This was excellent. What a great piece of science communication! Tallamy has stuffed this book full of research, and in some ways it reads as reminiscent of a scientific paper, in that references follow in brackets for a lot of the information passed on here... and yet it's clearly written for the layperson. There's a restrained but friendly tone, a scattering of personal anecdotes, and more importantly simple, clear explanations of how and why it's important to prioritise native plants over introduced ones in gardens. Tallamy has very obviously written this to persuade, and in that he is successful.

His argument - and it is, as I said, backed up with lots of primary research - is that introduced plants can out-compete native ones, because the insects, birds, and other animals that are suddenly faced with this introduced plant have not evolved alongside it, and are not adapted to consume it. They prefer to eat native plants, by a wide margin, and in the absence of stressors like herbivory the introduced plants take off like gangbusters. This means less natives, which means less food for wildlife, which means the ongoing impoverishment and collapse of ecosystems as food and habitat runs out. Functioning ecosystems are important! We need them to live, and one way to help build them back up is to limit the number of introduced plants in people's gardens and to replace them with natives. Which is an eminently sensible and achievable goal - especially as it doesn't have to happen all at once - and Tallamy offers up a number of possible substitutions. It's all in an American context, of course, but the ecological principles can apply anywhere. I'm convinced.