The Case Against Mulch Rings

grounded design by Thomas Rainer: The Case Against Mulch Rings: It’s a common sight in the American landscape: trees skirted with a ring of mulch around their base that float in a sea of lawn.   Landscap...

Asking More of the Landscape At Plant-O-Rama in Brooklyn, the Message Was That Beauty Is No Longer Enough

[Plant-O-Rama: never heard of it, but sounds irresistible. db]

“I can’t believe I’ve been running this event for 19 years, but you seem to keep coming back,” Bob Hyland told the cheering crowd at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s auditorium last week. “A few growers from the North Fork are still digging out of 30 inches of snow. But they’re with us in spirit.”

The storm had postponed Plant-O-Rama for two days, but it hadn't dampened the enthusiasm of the more than 1,000 plant lovers who are drawn to this symposium and horticultural trade show every year with an urgency akin to that of the swallows returning to Capistrano. (Mr. Hyland, a former vice president of horticulture at the Brooklyn garden, had flown in from his home in Portland, Ore.)

No matter that snow covered the witch hazels. Spring was on the way.

Plant-O-Rama has been a bellwether for trends in the garden world since its founding in 1997, by Mr. Hyland and other leaders of Metro Hort Group, a network of New York-based urban horticulturists. Exotic species as well as natives have ignited plant lust here, depending upon which rock star of the garden world extolled their virtues on the big screen in the darkened room. But always, the focus has been on aesthetics: what makes an attractive garden.

Last week, the keynote speaker, Douglas Tallamy, an ecologist, informed us that beauty is not enough.

“We have to raise the bar on our landscapes,” said Mr. Tallamy, a professor and chairman of the department of entomology and wildlife ecology at the University of Delaware. “In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty. Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators and manage water.”

A daunting order, perhaps, but maybe it’s just a shifting of gears. Yards filled with beautiful natives that can provide all of these services don’t have to look unruly and formless. And they are key to survival, Mr. Tallamy argued. Pollinators, he reminded us, “pollinate 90 percent of all plants, not just crops.” And if the plants crash, so do the rest of the species, including us.

Landscape ecologists estimate that only 3 to 5 percent of the lower 48 states is undisturbed habitat for plants and animals. Farmland now covers more than half of the country. Most of the rest is taken up by suburban sprawl and about 40 million acres of lawns (“eight New Jerseys,” as Mr. Tallamy put it), along with highways, malls and growing cities. A world with half those lawns, he said, might have 20 million acres of habitat, or more than 13 national parks, including Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Adirondacks, if you added up the acreage.

Instead, thanks to vanishing habitats, Mr. Tallamy said, “We have 50 percent fewer birds than 40 years ago,” referring to results of yearly bird-banding studies that track those numbers. And some 230 species of North American birds are at risk of extinction, he added, citing the 2014 State of the Birds Report (stateofthebirds.org).

“But we can do something about this,” he said. “We can bring nature back to our yards.”

•

Plant-O-Rama’s theme this year was Living Landscapes, a nod to Mr. Tallamy’s latest book, “The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden,” written with Rick Darke, a horticulturist and photographer whose own native garden in Newark, Del., is strikingly beautiful.

The book, published last year by Timber Press, comes seven years after Mr. Tallamy’s best seller, “Bringing Nature Home,” which described the lifeline that native plants provide to native fauna, particularly insects and birds. But his first book didn’t show how native plants could be layered, with winding paths in between, to make a garden as lovely to people as it is to its other inhabitants.

As Mr. Tallamy admitted, “I'm not a designer.” But Mr. Darke does have a gift for design, and the new book shows how a garden can function as an ecosystem and still have a powerful form.

Trees, of course, are carbon sinks. A large native sugar maple sequesters 450 pounds of carbon a year; a white oak, 513 pounds. Millions of such trees planted in American yards, Mr. Tallamy said, could help reduce global warming. Yet landscape contractors and designers often discourage clients from planting oaks and sugar maples.

“They say, ‘You won’t live long enough to enjoy an oak tree,’” Mr. Tallamy said. “But it doesn’t have to be 300 years old.”

He flashed an image of a white oak seedling on the screen, planted by a blue jay in his yard in Oxford, Pa. Fourteen years later, the tree is 20 feet tall and 13 feet wide. It’s a handsome tree, for sure. But so is a zelkova, or Japanese elm, you might argue, and that sequesters carbon, too. The difference is that native oaks support 557 species of caterpillars. The zelkova, none.

