Going Native

Posted by Joe Bauer on April 25th, 2008 filed in gardening, landscape

Hello everyone. I’m Joe Bauer, a native wildflower gardening enthusiast from south-eastern Michigan. Over the next few months I’ll be sharing with you posts related to gardening and landscaping with native wildflower plants. Some posts will spotlight specific plants native to the Great Lakes region, and some posts will focus on gardens specific to different site types commonly found in urban and suburban gardens in the Great Lakes area.

What if I told you that there were flowers you could plant in your garden that required no fertilizer, bug sprays, or even watering in most cases? They come back up every year without any intervention, frost fears, or digging up bulbs. These magic plants are native wildflowers. A plant that is native to your specific climate and land conditions has already figured out how to survive and thrive. All we need to do as native plant gardeners is match up the planting site with the correct plants.

Native Plant Nursery of Ann Arbor has a great site that allows you to search and filter through a database of native wildflowers to match plants up with your specific site needs.

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4 Responses to “Going Native”

Amber Says:
April 27th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Great blog…I love native plants! I started bouncing up and down when I saw the ferns return after being damaged by my landlord accidentally.

I’m in SE Virginia. Think beachy swampy clay, lots of pine. Ferns, trilliums, trout lily, violets. I love it!
NS Jones Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
We have just begun introducing native plants to our yard in our new home. We picked up several at a local native plant sale this past weekend. We also went to look for a tree at a box store. I was amazed that almost everything at the box store was exotic and if you didn’t know what was native and what wasn’t, the plants weren’t labeled that way. I can see why so many exotics get planted and used, if you aren’t really looking it can be difficult to find natives.
Joe Bauer Says:
May 1st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Good point! Not only is it tough to find native plants at most big box stores, it’s not uncommon to find invasives for sale. A mistake many people make is confusing the term wildflower with native.
Friday night eco-week roundup | EcoInsomniac Says:
December 10th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
[...] an environmentalist and really into wildflowers. He’s posted a great article about wildflowers in the Great Lakes area . He will be posting more about wildflowers and general gardening tips for the Great Lakes region [...]