Provenance
Provenance is a word I hear used a lot on "Antiques Roadshow" and "American Pickers". It's used by museum curators and anyone trying to guarantee the authenticity of an object by tracking its whereabouts through time.
It's so much more interesting, when I plant a thing, to think about how that thing came to exist for me to plant in the first place. Where specifically did that thing come from? It makes you seem silly when you're at a "native plant sale" and ask "where specifically is the parent colony that this plant is descended from"? It's too ideologically pure, but this is missing the point. I'm self-aware enough to know that the question is silly. I know that any visitors to my garden will be happy if it explodes with life. It won't matter where the plants came from if 1,000 pollinators alight from the plantings as visitors walk down the path.
I've gone to several garden shows over the years. You can see just about anything at a garden show. The one thing that each participant has in common is passion. They are the type of people who ask silly questions at plant sales. These are my people. But is the question silly?
Almost every serious park, preserve, zoo, or arboretum has a collection policy. Depending on size and funding, they may not have published collection policies, but I promise you it's something they've talked about and think about. They think... "if we are going to plant things, these things should benefit our area ecologically, so which plants are most appropriate"? These self-imposed constraints on the palette of plants is coming from a place of passion and love and science.
One of the most common constraints is based on geography. It's unrealistic to expect the web of life existing in North America to be best supported by the plant community in Australia. I believe this is also true within North America. It's unrealistic to expect the web of life existing in Ohio to be best supported by the plant community in California. I don't need to continue decreasing the size of my collection circle to know what my preference should be. My preference should be... the more local the better.
What's new is... modern software that allows home-gardeners the opportunity to establish provenance for their locals and for anything they plant.
Moving forward... when I plant something in my Casual Woodland Garden, I want to link to the parent colony observation from the observation of the planting. This link establishes the provenance for each of my plantings. My Eastern Redbud observation has an observation field called "parent colony" that links to an observation showing the geographic location this colony was sourced from. If I click the "parent colony" label on this observation, I can select "Observations with this field" (see image below).
When I click "Observations with this field", the results show all of the cultivated colonies that have a link to the parent colony that establishes provenance. This makes the hobby more interesting to me. I'm not expecting everyone to do this, but I think it will be an interesting idea for some to consider. I would love it if the plants I bought at native plant sales all had qr codes linking to the exact location of the parent colony from which the seeds and cuttings were sourced from. I would love it so much, I'd pay more for it.
All of my cultivated colonies that have a link to the parent colony thereby establishing provenance...
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=any&place_id=any&field:Parent%20Colony
When you think about it, every restored woodland area is becoming more like a museum of plants that might have existed at their installed location prior to the Columbian exchange. More importantly, these museums of plants might be critical to the preservation of downstream species. Then again, maybe not, but it makes the hobby more interesting.
