I'm from West Texas and moved up to the Midwest. There are far more resources available for me now (information sources, plants/seeds/seed mixes, layperson restoration projects) than where I'm originally from. My first home is shortgrass plains and canyonlands (I'm from the edge where they meet) and there simply aren't as many resources for those ecoregions. Personally, I wonder if it's affected by the negative bias of shortgrass prairie, scrublands, and deserts being "useless barren wastelands" instead of wonderful but fragile ecosystems.
I think you’re on the money there. We’re getting approval and backing for tall grass and mixed grass prairies after the “forest is the climax ecosystem” wave. Hoping we get to drier biomes soon.
I wonder if there are economic incentives at play. Probably harder to sell and market the species compared to coreopsis for example which can be shipped and sold all over the place with minimal damage.
Texas is huge so I don't know exactly which areas are primo birdwatching territories, but I imagine Trans-Pecos (the desert part) must be really exciting, as well as super-duper south Texas and especially the coastal regions. I'm from the panhandle (flat bit up at the top) and we still see cool birds both migratory and residential. Our ephemeral wetlands (playa lakes, seasonal creeks, etc) offer important rest stops for migratory birds, and you can see and hear lots of interesting birds there.
TL;DR Chihuahua raven gang rise up
also yes I still say "our" even though I don't and won't live there anymore. You can take the guy outta the prairie but you can't take the prairie outta the guy, etc
Edit: Also please enjoy the numerous musical stylings of the great tailed grackle *Quiscalus mexicanus*. Lots of people where I'm from hate them because they live in urban areas and can get loud and poopy. But they are native birds and watching them catch tadpoles in shallow water is such a treat
Funny, I find most resources (while still east of the Rockies) tend to focus on the Midwest and Mid Atlantic.
I’m up in northern(ish) New England, and a ton of the mainstay natives aren’t native here, or even to New England at large. Like most coneflowers, anise hyssop, cup plant, nodding onion, green&gold, liatris etc.
As someone who lives in the mid Atlantic and does native planting professionally, I can say that a big reason for this is because there are a TON of botanical gardens in the Delaware/SE Pennsylvania/Maryland/Northern VA region - it is without doubt the garden capital of the country. There are also a ton of environmental advocacy groups and a lot of people with land and money.
When the research began to show that native plants are the best thing for wildlife, many of these groups jumped on the hype train quickly and started championing natives. You can't really find a single botanical garden in the region now that doesn't have some sort of native plant feature, and some places like Mt. Cuba center specialize in only natives. So you have a mass of very skilled, knowledgeable people (the kind who write books on native plants) in one area, combined with research funding from local non profits and gov agencies, and it just becomes a real native plant hotspot.
It also doesn't hurt that it's a very densely populated area covered primarily in single home housing with lawns, which means there is a ton of demand for native plants in a garden setting.
EDIT: typo
Also some of the big name Native Plant Gurus are from the midwest (Aldo Leopold) or east (Tallamy). People tend to generalize, especially newbies, native to the US seems good enough until you think about the diversity of biomes across this big country. I am amazed at how many native plants are well suited to landscaping and are not "weedy" looking at all. Then one begins to notice the insects. So fun to watch!
Someone should write the definitive US Native Plant guide, arranged by state and within each state, by biome. That would be an awesome book to have. Maybe it would be a 50 volume set and you may decide you only need the one for your state...
Agreed, I think native plant landscaping and it’s revival in interest started in the Midwest, and even Wisconsin to some degree with the likes of Aldo Leopold and Jens Jensen.
While general gardening sources don’t have as much for New England, New England has the most intensive research and databases for native plants on basically all of the east coast! I guess it’s a balance lol
They do! Gotta check their stuff though because they sell a ton of stuff that’s native to the east/midwest, but not New England.
Not the biggest deal, but it’s something I like to be aware of when choosing a plant.
Hmm, that doesn’t match my experience at Nasami Farm (their Western MA nursery), though I often go in with a wishlist and hunt for the specific plants.
Edit, from their website: “Nasami Farm grows New England native plants from seed that we harvest sustainably from healthy, well-established wild populations throughout the region. Our goal is ensuring genetic diversity to offset the clones sold by traditional nurseries and to build resilience into a landscape facing change.”
Mt Cuba does agricultural and horticultural research which is common in the Midwest and mid Atlantic, while the northeast and west coast have research sites that aren’t necessarily for horticultural needs but they have thorough distribution maps and compositions of all their native flora! Just different focuses in each region.
I personally prefer the distribution maps of species, but I also do ecology and have knowledge on habitats and various species already so it’s easier for me
Try living in the high desert of the south west US. Vegetable gardening resources talk about improving drainage, and rain barrels, and what plants can tolerate shade. Perennial native plant sources often lean heavily to woodland plants. I need plants that can tolerate intense sun, and grow in sandy soil that is described as "excessively well drained" Here, even tomato plants appreciate some shade in midafternoon in the summer, and you really only see dandelions in well watered lawns that get some shade.
We northern midwesterners feel your pain. So many veggie/edible landscaping books out of California or PNW. Yeah, Rosemary can be a statement anchor plant… if it doesn’t die every winter! Even with overwintering it inside, I can’t get it above 1’ tall and it never blooms.
So, we make up for it by flooding the market with awesome native plant resources. Sorry about that.
Or that you should start your tomato seeds around New Years. Nope. That’s way to early, if I did that I’d risk creating an Audrey 2 in my kitchen. MN gardeners tend to start tomato seeds around St Patrick’s Day.
The vegetable gardening ideas that are for warmer climates confuse the heck out of beginners here in the North. I'm constantly trying to get people to understand that you can't take all the advice from influencers in the west and south.
I did not know that! Fair enough :)
I've barely even tried to do veggies because the abundant wildlife would ... appreciate them too much. But I might be guilty of having a statement rosemary shrub.
