Native Plants

Plants are the beginning of the food chain, or trophic cascade, of almost every living system of organisms on the planet. Harnessing energy from the sun, they transform carbon dioxide and water into simple sugars that act as the starting molecules for most of the other compounds plants produce. Your local ecosystem, whatever it looks like, is not only photosynthesizing, but it’s also providing food and habitat for the other life forms higher up in the food chain.

What’s especially important to note is that those organisms are often indigenous to the region and can’t move around long distances on their own. They rely on the naturally occurring vegetation to fulfill their life cycle and when that vegetation is sparse, it can lead to the decline of their population. In the worst case, they could become locally or even globally extinct.

You might think, “What do bees or wasps or ‘pest’ insects have to do with me?”. Every organism has a niche, or an ecological role to play, even mealybugs and aphids. Since plants are the pillar that supports 99.99% of life on Earth, it makes sense that we should protect the integrity of not only the plants themselves, but the plant communities writ large. Those communities support everything above it, even you and the plants, animals, and fungi we consume as food.

Choosing to plant plants in your yard or landscape that are both native to your area and propagated from local (or even local-adjacent) propagules is the best way to ensure your plants are going to be able to help the native wildlife in your area. If you can’t get local ecotype plants, then the next best thing is to plant the same species that may be propagated from other sources. For example, Silphium perfoliatum is a lovely, tall aster native to much of the eastern US. If someone were to plant a New Jersey ecotype plant in their Georgia garden, it would behave a bit differently from the same species as it naturally occurs in Georgia. Even within a species, there can be drastically different phenologies and even phenotypes depending on the origin of the plant. A northern-adapted plant may be much slower to flower than the same southern-adapted species because that population had experienced a longer cool season and a slow-flowering variant of that species was selected for over evolutionary time.

Here’s a tier-list to consider when choosing plants to plant in your garden or landscape.

Best - Local ecotype native plants

Good - Species native to your area but not local ecotype

Pretty good - Native to the general region but maybe not your area specifically

Neutral - Non-native plants that don’t escape where they’re planted and don’t pose a risk to native wildlife

Bad - “Weedy” non-natives that pose some risk of invasion

Very bad - Non-native invasives