But somewhat unexpectedly, since native plant breeding is often focused on improving aesthetic appeal, we found that gardeners almost always preferred the aesthetics of the native plant. Only yarrow ‘Salmon Beauty’ had a comparable aesthetic score to its native plant counterpart.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled ‘Gardeners Do Not Prefer Native Cultivars‘

We also share data from some of the unexpected and unplanned aspects of this study. For example, we formalized our observations of gopher preferences for Camas bulb cultivars into a Garden Ecology Lab Brief. We also did more reading, and found out that Camas ‘Blue Heaven’ are likely avoided by bulb predators, because this cultivar contains Camassia cusickii, and this bulb is inedible, due to its bitter saponin chemicals.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled ‘Protecting Bulbs from Gophers‘

Another unplanned aspect of the native plant and native cultivar study was how hard it was to find native plants and native cultivars that were representative of the native plants in our region. We decided to share our experience in a GEL Brief about how difficult it can be to determine native plant status. We also wrote two guides to help gardeners decipher plant labels and find and buy native plants.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled Plant Parentage Complicates Native Status

Finally, we created an infographic that communicates what gardeners think about native plant aesthetics, and how brief messages about the pollinators that are supported by an ‘ugly’ native plant can help improve a plant’s appeal. This brief highlights what our lab has long called the ‘ecological beauty’ of a plant. Beauty can indeed go beyond surface appearance, and can also include the beauty of the different pollinators that a plant brings to your garden.

The infographic from the Garden Ecology Lab Brief entitled Gardeners Value Ecological Beauty

We hope that you find these Briefs interesting and useful. If you have a gardening event or other venue where they might be useful, we hope that you will consider printing them out for distribution. They are free to use and share. We also hope that you will check back to the resource page that our lab has set up, specifically to community our research findings with gardeners. We have two new briefs in preparation, based upon a new study of syrphid flies in garden spaces.

Finally, we would like to highlight and thank several people and organizations that have helped to make these briefs possible.

The idea behind the Garden Ecology Lab Briefs first came from Sherry Sheng.
Funding for the Briefs came from a Clackamas County Master Gardener Association Gray and Norrene Thompson Community Projects grant, and donations to the Garden Ecology League and Garden Ecology Circle.
The 10-Minute University^TMteam reviews each brief for clarity.
Jen Hayes does the bulk of the content development and design for each brief.

This article was written for the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon Quarterly (HPSO) Magazine and was greatly improved by the efforts of the HPSO editorial team.

Robert Michael Pyle first used the term “extinction of experience” over 30 years ago in his memoir, which centers on the power of human-nature interactions. Extinction of experience refers to humankind’s increasing alienation from the natural world and the consequent impacts that include increasing disaffection towards the natural world. As Pyle so eloquently phrased it, “What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”¹

Children spend less time in nature than the previous generations and this gap has only widened over time.² Our loss of connection with nature is due in part to lack of opportunity in an increasingly urbanized world. But lack of opportunity grows a loss of emotional affinity to the natural world, thus creating a positive feedback cycle that further distances younger and future generations from nature.³ I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about this concerning trend and how I have seen it manifested in myself, and in younger generations.

I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore City, Maryland, where I relished opportunities to catch lightning bugs, pick mulberries, and crawl through the culverts of channelized streams. These experiences constitute some of my favorite childhood memories. Yet I remember being confused when I learned about deforestation in school, because I could see trees on every street. I had no frame of reference for how vast and diverse nature could be. It wasn’t until I took an undergraduate student position in an ecology lab that I started to understand how important the natural world was to humanity—and to my own existence. I worked in a peri-urban wildlife refuge, where I saw my first deer, hunted for spiders at night, and learned the names of an array of plants, birds, and invertebrates. I describe this time of my life, at the age of 21, as one where I felt like a scrim had been lifted from my eyes, and I saw the world in a whole new light.