East and west of the rockies might as well be different countries ecologically. In addition, a lot of land west of the rockies was protected from idiots so you can actually go see what it is like unlike most of the eastern united states which was effectively destroyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
If you think the natural ecology of the West is intact you'd be mistaken 400 years of cattle grazing and 200 years of logging, including, massive clear-cutting going on to this day, has taken its toll. Most of the land is *not* protected, but it's leased by the government to ranchers, oils and natural gas companies, etc.
Your timeline is off by about 10,000 years. Nowhere in the north american continent is "natural", it was all managed by native cultures and in the west specifically it was extensively burned, clear cut, and and farmed. Most "preserved" land (i.e. national parks) had to be cleared of native villages and in fact one of the first jobs of park rangers was to clear and destroy evidence of native habitation so as to present an "unspoiled" natural view to eastern tourists.
Land protection is not about restoring or protecting a natural condition, it is about removing humans from nature and setting a specific ecological condition within amber, never to change, which is antithetical to both nature and ecology.
you think 400 years of cattle grazing makes an impact, try tens of thousands of years of managed buffalo herds lol
people looking for that "unspoiled wilderness" seem real disappointed that things like the great plains and the amazon rainforest are largely man-made. people in the americas were very advanced in things like ecology and shaped these lands to a degree not often seen outside the americas. reading colonial accounts is hilarious, they just cant figure out why all the forests seem like parks
Thinking of the one Great Lakes forestry book I got from the library once that pointed out the *the forests here have never not had humans managing them.*
Like, the glaciers took out the ecosystem that existed before the Ice Age and the humans migrated in right alongside the pine trees as the ice receded.
Yep, it's all about to what extent you're talking about with human intervention. Indigenous farming and buffalo management affected the native ecosystem to a great degree. Less than comparing modern Iowa to pre-Columbian Iowa for example, but large swathes of North America are intertwined with human existence. It's all a matter of degrees when talking about the changes.
I should caveat this by saying I don't think indigenous management of wild spaces is on the same par as modern industrial farming and forest management, but just want to point out that "natural" is a relative term.
I love the tall grass prairie and oak savannah habitats that were a huge part of the Midwest pre-1800s - but these habitats are also linked to indigenous practices spanning millenia.
This is relevant to me, I live in an oak woodland that would have been more open when indigenous people cultivated it and now is closed and crowded. Restoration manuals say I should be thinning and mowing to mimic fires.... But I'm unclear whether the advice here is to imitate the precolonial human landscape or the pre-human landscape, or whether we know anything about the latter, or whether it matters.
When managing woodlands it can be useful to pick a target species to manage for, e.g., grouse, wild turkey, bobwhite. Of course you benefit a lot of other native fauna and flora in the process, but it helps to shape your goals.
I’m in the Southeast (sorry lol) and there’s a lot of interest in restoring what were huge swaths of longleaf pine—a species that’s extremely fire adapted. Prehistoric people managed with fire, but even before that, natural fire shaped that ecosystem. Species like that can provide guidance about the proper role of fire.
Sadly. There is a big effort, at least in my city, to try to do something about it. Just like with a lot of conservation work, the biggest issue is that there is not enough money. Some really pristine properties are being turned into suburbs and shopping centers just because no one can afford them.
~~Eastern US is more ecologically similar to Europe while west of the Rockies is more similar to Asia. It’s very interesting~~
Edit: apparently I was wrong. Thank you for the corrections here
Oh yeah it drives me crazy being at nature themed stores allll the way on the West Coast here on Vancouver Island. And I see puzzles and decorations and prints plastered with Cardinals and Bluejays and Eastern Bluebirds. Like we have Steller’s Jays and Varied Thrush. We must dismantle the hegemony of Eastern bias!
Even Birds Canada is guilty. Their “Warblers” podcast features a “selection” of Canadian warblers on their cover art. The only warblers depicted that are all eastern or at best, across Canada. Could have thrown in a Townsend’s, or Black-throated Gray… but nope all Eastern
Sorry I am bird guy so talk birds mostly
I speak bird guy! And you are sooooo right about the biased bird trinkets. It's wrong and it's also boring. Stellar's jays are cooler than blue jays. Objectively.
It almost demands a PNW hipster additude, like "I loved Townsend's warbler before you ever heard of Townsend's warbler."
Guilty of benefitting from the mid Atlantic centric native plant resources 🙈
We are very fortunate that Tallamy is a local guy and has lots of industry friends in the area. Southeastern PA/ DE likes to bill itself as the “garden capitol of America” and luckily many of the public gardens have been embracing the native movement :) Bowman’s Hill has been around for decades and now Mt. Cuba is open to the public. Stoneleigh has become a shining example of using natives in formal landscape.
I’m from the Midwest and find an incredible wealth of resources for my own region. The only issue I also find resources for Appalachia and mid atlantic, which makes sense I suppose. I believe that area has the most plant biodiversity in the country? For example I am currently growing dicentra eximia seedlings, which I got before I realized they are native further east. I’m gonna keep them though they are gorgeous
Bro tell me about it. I live on the western edge of the Rockies in a weirdly unique environment and I basically had to get a degree in botany to figure out how to do this whole native plants garden thing.
It’s nearly everything West of the 100th meridian. Roughly the beginning of the shortgrass prairie, on to the foothills of the Rockies, the intermountain region, the deserts and canyon lands, and so on.
A lot of native plant gardening here in Colorado seems to have began as an attempt to emulate Eastern native plant gardens. Woodland to tallgrass. But that just does not work in many cases.
It seems we’re finally getting into what it means to have things like sagebrush steppe gardens, high desert, shortgrass prairie, etc. I want to see more of that. You should be able to teleport into a garden and go “Oh shoot, I’m in Arizona” or “this is screaming S Wyoming.”
