My Approach

Native plant designs differ from traditional horticultural designs in a number of ways. Most notably, traditional plantings are designed for just the human eye. Yes, they are beautiful, but are often composed of plant species from far off places that do not support local wildlife.

Native plantings, on the other hand, are designed not just for the human eye. They support pollinators, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife because of the long co-evolutionary history between flora and fauna.

In addition, we are trying to reduce resource inputs such as water and fertilizer, and reduce maintenance. There are number of ways we accomplish this in native plant designs. I will detail five characteristics of native plant designs below.

1) Match plants to the site conditions

2) Plant in masses and drifts

3) Plant densely

4) Plant in layers

5) Plant in a matrix

Match Plants to Site Conditions

This is similar to the age-old mantra of right plant, right place. But when you're planting natives, we can push this principle a little further.

Look at the picture to the left. A typical landscaper (deadscaper?) would point out how crappy that soil is and that it needs to be amended with compost. Consult a gardening book or magazine and it will tell you that a sandy, gravelly soil such as this needs to be amended. Nothing can be further from the truth. Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa), pictured here, and myriad other native species, thrive in sandy, nutrient poor soils. Butterfly Weed has a deep taproot that enables it to get all the moisture it needs from deep underground. Amending the soil with compost will make it unsuitable for these sand meadow species.

In the picture to the right, Pickerel Weed (Pontedaria cordata), can only survive in standing water. The deadscaper you consult will tell you that you have to change the drainage patterns and get rid of the water. Rather than seeing the water as a feature, they treat it as a waste product.

So, match your plants to the conditions in which they evolved - soil type (sand, loam, clay), light (full, part, shade), and moisture (dry to standing water). It is way easier than trying to change your soil (which often fails anyway) and opens up a much larger array of plant species you can use, especially if you have extreme conditions. Once established, your plants will require no supplemental water or fertilizer. How much easier does it get than that?

Plant in Masses and Drifts

Typical horticultural plantings space plants far apart as individual islands in a sea of mulch. To look at these plantings you have to wonder if the designer hates plants because more space is occupied by mulch than plants. And if you're 20 minutes late to mulch, you will have a weed problem.

Since native plants are not bred or otherwise manipulated and evolved in the wild, they typically need the support of other plants around them and root competition to stay upright.

Thus, I design natives close together in masses and drifts. The typical plant buyer, looking for 10 plants, might buy 7 different things. I am advocating that if you are looking for 10 plants, buy 10 of one thing and fill that space with one species.

When you have a larger area keep the number of species to a minimum, plant them densely and in drifts so there is little to no space between them. This will provide support and root competition, so plants won't flop. It will look planned and not weedy or messy as the pictures here show.

When planting a larger area, prioritize leaf texture when deciding which species to put next to each other, rather than flower color. That's not to say ignore flower color or time of bloom, but most of the time plants are not flowering at the same time so you don't have to worry about clashing colors.

Take a look at the picture to the left. Nothing is in bloom, but the diversity of texture and leaf color is striking and beautiful.

The advantages of planting dense drifts of plants are legibility, ease for an insect to find its host plant, increased foraging efficiency with lower energy expenditure, greater potential for cross pollination, the elimination of mulch, less weeding, and greater diversity of texture.

Plant Densely

Big Horticulture teaches us to space plants out and mulch in between to suppress weeds. The native plant paradigm approaches planting very differently. In this paradigm you plant densely on as little as 12-inch centers. This accomplishes a number of things.

First, you get dramatic effect by massing plants of the same species. Second, it creates competition between plants, above and below ground. Competition keeps plants shorter, and density enables plants to support one another so they do not flop. And last, it also eliminates the need for mulch because the plants themselves are suppressing weeds due to their density.

Plant in Layers

In natural areas, at least in the east, plants have arranged themselves in layers - canopy, shrub, and herbaceous - as in the picture to the left. Some species of wildlife inhabit just one layer, others move up and down throughout their life cycles and some may need wildlife in a layer different than the one they generally occupy.

For example, more than 500 species of lepidoptera use Oaks as a host plant. However, 94% of these pupate in the soil or in cocoons in leaf litter. Therefore, it is not enough to just plant an oak in the middle of a lawn because of lawn mowers.

We need to underplant our Oaks (or any tree for that matter) with understory plants, thus mimicking the layers found in the wild.

Not only does this help wildlife, but it is also beautiful as well.

Plant in a Matrix

Related to the concept of layering is matrix planting, a specialized type of layering.

Most of our natural areas are grasslands or "sedgelands", even under the forest canopy. You've heard that nature abhors a vacuum and that plants will fill all bare space. This is mostly true and grasses and sedges (graminoids) are a very common filler plant in natural areas.

In the designed landscape, one way to fill space and mimic natural areas is to plant graminoids in the bare spaces between the perennials. This, combined with the concepts of masses and drifts and dense plantings, creates a what is called a matrix with the perennials coming up through the graminoids.