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DeVliegendeHollander comments on California Drought thread - Less Wrong
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Why don't people have actual gardens instead of lawns? Roses and bushes and hedges and stuff. This seems to be the suburbian norm in Central Europe. But I guess we have enough water.
Yes, but... Why do people insist on imported species and habits at all? I have only barely seen California, but why not plant sagebrush or something equally adapted and learn to love it? It might even lend itself to topiary. (But nooo, exotics are so much cooler.)
Part of the story may be migrants taking their native plants with them out of nostalgia.
That may be true for the Americas and perhaps Australia, but intuitively not for Eurasia. We have botanical gardens, though. It's actually part of their mission to popularize biodiversity, and what better evidence to show for the effort than to have an introduced species become widely cultivated? Horse chestnuts have no place in Kyiv's native flora, but they became a symbol of the city. ('Oh, the horse chestnuts suffer from leaf miners! Why doesn't the Institute of zoology DO something?' 'Stop planting the friggin' trees.' 'You, sir, are not a patriot.')
The first botanic gardens were a library of useful plants. (Diversity is a library-ish role.) Then imperial gardens were about gathering the diversity of the world, to assess whether it was useful.
I omitted that because nowadays it no longer holds.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that there was anything false about your statement. I don't remember what my point was, so I should have written it down. It might just have been trivia.
You probably meant that technically, even the trees like ginkgo or all the oaks and maples imported from afar are useful - they can withstand the ufriendliness of city life. I agree. It is just a different kind of usefulness that potato and cucumber have, and back then there was no way to weigh costs and benefits of introduction. (The usefulness of a cactus is yet another thing.) Or you could mean that having a rich botanical garden was a status thing for a capital; an obligatory research facility for a self-respecting university. It should be still somewhat true. However, today people know little enough about native species that there's merit in educating them, and the libraries now get it backward. Or you could mean, further, that botanical gardens used to be efficient institutions of progress, and indeed gave rise to centralized experimental biotechnology research as scientific approach. That is, I think, probably true.