A Preference for the wild things

At Spadefoot Nursery we grow a lot of plants that are not necessarily the showboats that some of the more commonly sold plants are. You’ll notice a lot less of the trademarked selections at our nursery. And some of the species we sell are not showy in the conventional sense. As time goes on, and we grow more and more, this will only increase.

It isn’t that we are against big flowers, or plants bred not to have thorns. Our goal is to preserve natural genetic diversity, and this is our emphasis. Part of our mission is to “restore the flora, restore the habitat”, at least, as much as it can be. We try to accomplish this by naturally propagating as many regionally native species as possible, which usually means seed-growing plants. It also means growing many species that have seldom or never been sold in nurseries before.

This is at odds with what is usually done in the nursery trade, and in retail in general. Conventional retail strives for consistency, quick movement, and shelf-stability—in the nursery that means they try to make all the plants look the same (so that customer expectations are met, even if unrealistic), with traits convenient and immediately relatable for the customer, and that perform well in a container and in the nursery so they look “retail ready”. These efforts are often accomplished even if the toughness has been accidentally bred out of the plants.

The nursery industry strives for consistency, which is convenient for the market but not necessarily for nature.

When your focus in breeding is bigger flowers, looking good in the nursery, and cloning, you lose genetic diversity. The plants become domesticated and much more reliant on human manipulation to keep alive. This means more water, and in some cases, reliance on pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

We are not interested in these traits at our nursery. Instead, we are interested in helping you make wildlife habitat, and helping you see the beauty in what we already have.

Unrealistic expectations are often imposed on plants of our region by people who come from other parts of the country or world. Even when many people use native plants, they try to force these plants to do what more domesticated plants do: pruning a greythorn to look like a hedge, forcing our native trees to have that perfect single trunk plus “perfect” canopy, wanting everything to be thornless, etc.

The natural shape of a desert hackberry (Celtis ehrenbergiana) should never be ruined by overzealous pruning.

Some decades ago the non-native mesquites became extremely popular in the nursery trade. Native mesquites are a bother to many nurseries because they have a longer dormancy period (less attractive to the average customer at that time of year), and they grow a very wide canopy almost immediately, rather than straight up. The South American and hybrid mesquites are more well-behaved in the containers, and the industry STILL prefers these plants, even though it’s well-known that they are much more likely to split down the middle of the trunk, blow over, and perform horribly in the landscape.

And speaking of the mesquite, the non-native mesquites are readily hybridizing with our native mesquites, threatening the life cycles of many species of insects and birds that rely on the timing and specific behavioral traits of our native mesquites—they, after all, evolved with the native mesquite, not the Chilean or thornless hybrid mesquite which has so few of those same ecological relationships.

Lucy’s warbler (Oreothlypis luciae) depends on the timing of leaf-break on our native mesquite (especially Prosopis velutina), which attracts the insects that they eat. The non-native mesquites lack these biological relationships.

We grow species of plants that sometimes have insignificant flowers. But those same plants have a huge significance in the natural landscape and ecology—being larval food plants for moths and butterflies, or provide nesting material for native bees or birds. Some plants evolved to collect organic debris and help settle organic material in the soil, and control erosion. Non-native plants offer far less of this sort of thing and some have even become ecological pests, displacing native species and taking up a lot of space without having those same ecological relationships.

The triangleaf bursage (Ambrosia deltoidea) does not have the significant flowers, but has an important role in the succession and ecology of our low desert, improving soil biology.

We grow plants that are inconvenient in nursery containers, and never reach their potential in a pot. This makes it a more difficult sell to our customers who have to ask questions in order to know what the plant will do in the ground, and how they should plant it.

This does put more responsibility on you, our customer. And more on us as well, to educate our customer base and not rely on the quick sale to keep us afloat. But we believe that our markets should steer away from mindless consumerism, and work on actually improving our lives and environment.

The various ecologies of our region are gorgeous and display many seasonal changes, with many wonderful surprises.

Our natural landscapes have a beauty of their own. We encourage you to develop a relationship with these species, and rather than demand that our native flora mimics landscapes from our previous origins, see our landscape for the beauty that it is. Arizona has the third largest flora of all the 50 states in the US. That flora has been shaped by our geology, proximity to the tropics, rainfall patterns, and the fauna that lives and migrates through the region.

And remember that while some of those selections offered by the nursery trade offer big flowers, those flowers often come at a cost. And some of those more subtle-blooming natives can give you a lot more reward by attracting all the beautiful insects and birds with much less hassle and water.