Gardening and investing are about compounding.
What is the most sustainable way to achieve your goals without taking undue risk?
The answer is easy for gardening – Go Native.
Native planting involves growing plants naturally adapted to a specific region’s climate, soil, and ecosystem. Native plants are the best way to promote biodiversity and sustainability.
Many people feel their lawns are an expensive swipe against nature, but they feel peer pressure to keep coughing up the bucks to keep the chemicals and carbon emissions flowing.
It resembles many parents’ attitudes about having their kids play on multiple travel sports teams. According to Jason Gay of the WSJ,
However, if you secretly polled parents, I feel that 97% of them would happily go back to the days when youth leagues played a maximum of two times a week on crabgrass fields no more than five miles from home.
Whether it’s your lawn or travel sports, keeping up with the Joneses is tricky to resist.
Most lawns need harmful chemicals for proper growth. Waste runoff seeps into the water supply, damaging humans and the environment.
In addition, grass is shallow-rooted and inefficient for holding deluges of water. Grass lawns allow nature’s breeding ground, topsoil, along with all its precious microbes, to wash away. A dead zone for essential plant life emerges when lawns cover large areas. Flowers attract pollinators, which are critical to our food supply. No Bees, No Dinner.
Using regional native plants, reverse all of these harmful side effects. The deep roots hold moisture, and the plants provide valuable nutrition for pollinators and local wildlife. (This is lavender, an excellent plant in my garden for pollinators, and it is deer resistant due to its unique fragrance.)
When non-native plants take root, they come with a host of problems. They don’t provide the proper resources for insects, hurting the birds that feed them. Non-native plants can also be invasive, crowding out the landscape’s biodiversity.
It’s not an all-or-nothing game. Lawns take up more space than any national park. Imagine if homeowners used just 10% of this space to rewild. It would be a game-changer for the health of our planet of epic proportions.
Investors could learn much from native plant gardening that aligns with smart investing habits.
Just as gardeners select “the right plant for the right place,” investors must choose the right asset for the right time frame and risk profile. With rare exceptions, the portfolio of a 30-year-old and a 65-year-old should be distinctly different.
Native plant gardens aren’t get-rich-quick schemes. I’ve been working on mine for 24 years and still have a ways to go. Like investing in native plant gardens, they reward patient investors by growing slowly and naturally. Similarly, consistency and compounding are the iron laws of retirement investing.
Doing nothing is often the best strategy for long-term investors. Once established, native plants require minimal attention, similar to holding low-cost index-based portfolios requiring minimal tinkering.
Plant diversity feeds nature instead of fighting it. The ultimate goal is enjoying the Spring, Summer, and Fall flowers blooming. Three-season flowering is impossible if you grow the same type of seasonal plants. This isnt much different from a diversified portfolio designed to cushion market volatility. There is always sunshine somewhere if you look hard enough.
(These are fall blooming New England Asters in my yard. Since there are so few flowers in the fall, I find bees sleeping in these overnight.)
Investment fees can consume returns if ignored. Once established, native plant gardens take care of themselves. There is no need to import costly mulch, topsoil, and chemical fertilizers. Letting nature do its thing saves enormous capital over one’s lifetime. Investors need to adopt a similar attitude towards their retirement portfolios.
Letting native plant gardens fully mature offers lasting beauty and the most ecological value.
The most vital lesson investors can learn from nature is that, whether cultivating a native plant landscape or a portfolio, the keys to success are the same: intention, patience, balance, and a deep respect for time are the key ingredients for a successful garden or retirement plan.