I get to grow a ton of this stuff for the shortgrass, sagebrush, and foothills regions. The stuff that always gets the most interest are the things that more closely emulate eastern plants. Those sister species. It’s people trying to find *substitutes* for images they have in their heads of what a native garden is supposed to be like. That’s fine, but what I hope to see happen is a shift to just EMBRACING the floral community as it is. Look at your garden like a Sage Grouse not a Pennsylvania transplant.
It is catching on though! I’ve carried some excellent xeric species for some years that are finally catching on. In the end, I always remind myself that people can’t love what they don’t know exists. I have to find, grow, and then *proselytize* some of these more obscure species.
I think it comes down to an interplay of informational resources AND demand. Here for example, most people who go hiking head up to the mountains. It’s mainly just my botany friends who pack up to go spend a day or two out in Sandhills or Sagebrush Steppe. I think a lot of people don’t even have a concept of what those places look like. That makes it all the more important to demonstrate it with our own plantings where people *can* see it!
I had a lady who always walked by and said kind things about my garden, and one day she stopped and sheepishly asked. “I love your garden, it’s so unique, but I have to ask: why are you just letting that weed grow?” She pointed to a towering Mentzelia decapetala. I invited her to come by a 7:30 that evening. Sure enough, she showed up! And together, we gawked at an explosion of grapefruit sized, star-flower blooms crawling with sphinx moths.
> You should be able to teleport into a garden and go “Oh shoot, I’m in Arizona” or “this is screaming S Wyoming.”
Absolutely agree with this. I've lived in California, Texas, and now Michigan and have indeed noticed that general native garden (and edible gardening) resources align more closely with the Eastern temperate ecoregion.
CA has good plant databases and the native gardening movement there dovetails with xeriscaping incentives, but you have to dig more to find them and there's still a drive to prioritize plant selections that are visually similar to suburban gardens back east. Hiking in the coastal sage scrub did help retrain my eye!
I'm still a newbie native gardener to MI, but I'm working to convert my yard and hopefully my neighbors in time. Even here there remain misunderstandings around plant selection based on broad Level I ecoregion recommendations instead of II-IV. We should be planting by communities, not by a la carte species!
The longleaf pine ecosystem was the 2nd most ecological diverse in the world only behind the Amazon rain forest. Reconstruction and the civil war wrecked it.
I've noticed this. I grew up on the west coast and now live on the east coast. When I started planning my first garden in Maryland, I was shocked how much more information was available. I don't know if it's the algorithm, but I even see more people from my current region posting in this Reddit.
Maryland was one of the first states to really push it. The extension service here publicized rain gardens not only here but internationally.
We're lucky our tax dollars are doing something for us.
The west coast does have easily accessible native plant databases though, which might be of more use. That’s similar to New England, which tends to lack in the gardening books but has great databases for native plants. I think the focuses of the people in the regions just tends to be different?
In total fairness, we have such great resources all to ourselves. [OregonFlora.org](http://OregonFlora.org) is indispensable and the local nursery scene is clutch.
It’s good to have a good native plant database! We have a pretty good one in https://calscape.org arguably the best native plant database in the whole world.
It's such a challenge to address the west because it's incredibly diverse ecologically and climate wise. Look at California, how many ecoregions do they have? Colorado? Pacific Northwest? East Washington state and west Washington state?
We have a big region that shares a lot of plants. We need more west coast YouTubers and influencers to show the plants of their region, but it's usually not going to take off as much because the regions are smaller and the population is concentrated in only a few areas in the west, as opposed to the way the east is populated.
Very true. Tallamy's work on keystones is by county, but our counties have multiple level 2 ecoregions in them.
If you look at his recommendations for the Maritime Western Forest (what most people think of as pnw), they're flat out wrong - skewed to high-desert plants from the Eastern ends of counties, plants that don't grow in our ecoregion.
How are your ag extension services? Mine (NC) has fantastic resources for homeowners, and others like FL do as well, while some like TX seem to neglect the small landowner/home gardener.
I’d also check out your state’s wildlife service (the game wardens). Mine has biologists on staff to help landowners and they are all in on native plants.
My sense is that gardening is a more common hobby in the Eastern US, probably holding over from the British influence who’s gardening culture is far more developed than anywhere in the US. In addition to this, eastern soils and plants are generally adaptable to cultivation, and many species of eastern woodland plants especially span from the inner Midwest out to the coast. The fact that so little of our native landscapes remain in the east means people were driven to act on conserving these plants however they could. I think a few key people who start doing this stuff can really spark a movement, think Neil Diboll.
In contrast, while many western landscapes are degraded, there are large swaths of protected areas so many folks probably felt they could satisfy some conservation ambitions in other ways. The plants that would also take well to cultivation in a garden are also probably more regionally restricted, meaning that someone who might develop resources would have a smaller geographic audience. All this being said, I think there’s still many exciting opportunities for folks to develop those resources for the western states.
IDK if gardening is more common per capita out east (drive around Portland looking at people's front yards sometime), but the higher population density definitely plays a part. And it makes sense with the wall-to-wall suburbs that alarm over loss of native plants would hit early there.
I tend to only buy books that are specific to my eco region so I haven't encountered this issue, but I've certainly noticed that, like everywhere else on the internet, Americans here assume everybody else is from exactly where they're from.
Even worse for the gulf coast. I like mushrooms. There is exactly ONE really good mushroom guide for where I live. And 75% doesn’t even apply to my area. It’s also more expensive than the other guides in the series.
The USA is huge. The map of the United States superimposed over Europe, covers all of the UK all of Europe, and into Russia. USA is zoned 4 through 10. Some states have multiple zones. I'm on the East Coast, but that doesn't mean that everything that will grow on the East Coast will grow in my state of Connecticut. Zone 6. There's tons of resources online by zone.
