CW Native Plant Farm Newsletter

February 2025

What does it mean to be a Native Gardener?

Native gardeners have some core beliefs, values and design ideas.  Many, if not all, native gardeners believe that locally sourced, native plants, suitable for your ecological region, are critical to climate stabilization.  Additionally, native gardeners understand that exotics have overrun wild areas, lawns are a wasteland for insects, and pollinators, insects and birds struggle to recognize exotic plants and cultivated natives.

Common Milkweed

Native plants aid Biodiversity:

Plants native to a specific region are a mosaic of specialized relationships between the plants and mammals, pollinators, and insects.  Monarch butterflies need milkweed to lay their eggs. The same for the Hackberry butterfly and Hackberry trees.  Spicebush is the host plant for spicebush swallowtails and golden alexander is the host plant for black swallowtails.  While there are generalist insects – most need one or two specific plants.  Biodiversity ensures that all can find food, shelter, water as well as a place to raise their young.  One way to know what plants are native to your location is to search the NYS Flora Atlas for your county.  https://newyork.plantatlas.usf.edu/  The NYS Flora atlas has all of the plants identified in NYS but it can be restricted by county and native status.  This list is also downloadable. 

Northern Flicker

Locally sourced and Locally appropriate:

Native plants and the creatures that rely upon them have grown together for centuries in mutualist, specialized, relationships.  As time passed, plants required the creatures around them to help them pollinate and spread their seed, while those very creatures needed plants for food, shelter, nesting habitat and moisture.  Flora and fauna grew to support each other so that mayapple fruit is just the height for a passing box turtle to eat it and spread the seed as it defecates.  Turtle head has a flower structure that bumblebees can lift and crawl into thereby pollinating the plant as the bumblebee feeds.  Cardinal flower has the perfect vessel for hummingbirds to sip nectar. 

Those native plants suited to the geographic area in which they are plants don’t require much in terms of fertilizer, soil amendments, or excessive watering to help them thrive.  As always, right plant – right location but only in general terms.  For example, spicebushes prefer locations with even moisture throughout the growing season.  However, I mistakenly planted two in my meadow (I was told they were butternut trees).  It took a few years, but they flowered last year and it was clear that they were spicebush and I found 10 caterpillars on the bushes.  My pasture is well drained and dry and those spicebushes are pretty happy even without much moisture in late summer.  Given that many native plants are also host plants or provide nesting habitat Pesticide use is reserved for only the most serious issues. 

Spicebush Swallowtail

Native Plants are more than Food:

Native trees and bushes can add nitrogen to the soil as well as sequester, or remove, carbon from the air that results from air pollution.  Soil health an important element of the whole system and plants are one part of a whole community. Given their importance it is critical to find and plant species that offer a succession of nectar or pollen for the entire season. 

Native plants are often nesting material for solitary bees.  Swamp milkweed is a wonderful pollinator plant, but the hollow stems become nesting material for solitary bees the next spring and orioles use strands they strip from those very stems to weave their nests. 

I encourage gardeners to be lazy in the fall.  Leave the clean-up for spring so that the plants can support overwintering pollinators.  Overwintering spicebush swallowtails need leaf litter to camouflage their chrysalis and wooly bear caterpillars need to hide under leaf litter to survive winter. 

Milkweed Tussock caterpillar

What is our Ecoregion?

In WNY we are a part of the Eastern Temperate forest but… there are many parts to that Eastern Temperate Forest.  My property in Akron NY is a part of the Great Lakes plain and the greater Ontario Forest.  Your property may well be in an entirely different ecoregion.  Check out your area on the Bplant map   https://bplant.org/region/1376

Understanding your Ecoregion is One Step:

Looking at your ecoregion and perusing the plants native to your county is one aspect of native gardening.  In the next two months I’ll be writing more on keystone species, books that can help you understand more and design principles.