Availability of native plants

It's a bit frustrating to hand out lists of good plants to grow in programs, knowing that it'll be hard to find them to purchase.

You've really got to be ready to transplant volunteers or grow them yourself from seed or cuttings or visit native plant society sales and specialty nurseries (or do online ordering).

We have lots of great plants in the Eastern U.S. that aren't readily available for various reasons.

They take a long time to grow to flowering size (lots of woodland wildflowers); they have deep roots quickly, so aren't easily held in containers (many canopy trees); they're hard to propagate (seed germination is complex in native species), etc.

But, they're all well worth the effort.

Native plants in the landscape

Every region of our planet has native plants, species that evolved in a particular place within a distinct plant community. These species are adapted to local climates, soils, and weather, and exhibit an array of ecological strategies, from germination patterns to growth and reproduction.

This is the stuff of plant ecological research. Folks who study the details of these processes spend a lot of time carefully monitoring plant behavior, with controlled experimental manipulations and lots of data collection. It's time-consuming, but revealing.

The reproductive habits of a plant are clues to whether it'll be invasive in a new habitat, or a well-behaved garden inhabitant. Many plants are highly adaptable moved from their native environments to new ones; they're often the stalwarts in our ornamental plant palettes.

We have plants from all over the world in our gardens and landscapes, wherever you might live. Often the same plants, though, appear over and over.

But a diversity of plants is always the key to a healthy and balanced garden, and the more natives the better.

Native plants support native insects that native birds and amphibians eat; their flowers, fruits, seeds, and leaves (not to mention their structure) provide food and habitat for birds, insects, mammals, etc. So in our gardens, emulating nature is a wonderful way to restore the often barren suburban, urban, or exurban landscapes that may face us.

Even though we weren't gardeners when we (my gardening companion and I) started on the journey of transforming our acre and a half of lawn to woodland, meadow, shrub borders, perennial gardens and vegetable gardens, we are now.

And we're grateful to feel like we're good stewards of our space for as long as we're here.

This is the transformation from lawn to woodland in our front yard - we're definitely appreciative of the power of plants.

Native plants and natural gardening

I visited two great gardens this morning, one public and one private. This post is about the public one.

I first visited North Carolina Botanical Garden about 25 years ago. It was fabulous then (and I've been a member ever since). Their mission, promoting native plants of the Southeast, and being a conservation garden, is essential to preserving and restoring our native plant communities.

They provide a garden vision that I (and my gardening companion) have embraced: trying to create a sense of place in our garden that reflects our native plants and their habitats.

It was wonderful to return and see the Coastal Plain Habitat Garden in its fall glory. Based on a plant rescue, this habitat garden has been burned periodically, and is a wonderful reflection of what our coastal plain habitats are like, when relatively undisturbed by human activity.

The pitcher plant bog habitats, in new raised stone beds were spectacular.

The borders were lovely, too.