In Defense of Nature

CONDON’S CORNER

An Over-developed World Doesn’t Support Wildlife

 

© Marlene A. Condon 2026 All Rights Reserved 

  [Published July 9, 2026, by The Daily Progress, the daily newspaper of Charlottesville, Virginia and published July 11, 2026, by The News Virginian, the daily newspaper of Waynesboro, Virginia.] 

Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra), a native plant in Europe, is one of the best plants for surviving drought conditions and also feeding insects, such as this Common Buckeye butterfly.  

“An Over-developed World Doesn’t Support Wildlife”

 

I’ve been an observer of the natural world for—literally—as long as I can remember. My very first memory is of walking along the city sidewalk with my older sister as she pushed a baby carriage containing our baby brother. As he is two and half years younger than I am, I know I must have been approaching the age of three as it was springtime—the time of my own birth—and my brother had been born at the end of the previous year. 

 

The city sidewalks were busy with large red-and-black ants going about their own lives as we went about ours. I possess many such memories of my earliest years of life as I seem to have been born with an avid interest in nature.

 

I’m now several decades beyond my youth and I have never lost my fascination with this aspect of life. Consequently, I possess thousands of photos I’ve taken of the natural world that attest to the attraction of nonnative plants to our wildlife. Thus, the push to rid our environment of alien plants is quite concerning to me.   

 

If our world wasn’t so developed (covered over with buildings and roadways) to accommodate humans, we wouldn’t have an abundance of alien plants populating human-disturbed areas (e.g., road margins where the nutritious and friable topsoil has long since been removed and poor subsoil left behind).

 

The reality is that the “intent” of nonnative plants is to keep the environment working as it should. Alien plants fare better in such areas (generally speaking) than native plants that have been here for millennia.

 

Native plants do best in the rich, built-up-over-centuries soil that preceded the arrival of Europeans and folks of many other nationalities, whereas many so-called invasive plants do well in the nutrient-poor soil left over from construction, roadside-grading, winter-salting of roads, highway department-mowing along roads, deposition of vehicle-exhaust chemicals, etc., etc.

 

Thus, we are lucky that humans transported—intentionally or not—alien plants to our land because we would instead have bare ground following development. Unlike the topsoil that is removed or despoiled by development, subsoil can support far fewer organisms (such as bacteria and earthworms), which is the reason it’s less fertile than the soil that would normally sit above it.

 

No matter what town you live in nowadays, you are bound to see development taking place to rob yet more land from the local critters. Consequently, the only way to help wildlife survive is to turn homeowners’ properties into nature-friendly gardens that can well support our local fauna. But do you see that happening? Not much.

 

Instead, you still see most homeowners mowing huge swaths of lawn that not only pollute the environment, but which also may serve only to support our overpopulation of deer—yet another current huge environmental problem. Consider that deer prefer to eat native plants (although they eat many nonnative plants as well) and you have to wonder why there isn’t a big hue-and-cry from native-plant enthusiasts for the government (i.e., the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources) to cut down the deer herd immediately to sustainable levels.

 

After all, how can anyone expect native plants to survive when we have a surplus of native deer to eat them? Yet the popular narrative continues to be that “invasive” plants are the biggest problem facing native plants, even though so-called invasive plants look invasive only because they fill areas cleared of native plants by mankind or deer.

 

This situation—in which the basic problem of too many deer is not addressed first—is very similar to what’s been happening in the Chesapeake Bay since the early 1960s. Throughout all of this time, our scientists have kept replanting native submerged grasses into a body of water that has, all along, remained hostile to the growth of these plants. The fact is that without first reducing the destructive consequences of sediment and nutrient pollution entering the Bay—thanks to what people are doing upstream—native grasses simply cannot possibly thrive there.

 

Likewise, the scientists’ answer to native-plant decline on land is also to tell folks to keep planting more native plants despite the untenable growing conditions of depleted soils, an overabundance of deer, and often, year after year now of drought or near-drought. One could say that a dearth of critical thinking appears to be ongoing in Virginia with no sign of this situation getting better anytime soon.

 

Consider that so-called invasive plants can be downright life-saving. They can survive not only our degraded physical environment, but also drought—both of which have become much more commonly occurring—while still feeding our wildlife. 2026 is the perfect time to be taking this truth into consideration.

“Leatherleaf Mahonia” (Mahonia bealei) is considered “invasive” in Albemarle and Augusta counties (among some other counties in Virginia), even though it’s not that commonly seen. Its flowers feed honeybees foraging in February when they may be the only blooms open, and its fruits feed birds (such as the female Northern Cardinal seen here) in late spring.    

I live in western Albemarle where we’ve received barely 50% of the amount of rain we should have received for the first five months of the year. The plants had continued to look good only because the weather had been on the cool side.

 

But now, as I write this article, we are experiencing hot summertime weather even though summer has not even officially begun and it’s already been 11 days with nary a drop of rain locally. Neither native plants nor animals do well under these conditions, the plants struggling to survive and unable to make fruits or seeds to feed wildlife.

 

On the other hand, nonnative plants often do fine under hot, overly dry conditions. My yard has many perennial Black Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) plants, the flowers of which feed numerous butterflies, bees, and insects of many kinds. Two Glossy Abelia (Abelia x grandiflora) shrubs do the same all summer along with my two Mimosa trees (Albizia julibrissin) that also attract Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

 

I can’t stress enough that every yard should contain a mix of native and “invasive” plants to help our wildlife to survive. Current environmental conditions simply do not allow for environmental propaganda that is not based in fact.

 

The choice is yours to make. Choose unwisely and we lose many critters forever.