Gardeners worry that all those caterpillars will defoliate their nice shade trees, Mr. Tallamy said, and then pointed to his white oak: “I counted 410 caterpillars, of 19 different species, just walking around this oak for half an hour one July day last summer. It wasn’t defoliated. You couldn’t see the holes.” (And even if you can, don’t think of those holes as damage, he said. Think of them as evidence that you’re feeding your friends.)

He counted the caterpillars on one of his black cherry trees: 239 in 14 species. In contrast, a Bradford pear in his neighbor’s yard had just one species, an inchworm.

•

Mr. Tallamy is relentless with his facts: 90 percent of native insects have developed specialized relationships with native plants. The blue flowers of Phlox divaricata, a native ground cover, for example, have too narrow a corolla for bees to reach the pollen. Only native hummingbird moths and a few other insects have a proboscis long and narrow enough to reach the pollen and nectar.

And another thing: Most plants defend themselves with toxic compounds. But certain native insects with the right enzymes have evolved alongside specific plants to break down the plant’s particular chemicals.

“Eastern red cedar has been around for millions of years, but very few insects, except the Juniper hairstreak, can eat its tissues without dying,” Mr. Tallamy said. “The downside is, that’s the only thing it eats. So if we don’t include cedars in our yards, we lose the hairstreak.”

 

And the only host for the great fritillary butterfly is the native violet. “When violets are mowed down,” he said, “we lose the fritillaries.”

And if we lose the insects, including spiders and moths, we lose amphibians, bats, rodents.

“Even the fox eats insects — 25 percent of his diet is insects,” Mr. Tallamy said.

So it goes throughout the food web. Though nonnative plants may provide nectar for butterflies, their leaves are unpalatable to caterpillars. Images of weirdly gorgeous worms flashed before our eyes. Caterpillars with little curvy tails or blue neon bumps or fuzzy mops of brown hair, chomping leaves of willow, black cherry, oak and other native species. “Streak dagger moths, Cecropia moths, spiny oak caterpillars,” he said, reeling off a dozen other names.

These caterpillars aren’t just entertaining to look at: 96 percent of all terrestrial birds in North America eat insects. And their young can’t survive without them.

Mr. Tallamy flashed images of bluebirds, catbirds and warblers, their beaks full of caterpillars, stuffing them down the throats of their voracious young. “Chickadees need 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to feed one clutch,” he said.

Mr. Tallamy had watched a pair feeding their young in a nesting box suspended from his white oak tree. The birds delivered 17 species of live caterpillars to their babies in three hours, sometimes carrying two or three at a time, every three minutes. No coffee breaks for these parents. They hunted worms from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. for 16 days, until the nestlings fledged.

Watching these kinds of interactions is more engaging than watching the grass grow (and mowing it). And it can create a sense of place.

“At our house, spring comes when the woodcock returns,” Mr. Tallamy said. “We know it’s fall when the juncos show up.”

Of course, not all of us are about to give up our beloved lilacs and tree peonies. And many are still married to those garish Japanese azaleas that Mr. Tallamy loathes.

“But are they ruining the landscape?” he asked. “No, they’re just taking up room that a native plant could occupy.”

•

Ruth Rogers Clausen, an English-born perennials expert who has gardened in this country for a half-century, followed Mr. Tallamy with a talk about her own favorite native plants. And it must be noted that her latest book, “Essential Perennials: The Complete Reference to 2,700 Perennials for the Home Garden,” written with Thomas Christopher and recently published by Timber Press, is as enthusiastic about a Japanese tree peony as a native prairie flower.

“As far as our book is concerned, we didn’t push one way or another,” said Ms. Clausen, 76, who gardens in Easton, Md. “Putting in an Asian plant doesn’t make you a bad person.”

But environmental consciousness has raised the bar, she allowed. “I came to the first Plant-O-Rama, and almost every one since,” Ms. Clausen said. “People used to not ask where a particular plant came from. Now they want to know, especially the young people.”

 

In her own garden, she said, she strives for at least “a minimum of 50 percent natives, just to make sure that I’m looking after wildlife.”

Ms. Clausen, who grew up in South Wales, recalled that many plants in her mother and grandmother’s garden were American natives. “We had a hedge of New England asters that bloomed every fall.”

She suggested all kinds of lovely combinations.

