Supply & Demand - Native Plants and the Home Garden
Gardeners are increasingly asking for native plants at nurseries but when they are provided, gardeners aren't buying them. How can we bridge the gap?
My first time testing out a voiceover for an essay—which is basically like me reading a essay for the podcast but this is completely unedited—so you get some fumbles and re-starts! I kinda liked it—it might be how I manage to sustain the podcast in the future.
Native Plants.
The topic of gardening with native plants is not a new idea, though if you were to look at social media these days you might get the idea that converting to an entirely native landscape in your garden is a novel idea. However, the idea has been around for decades with waxing and waning interest throughout the horticulture industry over that time. While there is increasing demand for native plants, thanks to the likes of Dr. Tallamy and others, the horticulture industry is slow on the uptake of bringing this idea to the mainstream.
I originally wrote about this topic of native plants in October 2022 on my blog, which I later read as a podcast episode on The Garden Path Podcast. In that post and episode I analyzed the demand for native plants vs the horticulture industry and several hurdles we have to face before native plants can hit the mainstream garden culture. I was mostly getting irritated with how much of this is all talk and no action on the part of the Gardening Industrial Complex. But then I watched human behavior at a plant sale in early April and began forming new thoughts.
The SFA Plant Sale in Nacogdoches, Texas is one of my favorite events. Being that I garden on the southwest edge of the Pineywoods eco-region near the cusp of the Blackland Prairie and Post-Oak Savannahs, many east Texas plants work particularly well for my soil and moisture conditions. This sale is one of the premier events in the native plant gardening world in Texas with gardeners driving from all over the eastern quarter of the state to get plants! They have native plants as well as some common horticulture trade non-native species, though their slant is definitely toward native plants.
The plant list is made available well before the event so you can pour over the list and highlight what you want to purchase. At the event itself, plants are lined out in alphabetical order according to scientific name, as well as separated out by type of plant: edible, forbs, shrubs, trees, etc. It makes it fairly easy to find the day-of when you are searching for plants to add to your wagon.
If you arrive before the event begins, you have time to scope out the aisles to see how many of each plant is available and figure out a route or method for collecting plants. And then about 10 minutes before it opens for sale, everyone lines up on the side of the gravel driveway with their wagons and carts and waits for the final countdown to begin. It’s a horserace for gardeners! It’s actually really fun, a bit chaotic, and the excitement about plants emanates from everyone in the crowd.
And then we’re off, searching for our plants!
When we attended the event this last April there were several species of plants I was particularly interested in and noticed they had only a handful of those plants available for sale. One was Monarda luteola, a recently described pale yellow beebalm species from a couple of counties in NE Texas and Arkansas. I needed them. I grabbed two plants right off the bat, went and found the other plants from the list and then circled back to the Monarda. Remember, I said there were only a handful, maybe a dozen. Y’all. There were at least 8 plants still sitting there. So I grabbed a couple more. I kept circling back to this plant and a couple of others I had gotten that were also in the rare to uncommon category and just couldn’t believe there were plants still sitting there! This happened to the Echinacea atrorubens, too!
Meanwhile, I’m watching as people are loading up their wagons and carts with the most common stuff you could find at the local nursery or the box store in town. Was I being judgmental? Yes, yes I was. I mean, fine, more of the cool, rare plants for me—but that’s not what I really wanted. I wanted my fellow gardeners to know about these really cool plants they were passing by in favor of generic plants that they could have probably gotten a cutting of from their neighbor.
The amount of Carex cherokeensis left also astounded me. This is an amazing, native sedge that is low-care and deer don’t eat it. I didn’t purchase any because it grows naturally in my yard and I already try to cultivate it around the garden. With the amount of native plant and naturalistic landscaping books coming out in recent years, not to mention the burgeoning native plant Facebook groups and posts on Instagram touting the benefits of native sedges, I was truly amazed how many of these sedges were still left.
So, watching all of this behavior really frustrated me. It’s partly a failing of the SFA sale staff—why not just grow edible plants and native plants for the sale? If we’re so dead set on trying to build and create habitat and turn the tide on the insect apocalypse, why even provide the other stuff for sale? I know the answer here is $$$. The other failing is the communication barrier between these folks and the horticulture industry. I am sure many of these folks are not following the same sets of native plant ecologists and gardeners I do on Instagram and they may not be in any of the native habitat groups on Facebook. They may not read blogs dedicated to native plants. They could perhaps subscribe to mainstream garden and lifestyle magazines that don’t typically promote native plants. And they just might like their non-native plants! That last sentence is something I think many of us native plant proponents just might have to swallow and accept on some level.