My core experiences with nature occurred between 1976 and 1993. But today’s world is different from when I came of age. Decades before we were introduced to virtual reality and the metaverse, two celebrated nature writers warned that “children’s very ability to perceive the environment may be diminished by the replacement of multisensory experiences in richly textured landscapes . . . .“⁴ Today, humanity lives in a world where the metaverse and social media platforms play an increasingly important role in social construction of reality, including how nature is experienced and perceived.⁵ In fact, as early as 13 years ago, 7-11 year olds, from both rural and urban settings, were found to be more apt to correctly identify and have positive feelings for virtual animals, compared to local animal species.⁶

More recent research has found that gardens can counteract extinction of experience. This is somewhat surprising, since gardens themselves are not natural areas; garden floras are diverse mixtures of both planted and volunteer plants and tend to be dominated by non-native and cultivated species.⁷ Nonetheless, gardens were ranked in the top five most frequented natural areas in a survey of 4,600 French adults.⁸ Gardens provide opportunities to notice and experience elements of the natural world in an accessible and relatively safe setting. And multiple studies (including those from the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab) have shown that, as people become more familiar with the plants, insects,⁹ and birds¹⁰ in a garden, they grow more positive feelings towards the natural world. This cycle of familiarity and increased emotional attachment to nature thus creates a positive feedback loop that disrupts and counteracts extinction of experience.¹⁰

There are two things you can do to create a positive feedback loop of familiarity and increased attachment to the natural world in a garden. First, you need to create a space that promotes biodiversity. If you have an affinity for neat and tidy gardens, challenge yourself to create at least one section of the garden that has a more natural look. If your garden is dominated by non-native and cultivated plants, look for opportunities to add a few native plant species. Don’t release beneficial insects into your garden. Instead, try to attract them with proper plant selection and by reducing or eliminating pesticide use. Second, practice noticing and identifying the volunteer plants, resident insects, and visiting birds in your garden.

If you are online, you may want to try using iNaturalist, which is a social media platform that uses artificial intelligence to help identify organisms. However, the artificial intelligence built into iNaturalist depends upon the community of naturalists that use the platform. The community aspect of iNaturalist allows nature lovers to connect with and learn from others. It is not unusual for a nationally or internationally renowned taxon expert to provide species-level determinations for bees, or beetles, or other syrphid flies on this platform. I use iNaturalist often and have expanded my own understanding of local biodiversity as a direct result of my engagement with the site.

Noticing and identifying nature in your garden are the very first steps to growing an appreciation for local biodiversity. Once you are able to identify a new garden organism, further challenge yourself to learn more about its basic biology and ecology. There are so many surprising ways that organisms make their way in this world, including cooperation and altruism to social parasitism and deception. Nature never ceases to amaze me.

This column is most likely to be read by gardeners, who already have a level of appreciation and affinity for plants and greenspaces. What about others, including those most fascinated with the digital and virtual worlds? With my students and my own kids, I try to connect elements from popular movies and video games with analogs in the natural world. The creature from the Predator movies has a face with insectoid-like mandibles that extend like a dragonfly naiad. The fictional Sarlacc pits from Return of the Jedi remind me of how antlion larvae hunt. And when you’re really struggling to catch the attention of someone seemingly bored with the natural world, you can always draw from British biologist Olivia Judson’s excellent and hilarious book,¹¹Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which was first recommended to me by a Lane County gardener. For readers of this book, there will be no denying that the natural world is often stranger than fiction.

A few of the 213 garden species observed during a 2021 one-day BioBlitz of Oregon Gardens. There is a diversity of nature in every garden, particularly if you can pull back on pesticides and other design and management practices that exclude diverse species.

References

¹Pyle, Robert M., The Thunder Tree: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
²Clements, Rhonda, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 5(1): 68-80, 2004.
³Soga, Masashi and Gaston, Kevin J., Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 14(2): 94-101, 2016.
⁴Nabhan, Gary P. and St Antoine, Sarah, Chapter 7. (pp 229-250) in, The biophilia hypothesis Island Press, 1993.
⁵Rossmeier, Albert. Chapter 23 (pp 429-449) in, Landscape Conflicts: Springer, 2024.
⁶Ballouard, Jean-Marie et al. Public Library of Science, 6(8): e23152, 2011.
⁷Thompson, Ken, et al., Journal of Vegetation Science 14(1): 71-78, 2003.
⁸Colléony, Agathe, et al., Landscape and Urban Planning 159: 23-31, 2017.
⁹Anderson et al., HortTechnology 31(4): 458-469.
¹⁰Garfinkel, Megan, et al. Biological Conservation 289: 110400, 2024.
¹¹Judson, Olivia. Dr. Tatiana’s sex advice to all creation: The definitive guide to the evolutionary biology of sex. Macmillan, 2003.