In article , Janet Baraclough..
wrote:

The message m
from "Cereus-validus" contains these words:


Almost everything that presently grows in England is an "exotic" because the
natives had completely decimated the forests and wiped out the original
native flora ages ago.


Garbage.

Janet, Scotland.

It was certainly too sweeping a statement to be less than silly, but I
gather the best lumber forests in the UK are today Douglas fir forests
from here in the Pacific Northwest, completely naturalized & vastly too
large & swift-growing & overshadowing for native trees to survive with the
Douglas. And many forests that were completely eradicated through the past
600 years have had restoration within the last 125 years, but largely of
foreign species that at best approximated the originals. This certainly
HAD to change the dynamics of the forest floor, pollinator-behavior &
survival, when the giant plants in an ecosystem are completely changed,
very little that is smaller is going to stay the same.

Or the English Bluebell that two centuries ago was famed for its
overpowering scent of balsam & cinnamon is today completely scentless from
having become thoroughly hybridized with the always-scentless Spanish
squill, so that a pure native scilla with its former redolence is
apparently extinct. Same with hedge hawthorn, today so hybridized with
species from all over the northern hemisphere that whatever the purely
native English hawthorn was like two or three centuries ago is no longer
quite known. I read an article about English forest-edge ecosystems which
once had a wide array of native shrubs that are today dominated by
century-old Pontus rhododendrons.

It's the same story as all over the world, except the UK is so much more
finite for being islands, so that like other island ecosystems it was
always more at risk. And with a continous culture so much older than in
North America, that means the UK has had a millenia head-start on screwing
everything up.

Everyone everywhere should consider how their gardening habits changes the
whole world & not just their own yard, & not often for the better. Take a
moment to feel a bit of guilt, then get back to gardenin'.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/