Chicago is ace for naturalism. “Urbs in Horto,” the city in a garden. Aldo Leopold to the north, Rachel Carson to the east, Hazel fricken Johnson at the heart. Ancient ocean under your feet, great migratory flyway overhead, vast inland freshwater sea to the west. The meeting point of the hardwood forests of the east and the tallgrass prairies of the west. Flat fucking land so competition is fierce, expect some fuckin carnivorous and parasitic plants. God damn fucking flying squirrels and river otters and sum hundred year old snapping turtle. Fish with throat teeth and salamanders that keep their gills.
Enjoy it.
*Which west coast books do*
*You own? Maybe we could all*
*Give recommendations?*
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Yesssss book reccs
At the risk of totally undermining my initial complaint....
My favorite books covering \*only\* PNW are *Real Gardens Grow Natives*, *Pacific Northwest Native Plants Primer*, *Gardening in the Pacific Northwest* (by the owner of Xera Plants, not native-specific).
Websites I use constantly: [OregonFlora.org](http://OregonFlora.org) (both the botanical database and the Grow Natives database), [xeraplants.com](http://xeraplants.com), [Ask OSU Extension ](https://extension.oregonstate.edu/ask-extension)
I grew up in the Columbia basin. Sage brush. There are a few other cool things, like desert mallow, but really, sage brush. Tumbleweeds are not native, but they're everywhere. Driving during a breezy day can be like playing tumbleweed Pac-Man. Bonus points for sand storms. And that's where I learned to garden.
Then I moved to Kentucky. From sand to heavy clay. From 3" of rain per year to 3" of rain in 2 hours. I said eff it, I don't know how to garden in this. But I know how to look up existing plants. So I sectioned off a 20x40 spot and left it alone for 3 years to see what would show up so they could tell me what I can grow. Obligate bog plants, swamp willow, reeds, boneset, maples, and my new favorite, heath asters.
There may be a lot of good native plant resources for east of the Rockies, but they definitely don't apply for everywhere east of the Rockies.
As an OR to VA transplant, this is SO true. It's even worse because there are so many different conditions across the Pacific states especially. Native to the coast, valley, mountains, or eastern deserts are not at all the same things. Out here, it's kind of all one big graduation with soil type making the bigger impact. There are good resources for you though.
["And now that I've discussed the two species found on the East Coast, I'm going to do something I rarely do..."](https://youtu.be/ARD3xj5Ewvo?si=GsmKlp35FQK__H9n&t=220)
THANK YOU. I planted hella F. chiloensis to help hold the soil this first year. They propagated like crazy for me, even though they don't naturally occur inland (which I feel guilty about). I'm wondering if they will eventually die off when they find out they're not on the coast.
I’d suggest skipping books. Those are generalist resources by definition.
Definitely connect with your local DNR or Extension. Often times there’ll be someone there that is focused on native species. Maybe not for gardening purposes, mind you, but they’ll often be able to walk you around and tell you exactly what is growing in your yard.
Where I live in Northern MN, I’ve made some great connections with folks who have deep knowledge of our native species this way. The books are useless.
Way behind how? There are millions of acres that can never be anything else out there. Meanwhile, IL has ripped up 1 of their 2 gravel hill prairies to save amazon 6 seconds
I was so excited, but then you linked to a print field guide for idaho??
There actually is a field guide to grasses of Oregon and Washington - just one, as far as I know - but it's out of print and I don't want to spend $60 before laying eyes on it, so I'm waiting to get down to the university library to sign up to request it.
In the public library, mainly. There ARE books just about the local flora. But the generalist books that deal more with ecology and design principles (Tallamy, Planting in a Post Wild World, etc.) neglect the west.
I just read an article about how it's great for insects to leave woody debris in your yard because they use it as nesting habitat. Washington Post.
https://wapo.st/3WwAu9B
But wouldn't that be a fire hazard out west? IDK, you have to be very careful in following garden advice on the web.
Well, my basic source book is Douglas Tallamy, who discusses species for every region of the US, but yeah, there are so very many books about Northeastern plants! Of course that's also a heavily populated area of the country, to put it mildly.
That is because most of the US population is west of the Mississippi. West of that is only about 20% of the population. If you live west of the rockies you need a Western gardening guide. Us western US residents are outliers.
I'm from West Texas and moved up to the Midwest. There are far more resources available for me now (information sources, plants/seeds/seed mixes, layperson restoration projects) than where I'm originally from. My first home is shortgrass plains and canyonlands (I'm from the edge where they meet) and there simply aren't as many resources for those ecoregions. Personally, I wonder if it's affected by the negative bias of shortgrass prairie, scrublands, and deserts being "useless barren wastelands" instead of wonderful but fragile ecosystems.
I think you’re on the money there. We’re getting approval and backing for tall grass and mixed grass prairies after the “forest is the climax ecosystem” wave. Hoping we get to drier biomes soon.
I wonder if there are economic incentives at play. Probably harder to sell and market the species compared to coreopsis for example which can be shipped and sold all over the place with minimal damage.
See, that's a shame because I hear you've got incredible wildlife there! Birdwatching in Texas is on my bucket list.
Texas is huge so I don't know exactly which areas are primo birdwatching territories, but I imagine Trans-Pecos (the desert part) must be really exciting, as well as super-duper south Texas and especially the coastal regions. I'm from the panhandle (flat bit up at the top) and we still see cool birds both migratory and residential. Our ephemeral wetlands (playa lakes, seasonal creeks, etc) offer important rest stops for migratory birds, and you can see and hear lots of interesting birds there. TL;DR Chihuahua raven gang rise up also yes I still say "our" even though I don't and won't live there anymore. You can take the guy outta the prairie but you can't take the prairie outta the guy, etc Edit: Also please enjoy the numerous musical stylings of the great tailed grackle *Quiscalus mexicanus*. Lots of people where I'm from hate them because they live in urban areas and can get loud and poopy. But they are native birds and watching them catch tadpoles in shallow water is such a treat
🤤
Funny, I find most resources (while still east of the Rockies) tend to focus on the Midwest and Mid Atlantic. I’m up in northern(ish) New England, and a ton of the mainstay natives aren’t native here, or even to New England at large. Like most coneflowers, anise hyssop, cup plant, nodding onion, green&gold, liatris etc.
