Does digging wildflowers from the wild hurt the environment?
Absolutely! Removing wildflowers from the wild is harmful for three reasons. First, you diminish the natural population and consequently reduce the diversity within that population. With less diversity, a plant population may be less capable of responding to environmental changes; it may perish if suddenly stressed by disease, insects, or sudden extremes in weather. Second, nature is likely to fill the vacuum you create when you dig up a wildflower with a plant of a different species, often an invasive weed. Finally, wild collected plants often perform poorly in the garden. Plants propagated in a nursery or grown from wild collected seed or cuttings, are much more likely to survive transplanting.
