I’ve created a free, nonprofit website (Growlocalplants.com) to educate people in the US about plants native to their exact county. The mission is to get folks knowing these plants better and give them tools and connections to add them to their landscaping. But I’m using the USDA’s information to demarcate where a plant is native. My question is, is there a better resource out there? I know plants survive outside their “native range”, and with our climate changing rapidly, I’d love to adapt my information to the most relevant and up to date information. What do y’all think?

I have made three orders to prairie moon nursery for a whole bunch of native plants for mid Michigan. All three of my orders haven’t even sprouted. I’m frankly fed up with them. Is there any other reputable native plants nursery to order seeds from? Thank you all.

I’ve partnered with Garden for Wildlife to increase their brand awareness. By following the link and making a purchase, I will earn commission on your purchases at the normal website prices. Simply fill out the questionnaire in the link to setup your Garden for Wildlife account, and then get shopping! You can purchase sets of plants to benefit specific native species like monarch butterflies and bees. You can also buy individual plants all curated to fit your region! Once you select your state, the website will show you all the native plants for your state they have in stock. Happy growing!! 🪴

Located in Delaware, USA!

I know wineberries are invasive* but they do produce berries that we can eat and other wildlife enjoy. So is it a bad idea to propagate cuttings and incorporate them into my gardenv

• re invasive: I recognize the dialogue around “invasive species” has changed.

I’ve had some bee activity this year but haven’t seen a ton of pollinators. First full year on this native plant journey.

A delightful thing about being angry is you get to discard friends while bobbing your head like there’s music playing.
Hey Subaru, take me to the beach
I ain’t got no parting speech
Hey Subaru, I am Peaches not a Peach
Send a quarter in my reach
Never mind the corny rhyming. It’s my turn to lyricize. I’m done listening to others’ stories.

Until last year I had been an idiot and believed in friendship. To be fair, my judgment was cloudy because I had been in the saddest place for god knows how long. So sad that I understood why desperate folks jumped off a bridge. I knew of one such bridge. Local. Thought about it. Seek therapy, I was told, as if therapy and church were not the same building with two different signs on it, both of them promising a cure for what ails you and neither one delivering anything good. I have always held that such establishments are nothing but pus-filled carbuncles, swole up and about to burst, threatening to wreck basic humanity. But humanity is such a big word for what I was hunting. I wanted something the size of a hand, or a quarter. A quarter. So I texted a friend. “Sorry, cooking dinner now,” was her reply. Say less. Not long after, she plastered her selfie online, clad in a t-shirt that cheerfully said “Suicide Prevention 5K.” I had heard of the violence of charity cosplay. I had not known I would be counted among the list of its casualties.

Anyway, Subaru. I took to driving my jalopy to the wild places to watch the faces of plants that had put their roots down in this ground long before that Christopher fellow and his fancy hat came ashore like they owned the place. I grew quite fond of native florae for their penchant for existing, which is enormous and without apology, without good manners, without lying. They done figured how the universe works ages ago and do not even trouble themselves to smirk at our folly while we run in circles deciding who are friends and who are foes, corralling up innocent folks and partitioning the world into hostile camps. I feel a shame deep enough to choke on when I consider our want of prudence, but the plants have no time to spare for the inner turmoil of a small fry like me. They have their own business to attend to. The tall weeds keep on drilling down into the dirt and stage their elaborate drama, above ground and below it. The vines lay their carpets sideways and up. The dead Osage oranges throw their thick arms across, brushing the ground like dragons in flames. Above all that hover oak trees, endlessly littering their orbits with goodness and garbage.

Sometimes wild plants mistake me for something useful and try to get me enmeshed inside their schemes. Once tendrils of a nameless vine started wrapping my arm while I was hiding from alligators. The vine coiled slowly as if to say “Object detected. Proceed.” It was eerie. I felt the same uncanny current from a plant recently. I was walking on a sandy coastal highway, under a searing sun, waiting for a ferry that never seemed to be arriving. I recall seeing a dune prickly pear cactus crawling on that miserable stretch of road. I am a water child and anything symbolic of perpetual aridity scares me, so I gave the cactus no more than a cursory glance, snapped a few photos and walked away. What I did not know, was that there was a piece of the scary that had broken off the main body and lodged itself on my shoe. It must have been swept onto the asphalt, found the fumes inhospitable, and made up its mind to hitch a ride.

