Outside of the southern entrance to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California lies the small rural gateway community of Three Rivers. Although these national parks are monitored and managed to protect their enviable natural resources, in many instances, the privately-held adjacent lands that are ranched or farmed or resided upon are not. These neighboring rural lands support a broad spectrum of exotic plant species, including horticultural escapes whose presence poses potential threats of reinvasion or introduction into the national parks lands.
To ameliorate this issue, in a community partnership with the National Park Service, eight public native plant demonstration gardens were designed and installed in prominent locations at no cost to the site landowner. The intention was to provide the public with: 1) a visual illustration of alternative native landscape plantings to exotic vegetation, 2) an introduction to the unique local ecology and dominant native species, 3) a renewed appreciation for the native flora and fauna, 4) a way to engage residents, business owners and the larger community in similar efforts to protect and preserve native habitat for wildlife.
Results/Conclusions
Together with efforts to physically remove horticultural weedy escapes, these community plantings appear to have had influence. An additional four community native gardens have recently been requested and installed and significantly more private residential gardens featuring local native plants have been planted. The community’s literacy of indigenous plants along with an awareness of the need to actively preserve wild habitat as a defense against biological invasions seems to have increased as well because of steady public promotions of these ideals. Ultimately, it is hoped that the formation of this informal buffer zone segregating adjacent highly disturbed agricultural areas will minimize the probability of invasion by noxious weeds into the invaluable protected wilderness of the national parks.