We all know the story, homo sapien rose from omnivore obscurity 500k years ago to dominate as a species about 20-60k years ago, but do we ever stop to think about the garden implications of that? You see, most popular garden plants evolved millions of years before we did. Protea’s and Magnolia’s for example took off 100+ million years ago, Ceanothus 5 million, Manzanita 10.
Plants are wayyy older than us. When we were still just a bit of conceptual cosmic dust, plants were developing baseline growth habits shaped by megafauna (animals 100+ lbs) that wandered around in numbers 20x what exists today! Plus ,there were dozens of other species weighing 1,000 lbs. or more crashing around too.
Today, most gardens have no megafauna whatsoever besides us (and sometimes our dogs). That’s why pruning (or for grasslands, trimming and mowing) is our primary maintenance task. It mimics the breaking and shedding actions megafauna triggered when they bumped into, blew through, crunched on or snacked on them at seasonal intervals to make room for their svelt selves. That doesn’t mean that trampling and compacting in excess isn’t still a major habitat destroyer (like how centuries of grazing from sheep and cattle’s fat, soil-compacting buns decimated California’s wild grassland ecologies), but it does mean that plants like some breakage and bashing about. And that that is how we should shape them if we want to make strong habitats.
