Planting Native Plants Around Nativity

Coming into right relationship with the rest of the living world includes making room on the land we occupy for other creatures to thrive. Faith communities can provide wildlife habitat and demonstrate environmental stewardship on the land around their buildings as public witness to their devotion and care for Creation.

Your Nativity Creation Care Ministry has taken a step to diversify our campus plantings by adding a small native plant garden in the church parking lot area. Plants native to our area provide food for native insects and pollinators, and are critical to the food webs that our birds and local wildlife depend on. In addition, native plants are adapted to local environmental conditions such as soil and climate, and require far less water. They don’t need extra chemicals in the form of costly chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow and thrive.

In his encyclical, Laudato Si, Pope Francis said, “It is not enough… to think of different species merely as potential ‘resources’ to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity. Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.”