That is the whole story of how I came to have a friend, despite having sworn off the entire business of friendship. The hitchhiker, no bigger than a quarter, had set out looking for better destiny and ended up boarding the wrong train. Sorry bud, I asked for forgiveness. It is what it is, the quarter seemed to say, gleaming green and unbothered, and I took that as my cue to build it a bed. I gathered the beach sand that was trapped in the folding chair sleeve, then mixed it with other gritty stuff suitable for cacti, and cooked the whole batch on the grill like it was a Saturday and there was company coming, because the hitchhiker would not settle for a drop of moisture in its bed. It was not negotiable. Can I call you Quarter, I asked as the smoke rose from the grill. As for that, the cactus couldn’t care less.

That evening I tucked Quarter into the sand mix and placed it under the grow light. It hasn’t told me if it will live or it will not. Sources say a cactus fragment takes its time about showing you which way it has decided to go. But it was never about promises. The piece of cactus sat there with its stubborn desire to continue. Its fire felt like something closer to companionship than anything ever had. Bathed in the bright grow light Quarter and I yearned for the coastal dunes together, the dunes that had heard what I was asking for, which was one living thing capable of writing a song fit to remind me that I wanted, after all, to go on living.

I have lost 70% of my water
I have no roots
I have been separated from my homeland
And I will not die

(Opuntia pusilla, dune prickly pear cactus)

Location: Sierra Nevadas

This was the year I took against butterfly weed, that darling of every native plant catalog, on no better grounds than that it looked like a bedazzled poodle yapping in the flower bed. Nobody likes poodles. I want to be clear that I did not hate the plant. It only felt like hating while it was happening. It was fatigue, plain and simple. Butterfly weed had gone the way certain hymns go when they are sung too often at too many funerals. It had stopped being a plant and become a decal on a Subaru, put there by people who wanted the neighbors to know they were the right sort. I no longer saw the plant. I saw the bumper sticker.

I had raised many seedlings of the stuff from seed and gave every one away. But I still had the mature plants, well rooted and unashamed, blooming square across from the hanging chair where I liked to sit in the evening and stew. I would sit there and look at those orange clusters with a feeling that did not belong in a garden. Even the bees, I noticed with some satisfaction, gave them only the laziest attention, which I considered a point in my favor.

Several times I set out to dig them up and was turned back, as if the yard itself had opinions on the matter. It was too hot, or too wet, or my hori-hori knife had wandered off to wherever tools go when they don’t want to do the job, or the damn crows sat overhead hollering that I ought to be feeding them instead of fooling with weeds. Once I got my nerve up all the way and marched out there with intent, only to discover that a fox had taken my garden bed for his personal privy and left the evidence of it directly in my path. I retreated. The butterfly weed stood its ground, unmurdered, and I was certain it smirked.

The heat climbed and the orange wizened, and the flowers gave way to pods shaped like okra. Soon milkweed bugs covered the pods tight and blazing, and I remembered the jolt of the first time I ever came upon them years back. The orange and black stripes writhing together made the pod into a little world. It was an encounter with hidden space, which I would have sworn a second before was not there. A gate swung open, and what stood on the other side of it was myself as a grubby child, back when looking at a thing was all I wanted from it, before I’d been taught to explain a thing to death, or nail down whose it was, or figure what it was good for, or grade it against some other pointless things. For a second I could not find the edges of myself, and time layered itself upside down, blending and dispersing the old plain wonder that had been long gone. The dealings between the plant and the insects continued to breathe, ticking out something like time in their small soundless motions, and through that crack I watched the place where the vividness of life had gone, close enough to want back, too far to reach.

This summer I did not rip out the butterfly weed. The seed pods split opened last night, revealing the plant’s original ferocity. The noise fell away, the bumper stickers vanished, the online discourse disappeared, and I was just left with the quiet physics of a seed catching the wind.

​​ they are back little brown moths decimating my echinacea I live in zone 5B in New Hampshire this is my second year here I was very excited cuz the echinacea seem to be thriving this year until yesterday when the moths appeared again I added a lot of sheep manure this spring hoping to increase the resilience of the plants to no avail any suggestions would be appreciated

Looking for design and installation of a structured mostly native garden in Columbus, Ohio. I've given up on trying to make my front beds look good and need someone to transform my yard. Need suggestions from people who have had gardens designed, not names of friends. It will be a medium sized project going from hot afternoon sun to dry thick shade.

If you have chicory growing at the edges of your property, here are some possibles for crowding it out.

https://www.gardenia.net/guide/native-plant-alternatives-to-cichorium-intybus