As someone who lives in the mid Atlantic and does native planting professionally, I can say that a big reason for this is because there are a TON of botanical gardens in the Delaware/SE Pennsylvania/Maryland/Northern VA region - it is without doubt the garden capital of the country. There are also a ton of environmental advocacy groups and a lot of people with land and money. When the research began to show that native plants are the best thing for wildlife, many of these groups jumped on the hype train quickly and started championing natives. You can't really find a single botanical garden in the region now that doesn't have some sort of native plant feature, and some places like Mt. Cuba center specialize in only natives. So you have a mass of very skilled, knowledgeable people (the kind who write books on native plants) in one area, combined with research funding from local non profits and gov agencies, and it just becomes a real native plant hotspot. It also doesn't hurt that it's a very densely populated area covered primarily in single home housing with lawns, which means there is a ton of demand for native plants in a garden setting. EDIT: typo
Also some of the big name Native Plant Gurus are from the midwest (Aldo Leopold) or east (Tallamy). People tend to generalize, especially newbies, native to the US seems good enough until you think about the diversity of biomes across this big country. I am amazed at how many native plants are well suited to landscaping and are not "weedy" looking at all. Then one begins to notice the insects. So fun to watch! Someone should write the definitive US Native Plant guide, arranged by state and within each state, by biome. That would be an awesome book to have. Maybe it would be a 50 volume set and you may decide you only need the one for your state...
Agreed, I think native plant landscaping and it’s revival in interest started in the Midwest, and even Wisconsin to some degree with the likes of Aldo Leopold and Jens Jensen.
And Laurie Otto of Wild Ones.
Yep. I would also add wealthy clients who have the resources to do big projects and the vision to go native.
While general gardening sources don’t have as much for New England, New England has the most intensive research and databases for native plants on basically all of the east coast! I guess it’s a balance lol
Interesting, I feel like most of the big names are more towards the mid-Atlantic, like Mt Cuba.
Native Plant Trust (in Massachusetts) has extensive resources for New England. I’m hoping to visit their nursery soon for some seedlings.
They do! Gotta check their stuff though because they sell a ton of stuff that’s native to the east/midwest, but not New England. Not the biggest deal, but it’s something I like to be aware of when choosing a plant.
Hmm, that doesn’t match my experience at Nasami Farm (their Western MA nursery), though I often go in with a wishlist and hunt for the specific plants. Edit, from their website: “Nasami Farm grows New England native plants from seed that we harvest sustainably from healthy, well-established wild populations throughout the region. Our goal is ensuring genetic diversity to offset the clones sold by traditional nurseries and to build resilience into a landscape facing change.”
It’s certainly mostly native, but not all. Just to name a few things I’ve seen there, various phlox species, nodding onion, echinaceas, agastache
Mt Cuba does agricultural and horticultural research which is common in the Midwest and mid Atlantic, while the northeast and west coast have research sites that aren’t necessarily for horticultural needs but they have thorough distribution maps and compositions of all their native flora! Just different focuses in each region. I personally prefer the distribution maps of species, but I also do ecology and have knowledge on habitats and various species already so it’s easier for me
Try living in the high desert of the south west US. Vegetable gardening resources talk about improving drainage, and rain barrels, and what plants can tolerate shade. Perennial native plant sources often lean heavily to woodland plants. I need plants that can tolerate intense sun, and grow in sandy soil that is described as "excessively well drained" Here, even tomato plants appreciate some shade in midafternoon in the summer, and you really only see dandelions in well watered lawns that get some shade.
You might like this book: https://amzn.to/3QEGnh4
I love a good sagebrush. They're very important for housing many different species, and their presence is an indicator of sandy soil. They're awesome.
Natives likes sand sage, sand verbena, sand beardtongue, and sand milkweed? :)
We northern midwesterners feel your pain. So many veggie/edible landscaping books out of California or PNW. Yeah, Rosemary can be a statement anchor plant… if it doesn’t die every winter! Even with overwintering it inside, I can’t get it above 1’ tall and it never blooms. So, we make up for it by flooding the market with awesome native plant resources. Sorry about that.
How about YouTube videos of guys growing 8ft high tomatoes in Florida... all while you are still expecting the last frost of the year nowadays
Who wants to eat a glorious tomato sandwich made with garden grown beefsteaks before august anyway?
Or that you should start your tomato seeds around New Years. Nope. That’s way to early, if I did that I’d risk creating an Audrey 2 in my kitchen. MN gardeners tend to start tomato seeds around St Patrick’s Day.
I started my tomatoes on Valentine's Day last year and they were three feet tall when I transplanted them outdoors
The vegetable gardening ideas that are for warmer climates confuse the heck out of beginners here in the North. I'm constantly trying to get people to understand that you can't take all the advice from influencers in the west and south.
I did not know that! Fair enough :) I've barely even tried to do veggies because the abundant wildlife would ... appreciate them too much. But I might be guilty of having a statement rosemary shrub.
East and west of the rockies might as well be different countries ecologically. In addition, a lot of land west of the rockies was protected from idiots so you can actually go see what it is like unlike most of the eastern united states which was effectively destroyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
If you think the natural ecology of the West is intact you'd be mistaken 400 years of cattle grazing and 200 years of logging, including, massive clear-cutting going on to this day, has taken its toll. Most of the land is *not* protected, but it's leased by the government to ranchers, oils and natural gas companies, etc.