Gardeners were provided with a plethora of native plants, many of which were purchased that day, and yet many still remained, in particular some very hard to find plants rarely seen in the nursery trade. And a decent amount of people chose very common non-native plants over native plants. That says a lot about the state of native plant gardening, I think.
On Instagram the other day I got a glimpse of a post from James Golden of the blog View from Federal Twist that intrigued me upon first glance. My feed reloaded before I could click on the post to read more about it, and then I got distracted and put down my phone and forgot about it completely until I started thinking about writing this essay. So I went back and found it and it was a synopsis linking to a blog post called Why Is No One Growing And Selling This Extraordinarily Beautiful Native Tree?
He reports coming across silky camelia, Stewartia malacodendron, at the Mount Cuba Center and was intrigued to find out more information about the tree and its range and habitat requirements. He then ends his posts wondering why it isn’t commonly found in the nursery trade when a just as finicky tree such as Franklinia altamaha is commonly grown in botanic gardens and collector’s gardens.
Well, my answer is this: who is going to buy it? I certainly would, as it seems Mr. Golden would as well. I’m not sure I have the appropriate habitat it would thrive in, though I might be able to find a spot for it to work. If it’s finicky, and if people are already not buying other rare and uncommon native plants, what is the incentive for the horticulture industry to begin propagating it? That is, unless we begin better educational campaigns and start dedicating magazine articles and other literature with information for these species.
I’ve never seen silky camelia in person. I have co-workers who have seen it at field sites in Mississippi around the Homochitto National Forest. There are even a few scattered locations in Deep East Texas, though I’ve not made the trek over there to try to find one (soon!). The species itself is rather scattered along the southern coastal plain when you see observations on iNaturalist. It may be locally common in certain areas but it isn’t widespread and common throughout the southern forests.
His post ties in well with my thoughts here—why aren’t species like this seen more often in the nursery trade? But then we get to the nitty gritty details and look at the huge gap between availability and uptake between those purchasing the plants. And there seems to be quite a divide.
So, what’s the answer here? Well, we have to keep talking about native plants, of course. But we also have to realize that there should be more informational materials provided on growing conditions to those who would be purchasing these plants. We can’t expect everyone to have the know-how to look up the ecological characteristics of a plant. And as I’ve written elsewhere before, the garden communication writers in mainstream publications have to start being more forthcoming on writing about native plants. There can’t continue writing about adapted non-natives if we’re looking for people to start really investing in purchasing native plants. If local nurseries are only providing one or two native species for every 5-10 non-natives, we’re never going to change behavior patterns.
I realize all of this makes me sound a bit like a plant snob. And maybe I am a little, and the truth is I still love my fair share of non-native plants and even grow some in my own garden. But I’m wrestling with this continued conundrum. People are demanding and asking for native plants and yet there’s still a disconnect between what is and isn’t provided and what is and isn’t being bought by gardeners. I still lean on the side of teaching more about ecology to gardeners as that seems to be a big missing link in this conversation.
What do you think? What would be a reason to stop you from buying native plants at a plant sale? How do you discuss native plant gardening with other gardeners? Let me know down in the comments or reply to this email!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
In my experience, our local native plants aren’t as showy and colourful as the hybrid varieties, they may not be in bloom or as large (often because they lack chemical fert) at the time of sale and they don’t have bright photo labels with planting info.
Nursery owners here, seem to be either, carrying just a few with their other stock or specializing in natives only. It seems to have grown into a niche market, but I’m betting things will flip. As consumers become more aware of ecological practices, I feel like they’ll start to reject the old style (import, chemical and plastic based) systems. But as always, one step at a time 💚
“Was I being judgmental? Yes, yes I was.” Love all of this. Thank you for the audio. I thought it was great. I went to our local plant sale Saturday and also experienced frustration for similar but also different reasons. I was looking for Native plants, and the plants they had were labeled, pollinators, bee friendly, deer resistant etc., but no labels for native species. I know something about which plants are native here but I was hoping to find some new to me native plants etc. I asked one of the volunteers about a plant, and he said, well it says it grows in this zone, so I would assume that would mean it was native, and I looked at him and said you know what happens when you assume. “Was I being judgmental? Yes, yes I was.” To his credit, we looked it up together having that information at our fingertips, and it was indeed not native so I stuck with safe bets that day, cone flowers, yarrow, asters and goldenrod. I am going to try and connect with the plant sale folks to see if we can highlight native plants in next year’s sale.
As for you being a plant snob, I think we need more plant snobs. I sometimes think my family consists of food snobs because we take our time and cook real food. I wonder if we have lost our way if such simple things that return us to the gifts of the earth can be considered snobbery.