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During the past ten years or so, gardeners have been subtly pressured to stop buying flowering perennials and reseeding annuals from other parts of the world than their local area.  Jim Wilson is one of the foremost authors in this field of "isolationist gardening."   Wilson has many persuasive arguments.  Native plants need less artificial irrigation, less insecticides, etc.  They are adapted to your area.  Further, they provide important food sources for local wildlife.  Most important is the observation that many plants (both indigenous and foreign) can escape cultivation to become invasive marauders.  They replace local species and transform the landscape.  In some cases they even destroy important food sources for wildlife.  

As a pretty hardcore liberal and environmentalist, these are very persuasive arguments.  However, as a very urban and fairly cosmopolitan person, I also am attracted to cultural diversity and the exotic.  It's not that local plants aren't pretty.  Here's where my analogy comes in.  Like many urban liberals, I am not terribly interested in trying to maintain America as a paradise of European white immigrants.  I like seeing the cultural variety that globalization and immigration have created here.  The vanishing of the illusion of a traditional white America corresponds with the vanishing of the illusion of static, native phytosystems here.  Ironically, I can't help making some comparisons between the anti-immigrant rhetoric of whackos like Michael Savage and the anti-exotic rhetoric of the "native plants only" crowd.  

Surely we must think of the wildlife that depend upon the vegetation.  But, I can't help noticing the paradoxical parallel between the inability of Pat Buchanan to see the inherent value of having East Indian doctors in small towns of America, and these "botanically correct" activists who can't see the value of foreign plants that can provide food for local creatures, or prevent erosion, etc.  Lythrum, Akebia, Kudzu and others give excellent examples for them to argue their "anti-immigration" policies.  However, other plants have proven themselves welcome additions to our land.

On the other hand, there are odd indications of the eugenic motivations of the native habitat restoration movement.  For instance, I recently picked up a pamphlet for the local Native Vegetation Landscape Restoration Program of Ramsey County.  They offer subsidies to restore native vegetation in critical areas, including rain gardens and boulevard plantings, which are quite practical for us urban homeowners.  However, in their documentation they state that not only are there to be no exotic, non-native species, but they will not even accept cultivars.  For those who don't know, cultivars are natural genetic mutations of one species, so they are not vegetable immigrants.  A cultivar, with the exception of the double-flowered varieties, would provide more diversity to the gene pool of the species without polluting the species with freakish F1 or F2 interspecies commingling.   In the more extreme cases, cultivars are not even fertile.  However, it is not uncommon for horticulturalists to propagate their plants through cloning. This suggests to me that their motivations have less to do with improving the environment, than they do with asserting a rigid agenda of ethnic cleansing not unlike that inspired in XVI Century Spain by Torquemada.  

What's a gardener to do?  I suggest that you keep in mind these simple facts:

1) Their goal is impossible.  Even if they successfully create healthy examples of what they think are natural, the actual spaces will be filled numerous exotic plants and animals.  It is impossible to kill all the foreigners.  The Dandelion is a foreigner.  Earthworms are invaders.  Ladybugs are abducted slaves.  How likely is it that they can exterminate all the non-natives in their attempts to recreate past habitats?  Given the aesthetic demands of the gardeners, there will also be significant examples of plantings that are indigenous to the state, but in quite different habitats.  For instance, a Yellow Ladyslipper orchid from the Red Wing area would not survive next to a pink Ladyslipper near Bemidji, even though they are in the same genus, and can be hybridized.  This example is quite radical, but I'm sure that the county will fail to get us to follow their plans if we aren't allowed to put a few Northern forest species in with some of the prairie denizens.  Hence, these "recreations" will always be to some degree artificial.  

2) Supply and demand laws assure that people will continue to plant exotics unless they are outlawed.  This also means that localized attempts at purity will always be threatened by repeat invasions from the collections in their neighbors' gardens.  The powers that be won't even allow sane gun control legislation, so how on Earth do they imagine that they will be able to prevent a Lebanese immigrant from growing her precious family heirloom Mentha for tabouli, or the Pakistani from growing the various herbs necessary to make Garam Masala?  Are we to demand that the Hmong women not cultivate Oriental lilies in their backyards?  Can the Norwegian farmer mix beautiful cultivars of Hemerocalis in amongst the local orange day lilies in the ditch along his property?  Would it destroy the Minnesota countryside if the day lilies suddenly began showing up in shades of red?  Oops! daylilies aren't native to begin with, although they are present throughout the state.

3) The real botanical evil of modern society is monoculture, or the attempt to limit diversity to a very small number of plants: bluegrass, fescue grass, arborvitae, hostas, tulips and maybe a flowering crabapple along with a couple of maple trees.  See my old essay on "The Lawncare Cult."  Even the rigid design of formal gardens limits biodiversity to some extent, when compared with the  

4) Some plants are indeed invasive and undesirable.  Among the more dangerous plants are those which have the following traits: 

1. vines that grow quickly and reseed freely.
2. plants that develop deep and spreading systems of rhizomes that spread outward rapidly.
3. plants whose seeds are many, and ability to travel is great.  Waterborne seeds are especially bad in Minnesota.

The first thing you should notice about this list is that many of the native species they want us to grow fit those descriptions quite well.  Within urban settings, many native plants are more troublesome than Dandelions if you are trying to maintain a controlled look around your home.  Given the aforementioned laws of supply and demand, it is unlikely that Minnesotans will replace their Mexican Cosmos with local Rudbeckia nitida.  Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want to replace a Clematis 'Jackmani' with a Celastrus scandens (Bittersweet)?  Yet, we should be extremely careful in introducing plants like Akebia, or Loosestrife.   

Within the context of our garden, our choice has been to avoid aggressive invader plants that can indeed escape our garden, and emphasize plants that are attractive, and provide appealing food sources for bees, birds and other wildlife.  For instance, the Spanish Thalictrum flavum is extremely attractive to bees.  There are many variants of local species that are close enough in their constituents that they can easily feed the same animals.  Some species are already dispersed throughout the globe.  For example, the Cloudberry, (Rubus ) is extremely like the raspberry, but you can mow it, so it is far more practical (and perhaps subversive) in residential contexts. 

Another trick I am trying is to create unnatural microecosystems.  In particular, within the context of this Prairie/Hardwood transitional zone with high lime content in the soil, I am creating a strongly acidic front yard for the cultivation of edible ericaceous berries like Blueberry, Uva Ursi, Empetrum, Wintergreen and even some non-edibles that wildlife enjoy, like Baneberry.  They would find a more naturally friendly environment in Duluth.  The collection of plants there would never exist together in any place, and they would never occur naturally in local environments, but with some conifers, sulfur and peat moss, it becomes possible to create my fantasy "Circumpolar Garden", while simultaneously creating new sources of food for the wildlife in our neighborhood. 

Yet another trick is that we feed the birds and squirrels during Winter.  Obviously the bags of birdseed are full of exotic species that sprout in Spring but this isn't hard to control.  The birds thrive in those spruce trees, and their droppings provide natural nutrients for the soil. 

But, I do try to plant as many natives as I can manage to control. 

In other words, I'm inspired by the county restoration efforts to think more carefully about what I'm doing, but I'm going to ignore them for the most part, and do my own thing.  It merely provides another example for libertarian tax haters to rail against social engineering mavens in the public sector.