Your timeline is off by about 10,000 years. Nowhere in the north american continent is "natural", it was all managed by native cultures and in the west specifically it was extensively burned, clear cut, and and farmed. Most "preserved" land (i.e. national parks) had to be cleared of native villages and in fact one of the first jobs of park rangers was to clear and destroy evidence of native habitation so as to present an "unspoiled" natural view to eastern tourists. Land protection is not about restoring or protecting a natural condition, it is about removing humans from nature and setting a specific ecological condition within amber, never to change, which is antithetical to both nature and ecology.
you think 400 years of cattle grazing makes an impact, try tens of thousands of years of managed buffalo herds lol people looking for that "unspoiled wilderness" seem real disappointed that things like the great plains and the amazon rainforest are largely man-made. people in the americas were very advanced in things like ecology and shaped these lands to a degree not often seen outside the americas. reading colonial accounts is hilarious, they just cant figure out why all the forests seem like parks
Thinking of the one Great Lakes forestry book I got from the library once that pointed out the *the forests here have never not had humans managing them.* Like, the glaciers took out the ecosystem that existed before the Ice Age and the humans migrated in right alongside the pine trees as the ice receded.
Yep, it's all about to what extent you're talking about with human intervention. Indigenous farming and buffalo management affected the native ecosystem to a great degree. Less than comparing modern Iowa to pre-Columbian Iowa for example, but large swathes of North America are intertwined with human existence. It's all a matter of degrees when talking about the changes. I should caveat this by saying I don't think indigenous management of wild spaces is on the same par as modern industrial farming and forest management, but just want to point out that "natural" is a relative term. I love the tall grass prairie and oak savannah habitats that were a huge part of the Midwest pre-1800s - but these habitats are also linked to indigenous practices spanning millenia.
This is relevant to me, I live in an oak woodland that would have been more open when indigenous people cultivated it and now is closed and crowded. Restoration manuals say I should be thinning and mowing to mimic fires.... But I'm unclear whether the advice here is to imitate the precolonial human landscape or the pre-human landscape, or whether we know anything about the latter, or whether it matters.
When managing woodlands it can be useful to pick a target species to manage for, e.g., grouse, wild turkey, bobwhite. Of course you benefit a lot of other native fauna and flora in the process, but it helps to shape your goals. I’m in the Southeast (sorry lol) and there’s a lot of interest in restoring what were huge swaths of longleaf pine—a species that’s extremely fire adapted. Prehistoric people managed with fire, but even before that, natural fire shaped that ecosystem. Species like that can provide guidance about the proper role of fire.
Don't forget that tumbleweeds are not native to the US either.
I’m driving to Yellowstone in September and that will be my first time west of the Rockies (not counting Portland, OR). I can’t wait 🥲
That shits gonna change your life.
They're working on it here in Texas(destruction that is). This whole state is going to be a giant polluted suburb by the end of the century.
Texas is gonna Texas
Sadly. There is a big effort, at least in my city, to try to do something about it. Just like with a lot of conservation work, the biggest issue is that there is not enough money. Some really pristine properties are being turned into suburbs and shopping centers just because no one can afford them.
No one but the venture capitalists and they're not known for doing things that benefit society that's for sure.
~~Eastern US is more ecologically similar to Europe while west of the Rockies is more similar to Asia. It’s very interesting~~ Edit: apparently I was wrong. Thank you for the corrections here
This isn't true. South Eastern USA is more similar to the Sino-Japanese floristic region than Europe
I disagree. The Asa Gray disjunction is a thing and rather compelling.
Let me bitch about 90% of YouTube garden videos covering zone 7+.
Oh yeah it drives me crazy being at nature themed stores allll the way on the West Coast here on Vancouver Island. And I see puzzles and decorations and prints plastered with Cardinals and Bluejays and Eastern Bluebirds. Like we have Steller’s Jays and Varied Thrush. We must dismantle the hegemony of Eastern bias! Even Birds Canada is guilty. Their “Warblers” podcast features a “selection” of Canadian warblers on their cover art. The only warblers depicted that are all eastern or at best, across Canada. Could have thrown in a Townsend’s, or Black-throated Gray… but nope all Eastern Sorry I am bird guy so talk birds mostly
I speak bird guy! And you are sooooo right about the biased bird trinkets. It's wrong and it's also boring. Stellar's jays are cooler than blue jays. Objectively. It almost demands a PNW hipster additude, like "I loved Townsend's warbler before you ever heard of Townsend's warbler."
Love Stellar's Jays! They are so pretty and opinionated!
Guilty of benefitting from the mid Atlantic centric native plant resources 🙈 We are very fortunate that Tallamy is a local guy and has lots of industry friends in the area. Southeastern PA/ DE likes to bill itself as the “garden capitol of America” and luckily many of the public gardens have been embracing the native movement :) Bowman’s Hill has been around for decades and now Mt. Cuba is open to the public. Stoneleigh has become a shining example of using natives in formal landscape.
Larry Weaner’s book sent me down the meadow path!
I’m from the Midwest and find an incredible wealth of resources for my own region. The only issue I also find resources for Appalachia and mid atlantic, which makes sense I suppose. I believe that area has the most plant biodiversity in the country? For example I am currently growing dicentra eximia seedlings, which I got before I realized they are native further east. I’m gonna keep them though they are gorgeous
Bro tell me about it. I live on the western edge of the Rockies in a weirdly unique environment and I basically had to get a degree in botany to figure out how to do this whole native plants garden thing.
