"Bringing Nature Home" by Doug Tallamy
A modern classic focused on the "why" of gardening for wildlife
We’re in quite the predicament, biodiversity-wise. We risk, among other things, losing much of our insect biomass. Being the real feeders for many of our birds, these invertebrates not only satiate our flying friends, but fulfill countless number of roles that keep us all alive. It is through his incredible research that Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist (insect-scientist) from Pennsylvania, has studied the fascinating habits of these creatures, especially the plants that certain key groups like to use the most. This book is the first and foremost proof that we need to change our gardening habits to accommodate them.
It’s hard to be comprehensive in a review for a book like this. That’s because Bringing Nature Home is most likely the best science-backed, complete handbook on why to turn your garden into a paradise for insects, and subsequently, birds and other animals in our region of the world. I will leave most of the reading to you, the reader, which is why I am going to focus on the parts that hit home the most for me.
Why is this on the shelf
Everyone should eventually read this modern classic, which was first published in 2007 and reedited in 2019 (Link to buy the revised edition). It hands us a key that might just unlock the solution to the biodiversity crisis, a plea to reconvert the places that were once natural—our home yards—into wildlife paradises.
This transformative approach, based on native plants, empowers the average gardener, or gardener-to-be, to take action for the environment at the closest level possible : in our home yards.
As an entomologist, he knows about which insects eat which plants, a component of biodiversity we should definitely take into account while thinking of which things to incorporate in our gardens. In his work, he speaks volumes about how foreign plants can offer way less nutrients to insects, and a lot of them are inedible to most of our insects, compared to native ones.
“Our own ability to eat plants provide a good analogy [to leaf chemistry differences]. Dozens of common plants would make us quite sick if we were to eat them (Kingsbury 1964). Black cherry leaves, pokeweed leaves and deadly nightshade all fall into the “poisonous” category for people. […] We have all eaten cucurbitacins in minute quantities in the occasional bitter cucumber, but we don’t make that mistake twice in a row.
My point here is that insects suffer the same constraints. They can only tolerate a narrow group of chemicals to which they have been repeatedly exposed over thousands of generations. All other chemicals taste bad to insect herbivores and signal that the insect is on the wrong host.”
D. Tallamy, p. 57-58
There are even keystone species, like the stone at the center of a roman arch, or even the last block holding together a Jenga tower, that feed a disproportionate amount of animals. His research is well-known for mentioning this and has given way to a guide by the National Wildlife Federation on keystone plants by ecoregion, focused around native bees and butterflies.
His sections on native insects and plants explain how they interact together and reads like an easy-to-follow encyclopedia. This hybrid approach, with a central set of messages introducing a list of keystone plants and essential insects, works exceptionally well in this case. The color photographs just add to the mix and make this a work of art and science that stimulates true environmental awareness.
Author and Editor profile
Tallamy is a very well-known, even trendy scientist among wildlife gardeners, yet too many people do not know him yet. I also have read Nature’s Best Hope, his latest work that also has a Young Reader’s Edition, that is more of an introduction to the benefits that our yards can give to us, in a similar vein as Bringing Nature Home. There, he introduces his concept of the “Homegrown National Park”, which has become a transcontinental movement among gardeners coast to coast. The Living Landscape, which is an illustrated coffee-table-book-style overview to native plant gardening, and The Nature of Oaks which speaks volumes about our best insect-feeders (oak trees) are his other works.
Timber Press is one of my favourite US editors; they publish lots of books, not only on nature, but on gardening and other related fields.
Fieldnotes
We’re often presented with how to garden for wildlife, especially with the lists of native plants growing in popularity. But what are the deep, true reasons why we should care? In his essays, Doug Tallamy not only asks basic questions, but answers them with solid research that he and his team conducted. He also achieves, ultimately, the feat of having us care about the sake of wildlife through a very practical action, gardening.
“(…) because gardens are, in essence, groups of plants, they also have the potential to perform the same essential biological roles fulfilled by healthy plant communities elsewhere.”
D. Tallamy, p. 21
Insisting that nature doesn’t have anywhere to flee from modern development and lawn overuse (“No Place to Hide” is in fact the name of a whole chapter in the book), he goes back to his childhood and examines the reasons why he became an entomologist.
“We have become accustomed to meeting our needs without compromise. If we need space to live, we take it—all of it—and if that means filling in a pollywog pond or cutting down a woodlot, then so be it. We feel completely justified in sending the plants and animals that depend on those habitats off to make do someplace else”
D. Tallamy, p. 27-28
This triggered a realization in my head that we all have this visceral link to nature from our childhood and that our yards present an opportunity to design as part of nature, instead of against it.
Some of us know about “Shifting Baselines”, a term often transposed to ecology where we don’t remember the nature that was here before us, a kind of wildlife amnesia. Many of us think the scant birds we see nowadays compared to a few decades ago, and the insects that no longer splatter on our windshields, are part of a normal state of affairs. But it’s not.
Let’s take our yards, make them nature havens and shift the baseline back to abundance by following the science-backed advice that Bringing Nature Home gives us.