Let your garden grow wild | Rebecca McMackin
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is in full swing, and that means gardening season is among us. So to celebrate spring, and especially for those who like to get their hands dirty, we've got a great talk from our archives for you today. In her 2023 talk, horticulturalist Rebecca McMacken shares that there is a better way to build beautiful gardens, one that benefits the environment more. She offers her advice for building these gorgeous gardens wherever you are and reminds us all that it's okay to let our gardens grow a little wild.
So, full disclosure, I am the nerdiest gardener you are ever going to meet. Technically, I'm an ecological horticulturalist, which is a fancy way of saying that I design and manage gardens that are extravagantly beautiful, while also providing habitat for plant populations, wildlife communities and even soil organisms. And you might wonder, isn't that what all gardeners do? Unfortunately, no. The vast majority of gardens are ecological deserts. And in fact, an incredible amount of environmental damage has been done in the name of making pretty gardens. In the US alone, we dump over 100 million pounds of insecticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers on our lawns and gardens every year. There just isn't a garden pretty enough to be worth all of that.
And the reality is that it's completely unnecessary. Gardens and landscapes that are absolutely gorgeous can also help the world around us. They can provide food, water and shelter to wildlife. Gardens can and have brought back plants and animals from the brink of extinction. There is a movement happening all over the globe. Gardeners, garden designers, landscape architects, even entire cities are finding ways to beautify our environment while making space for the animals we share this land with. I've seen biodiversity return to one of the toughest places to live on the entire planet, the middle of New York City. where I cared for, designed and helped build public parks and gardens.
At Brooklyn Bridge Park, where I was director of horticulture, we took these massive, derelict shipping piers out over the water between Brooklyn and Manhattan and turned them into an 85-acre post-industrial public park.
It was designed by MVVA and built out over a decade. And it's hard to imagine now, but this lush landscape was built on parched concrete. This is about as appealing to wildlife as a parking lot. And yet, just a few years after construction, we welcomed migratory birds, rare insects and clouds of butterflies, all among millions and millions of park visitors. When people go to Brooklyn Bridge Park, they're usually there to play basketball or have a picnic. They have no idea that they're walking through a monarch habitat or a firefly sanctuary. It just reads as a beautiful park with lots of butterflies and magical evenings. And if we can do that in the middle of New York City, amidst all that traffic and concrete, you can do it anywhere.
Indeed, we must incorporate habitat everywhere, immediately, especially in our cities. We are facing a biodiversity crisis of catastrophic proportions. We're changing the planet so quickly that plants and animals cannot keep up. You may have heard of the insect apocalypse, and unfortunately, it is just as terrifying as it sounds. We have lost nearly half of insects on planet Earth just since I was a little kid. Now, you might not like bugs, but they are still keeping you alive. One in every three bites of food that you eat is the direct result of insect pollination. And this isn't just a problem for humanity. Where we have the data, we've lost a quarter of our birds.
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