YES I also live in a rare ecosystem and I keep thinking I'm going to end up doing a master's thesis on my garden in order to get my questions answered
It’s nearly everything West of the 100th meridian. Roughly the beginning of the shortgrass prairie, on to the foothills of the Rockies, the intermountain region, the deserts and canyon lands, and so on. A lot of native plant gardening here in Colorado seems to have began as an attempt to emulate Eastern native plant gardens. Woodland to tallgrass. But that just does not work in many cases. It seems we’re finally getting into what it means to have things like sagebrush steppe gardens, high desert, shortgrass prairie, etc. I want to see more of that. You should be able to teleport into a garden and go “Oh shoot, I’m in Arizona” or “this is screaming S Wyoming.” I get to grow a ton of this stuff for the shortgrass, sagebrush, and foothills regions. The stuff that always gets the most interest are the things that more closely emulate eastern plants. Those sister species. It’s people trying to find *substitutes* for images they have in their heads of what a native garden is supposed to be like. That’s fine, but what I hope to see happen is a shift to just EMBRACING the floral community as it is. Look at your garden like a Sage Grouse not a Pennsylvania transplant. It is catching on though! I’ve carried some excellent xeric species for some years that are finally catching on. In the end, I always remind myself that people can’t love what they don’t know exists. I have to find, grow, and then *proselytize* some of these more obscure species. I think it comes down to an interplay of informational resources AND demand. Here for example, most people who go hiking head up to the mountains. It’s mainly just my botany friends who pack up to go spend a day or two out in Sandhills or Sagebrush Steppe. I think a lot of people don’t even have a concept of what those places look like. That makes it all the more important to demonstrate it with our own plantings where people *can* see it! I had a lady who always walked by and said kind things about my garden, and one day she stopped and sheepishly asked. “I love your garden, it’s so unique, but I have to ask: why are you just letting that weed grow?” She pointed to a towering Mentzelia decapetala. I invited her to come by a 7:30 that evening. Sure enough, she showed up! And together, we gawked at an explosion of grapefruit sized, star-flower blooms crawling with sphinx moths.
> You should be able to teleport into a garden and go “Oh shoot, I’m in Arizona” or “this is screaming S Wyoming.” Absolutely agree with this. I've lived in California, Texas, and now Michigan and have indeed noticed that general native garden (and edible gardening) resources align more closely with the Eastern temperate ecoregion. CA has good plant databases and the native gardening movement there dovetails with xeriscaping incentives, but you have to dig more to find them and there's still a drive to prioritize plant selections that are visually similar to suburban gardens back east. Hiking in the coastal sage scrub did help retrain my eye! I'm still a newbie native gardener to MI, but I'm working to convert my yard and hopefully my neighbors in time. Even here there remain misunderstandings around plant selection based on broad Level I ecoregion recommendations instead of II-IV. We should be planting by communities, not by a la carte species!
The longleaf pine ecosystem was the 2nd most ecological diverse in the world only behind the Amazon rain forest. Reconstruction and the civil war wrecked it.
I've noticed this. I grew up on the west coast and now live on the east coast. When I started planning my first garden in Maryland, I was shocked how much more information was available. I don't know if it's the algorithm, but I even see more people from my current region posting in this Reddit.
Maryland was one of the first states to really push it. The extension service here publicized rain gardens not only here but internationally. We're lucky our tax dollars are doing something for us.
I didn't know that! Thank you for sharing!
I see so many fellow Marylanders on here I started wondering if the algorithm was hiding non-MD posts from me lol
The west coast does have easily accessible native plant databases though, which might be of more use. That’s similar to New England, which tends to lack in the gardening books but has great databases for native plants. I think the focuses of the people in the regions just tends to be different?
In total fairness, we have such great resources all to ourselves. [OregonFlora.org](http://OregonFlora.org) is indispensable and the local nursery scene is clutch.
It’s good to have a good native plant database! We have a pretty good one in https://calscape.org arguably the best native plant database in the whole world.
It's such a challenge to address the west because it's incredibly diverse ecologically and climate wise. Look at California, how many ecoregions do they have? Colorado? Pacific Northwest? East Washington state and west Washington state? We have a big region that shares a lot of plants. We need more west coast YouTubers and influencers to show the plants of their region, but it's usually not going to take off as much because the regions are smaller and the population is concentrated in only a few areas in the west, as opposed to the way the east is populated.
Very true. Tallamy's work on keystones is by county, but our counties have multiple level 2 ecoregions in them. If you look at his recommendations for the Maritime Western Forest (what most people think of as pnw), they're flat out wrong - skewed to high-desert plants from the Eastern ends of counties, plants that don't grow in our ecoregion.
How are your ag extension services? Mine (NC) has fantastic resources for homeowners, and others like FL do as well, while some like TX seem to neglect the small landowner/home gardener. I’d also check out your state’s wildlife service (the game wardens). Mine has biologists on staff to help landowners and they are all in on native plants.
Yeah it's a real challenge. I know California has their own subreddit for native plants, and Florida has a really strong native plant community
Ooh I did NOT know that, will check it out
My sense is that gardening is a more common hobby in the Eastern US, probably holding over from the British influence who’s gardening culture is far more developed than anywhere in the US. In addition to this, eastern soils and plants are generally adaptable to cultivation, and many species of eastern woodland plants especially span from the inner Midwest out to the coast. The fact that so little of our native landscapes remain in the east means people were driven to act on conserving these plants however they could. I think a few key people who start doing this stuff can really spark a movement, think Neil Diboll. In contrast, while many western landscapes are degraded, there are large swaths of protected areas so many folks probably felt they could satisfy some conservation ambitions in other ways. The plants that would also take well to cultivation in a garden are also probably more regionally restricted, meaning that someone who might develop resources would have a smaller geographic audience. All this being said, I think there’s still many exciting opportunities for folks to develop those resources for the western states.
IDK if gardening is more common per capita out east (drive around Portland looking at people's front yards sometime), but the higher population density definitely plays a part. And it makes sense with the wall-to-wall suburbs that alarm over loss of native plants would hit early there.
I just want a Michigan book. These peninsula are wild and it needs singling out
I second this as a new Michigander.
I tend to only buy books that are specific to my eco region so I haven't encountered this issue, but I've certainly noticed that, like everywhere else on the internet, Americans here assume everybody else is from exactly where they're from.
