The rewards of native plant gardening

Growing native plants is a source of unmitigated joy. A small urban yard will come to life with countless species of bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, and birds of all descriptions including hummingbirds.

It’s also easy to do, and beautiful. You don’t have to tear up your lawn and turn it into what your neighbours may perceive as a weed patch, if that’s not your jam. In fact each part of your yard can become its own little ecosystem and a lawn helps tie everything together. Personally I don’t hate lawns at all, the only reason ours seems to get smaller every year is that we want more space to grow native plants, vegetables, and fruits. Seeding some clover into your remaining lawn also provides food for pollinators, makes it more beautiful, and reduces weed problems.

If you start small in your borders or garden plots, native plants will tend to want to spread. It’s up to you how far you let them wander, and which ones you want to favour.

Native plant gardening can begin as a very small commitment, and almost immediately you’ll see results in terms of the biodiversity in your yard. I’ve been learning my bees thanks to the inaturalist app, and our yard is host to various species of furrow bees, bumble bees, woolcarder bees, sweat bees, longhorn bees, and mining bees; also monarch, viceroy and red admiral butterflies; pug and forester moths; tiger beetles, dragonflies, and more. We tend to think of the natural environment as something that happens elsewhere, as far from the city as possible, but that is mostly a choice made by homeowners and city planners. In fact urban areas can have high biodiversity compared to the surrounding rural landscapes, which are also often highly managed.

In his book Bringing Nature Home , Douglas Tallamy explains the link between native plants and biodiversity. Plants evolve in a delicate balance with local insects, mammals, birds etc. that want to eat them. Plants will develop defences like toxins or hairy leaves that make them hard to eat, insects evolve strategies to overcome them, birds and bats eat the insects, and an ecosystem is born. Non-native plants evolved thousands of km away from your yard, and nothing in our environment has evolved alongside them. Research has shown that native plants can host an order of magnitude more life than non-natives. In short native plants are the basis of the entire ecosystem, while non-natives mostly occupy space, and may have a competitive advantage because of lower predation.

This becomes even more important when you realize that what you plant in your yard will inevitably spread beyond its borders, ending up in the neighbourhood and eventually in local natural areas. Our neighbour has planted several native dogwood shrubs in his front yard that attract pollinators when they flower, and tons of birds when they fruit. The birds spread seeds through the city, including into our yard. A couple of yards over, an invasive European buckthorn along the hedgerow also sends seeds into our yard. Our neighbour’s dogwoods are a rare native seed source to compete with invasive ornamentals intentionally planted throughout the neighbourhood such as burning bush; barberry; wayfaring and Japanese snowball viburnums; and amur, bells, morrow, or Tatarian honeysuckles.

The dirty truth is that many species sold in plant nurseries are highly invasive. If you plant them in your yard they are likely to spread into surrounding yards and parks where they degrade habitat for birds, bats, and insects of all stripes and colours. Native plant gardening is easy – but maybe more to the point, ethically gardening with non-natives is very difficult and involves researching each plant you’re considering adding to your yard. It can be done, but very few people do it, and nurseries certainly don’t do it for you! I regularly find invasive plants in our local woodland that definitely seeded in from surrounding houses. As our cities sprawl across the landscape we can no longer afford to degrade all the surrounding areas.

Native ground covers

Ground covers can also be very invasive. Many gardeners have learned to hate goutweed, which spreads across fence lines, into gardens and even lawns. It also entirely takes over the understory of some urban forests, making them into biological deserts when it comes to insect and animal life, and hampering regeneration of trees and shrubs. Unfortunately gout weed is not unusual, just about every non-native ground cover is potentially invasive, and many are toxic to both wildlife and insects. Common examples include periwinkle and lily of the valley, and in fact the better a non-native plant is as a ground cover the more likely it is to be a problematic invasive in local woodlands.

The solution is native ground covers. Wood violet (Viola sororia) is one of the best, wild ginger is another. It may take a little research to find wood violet, which is sold at some online native plant nurseries; on the other hand it might already be a weed in your lawn or garden that you just need to help along. Wild ginger is more commonly available, but it is still worth finding a reputable native plant nursery that offers locally adapted plants.

Building habitats: Rain gardens and green roofs

A lot has been made about rain gardens lately. It seems like they can be as complicated as you want them to be, but we just dug a series of shallow basins near our downspout/ rainbarrel overflow and planted water loving plants like cardinal flower, joe pye weed, and swamp milkweed. Even a light rain tends to dump a fair amount of water into them. In prolonged droughts we’ll give them some water from the rain barrel since these species prefer not to have very dry roots. It’s a joy to have all these habitats on our property, and it adds even more to the biodiversity.

Adding a small green roof on top of our shed also created a new habitat, more or less the opposite of the rain garden. It has only 5-10 cm of soil so it dries out almost completely by mid-summer. In the meantime it has showy spring blooms of columbine and early saxifrage, followed up by witch grass (Panicum capillare) and other grasses. It attracts juncos who pick through it in fall and winter looking for seeds.

The final gift that comes from growing native plants is better understanding the environment around you. The plants we’ve tried to grow, as well as some that brought themselves to our yard, have taught me a lot about where they thrive, what they like to grow alongside, and their life strategy. I discovered that wild columbine will thrive in a fairly harsh environment so long as it gets enough spring rain for it to bloom and seed itself prolifically. The parent plant will die back in a drought but come to life again after a good drenching. I learned that zig-zag goldenrod (a shade-tolerant goldenrod) spreads readily underground by rhizomes, and can actually make a decent groundcover, with understated late season yellow blooms. And I’ve become a better naturalist generally as I become more aware of the plants in our local woodlands and the habitats where they seem to be thriving. Inaturalist is a great gardeners companion to help you learn plants that you see in nature, and sometimes also plants that bring themselves to your yard.

Which brings us to the final question, where to get native plants. The easiest way to get your initial stock of plants is from a native plant nursery. You may already know one that sells locally (maybe even a grower who sells at the farmers market), but if not the internet will provide. The North American Native Plant Society maintains a list of commercial growers that can be helpful for finding internet suppliers as well as some local sellers. If you’re willing to invest the time to do it right, you may be able to grow your own from seed – but make doubly sure you know what you’re collecting, and read and follow seed collecting guidelines.