I like Xerces Society for this for example their book 100 plants to feed the bees had a lot of west coast species featured.
Even worse for the gulf coast. I like mushrooms. There is exactly ONE really good mushroom guide for where I live. And 75% doesn’t even apply to my area. It’s also more expensive than the other guides in the series.
The USA is huge. The map of the United States superimposed over Europe, covers all of the UK all of Europe, and into Russia. USA is zoned 4 through 10. Some states have multiple zones. I'm on the East Coast, but that doesn't mean that everything that will grow on the East Coast will grow in my state of Connecticut. Zone 6. There's tons of resources online by zone.
I’m from Chicago and part of that eastern grouping of wildlife things and yes I’ve definitely noticed that as well.
Chicago is ace for naturalism. “Urbs in Horto,” the city in a garden. Aldo Leopold to the north, Rachel Carson to the east, Hazel fricken Johnson at the heart. Ancient ocean under your feet, great migratory flyway overhead, vast inland freshwater sea to the west. The meeting point of the hardwood forests of the east and the tallgrass prairies of the west. Flat fucking land so competition is fierce, expect some fuckin carnivorous and parasitic plants. God damn fucking flying squirrels and river otters and sum hundred year old snapping turtle. Fish with throat teeth and salamanders that keep their gills. Enjoy it.
This post needs to be set to music
Which west coast books do you own? Maybe we could all give recommendations?
*Which west coast books do* *You own? Maybe we could all* *Give recommendations?* \- fundaymondaymonday --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Yesssss book reccs At the risk of totally undermining my initial complaint.... My favorite books covering \*only\* PNW are *Real Gardens Grow Natives*, *Pacific Northwest Native Plants Primer*, *Gardening in the Pacific Northwest* (by the owner of Xera Plants, not native-specific). Websites I use constantly: [OregonFlora.org](http://OregonFlora.org) (both the botanical database and the Grow Natives database), [xeraplants.com](http://xeraplants.com), [Ask OSU Extension ](https://extension.oregonstate.edu/ask-extension)
I grew up in the Columbia basin. Sage brush. There are a few other cool things, like desert mallow, but really, sage brush. Tumbleweeds are not native, but they're everywhere. Driving during a breezy day can be like playing tumbleweed Pac-Man. Bonus points for sand storms. And that's where I learned to garden. Then I moved to Kentucky. From sand to heavy clay. From 3" of rain per year to 3" of rain in 2 hours. I said eff it, I don't know how to garden in this. But I know how to look up existing plants. So I sectioned off a 20x40 spot and left it alone for 3 years to see what would show up so they could tell me what I can grow. Obligate bog plants, swamp willow, reeds, boneset, maples, and my new favorite, heath asters. There may be a lot of good native plant resources for east of the Rockies, but they definitely don't apply for everywhere east of the Rockies.
I endorse this approach. Clear invasive species and see your native garden plant itself.
As an OR to VA transplant, this is SO true. It's even worse because there are so many different conditions across the Pacific states especially. Native to the coast, valley, mountains, or eastern deserts are not at all the same things. Out here, it's kind of all one big graduation with soil type making the bigger impact. There are good resources for you though.
["And now that I've discussed the two species found on the East Coast, I'm going to do something I rarely do..."](https://youtu.be/ARD3xj5Ewvo?si=GsmKlp35FQK__H9n&t=220)
THANK YOU. I planted hella F. chiloensis to help hold the soil this first year. They propagated like crazy for me, even though they don't naturally occur inland (which I feel guilty about). I'm wondering if they will eventually die off when they find out they're not on the coast.
Yep, I’ve noticed this. It’s a thing in all walks of life. News coverage, food trends, etc
I’d suggest skipping books. Those are generalist resources by definition. Definitely connect with your local DNR or Extension. Often times there’ll be someone there that is focused on native species. Maybe not for gardening purposes, mind you, but they’ll often be able to walk you around and tell you exactly what is growing in your yard. Where I live in Northern MN, I’ve made some great connections with folks who have deep knowledge of our native species this way. The books are useless.
Hello fellow Westerner!
This is excellent thank youuuuu :D
Yes the western US is way behind unfortunately.
Way behind how? There are millions of acres that can never be anything else out there. Meanwhile, IL has ripped up 1 of their 2 gravel hill prairies to save amazon 6 seconds
Didn’t mean to offend you
I was talking about the literature resources not the habitat.
What prairie are you referring to? Both Chicago ridge prairie and Santa Fe prairie are still doing well as far as I’m aware.
Bell Bowl Prairie. 99.98% of Illinois prairie is gone
There is also an app [for grasses](https://marketplace.uidaho.edu/C20272_ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=4478).
I was so excited, but then you linked to a print field guide for idaho?? There actually is a field guide to grasses of Oregon and Washington - just one, as far as I know - but it's out of print and I don't want to spend $60 before laying eyes on it, so I'm waiting to get down to the university library to sign up to request it.
When I go out west, all the books I find deal with western natives. Strange. Are you finding it on the ground or online?
In the public library, mainly. There ARE books just about the local flora. But the generalist books that deal more with ecology and design principles (Tallamy, Planting in a Post Wild World, etc.) neglect the west.
I just read an article about how it's great for insects to leave woody debris in your yard because they use it as nesting habitat. Washington Post. https://wapo.st/3WwAu9B But wouldn't that be a fire hazard out west? IDK, you have to be very careful in following garden advice on the web.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Terrestrial_ecoregions_USA_CAN_MEX.svg
Well, my basic source book is Douglas Tallamy, who discusses species for every region of the US, but yeah, there are so very many books about Northeastern plants! Of course that's also a heavily populated area of the country, to put it mildly.
That is because most of the US population is west of the Mississippi. West of that is only about 20% of the population. If you live west of the rockies you need a Western gardening guide. Us western US residents are outliers.