Bloodroot, the ivory woodland flower that blooms so early and fleetingly, could be tucked beneath a deciduous tree to flower while its branches are still bare. “But don’t plant the double one, if you want wildlife,” she said. (Many varieties of species, gussied up by hybridizers, lose their value for wildlife.)

Mix bloodroot with trilliums (if you don’t have deer), columbine and native gingers, which have shiny evergreen leaves.

Virginia bluebells are striking mixed with celandine poppies, though the poppy “is a generous seeder,” she said, and can be invasive in some gardens. In the wild, native bluebells flourish with ostrich ferns.

Ms. Clausen mentioned sun-loving zizia, or golden alexander, as one of the best plants for the black swallowtail butterfly, and noted that spigelia, with its upright stems of deep red flowers, draws the hummingbirds.

Amsonia, a native mounding perennial, covers itself with blue stars in spring and turns a golden orange in fall, she said, and “it looks gorgeous en masse.”

Both she and Mr. Tallamy encouraged gardeners to visit Mt. Cuba Center (mtcubacenter.org), a botanical garden near Wilmington, Del., and a former du Pont estate, which demonstrates, in hundreds of acres, how natives can be artfully combined. Ms. Clausen loves the fields of native coreopsis and rudbeckias encouraged along the roads near Easton.

“I stood on the brakes on Route 50 for this field of Coreopsis grandiflora,” she said. And a field of Rudbeckia hirta, black-eyed Susans, caused her to hit the brakes on Route 301.

She loves to put such natives in her garden, but the popular variety, Goldsturm, leaves her cold. “It looks like plastic,” she said. “It’s very flat.”

Many other favorites of hers may be found in “Essential Perennials,” along with her favorite exotics, like the epimediums she has nestled beneath the old native beech tree in her backyard. (“Don’t tell Doug,” she said.)

If the natives get 50 percent of her garden, perhaps the rest goes to nonnative plants that bring back memories of home, or dear friends. “I love the Welsh poppy, because I come from Wales,” she said. “I love the old-fashioned fragrant dianthus that my grandmother grew.”

But the specialized relationships between the native species fascinate her: “The whole thing is an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and when you find a piece, it’s exciting.”

In “A Living Landscape,” Mr. Tallamy tells the story of the Atala butterfly, a native of South Florida that once thrived on its sole host plant, Zamia pumila, or coontie, a slow-growing native cycad. The butterfly disappeared as the coontie was harvested to the point of extinction, to make starch out of its roots.

But in the mid-1970s, landscape designers rediscovered coontie as a valuable evergreen that could take drought and heat. And as coonties began to fill South Florida yards, the Atala butterfly returned.

“Maybe it had been harbored in the Everglades or somewhere,” he said, but “adding that single plant brought the butterfly back.”

Native Plant Lectures at Blue Water Baltimore

Native Plant Lectures at Blue Water Baltimore

Concrete Paver projects

Images of concrete paver projects

This Google search displays myriad images of concrete paver projects, including many at churches.

Gardening for Life By Doug Tallamy

Gardening for Life By Doug Tallamy

Chances are, you have never thought of your garden - indeed, of all of the space on your land - as a wildlife preserve that represents the last chance we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common
throughout the United States. That is exactly the role our suburban landscapes are now playing, and will
play even more critically in the near future. If this is news to you, it's not your fault.

We were taught from childhood that gardens are for beauty; they are a chance to express our artistic talents, to have fun with, and relax in. And, whether we like it or not, the way welandscape our properties is taken  by our neighbors as a statement of our wealth and social status.

No one has taught us that we have forced the plants and animals that evolved in North America (our nation's) to depend more and more on human-dominated landscapes for their continued existence. We have always thought that biodiversity was happy somewhere out there - "in nature" - in our local woodlot, or perhaps our national parks, or best of all "in the rain forest." We have heard nothing about the rate at which species are disappearing from our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states.

We have never been taught how vital biodiversity is for our own well-being.

We Have Taken It All
The population of the United States, now nearing three hundred and six million people, has doubled since most of us were kids, and continues to grow by eight thousand forty-six people per day. This, coupled with our love affair with the car, and our quest to own ever-larger homes, has fueled urbanized development that continues to sprawl over two million additional acres per year (the size of Yellowstone National Park). We have connected all of our developments with four million miles of roads, and their combined paved surface could occupy roughly the area of Pennsylvania.

Somewhere along the way we decided to convert most of our leisure and decorative places, both at work and at home, into huge expanses of lawn. So far we have planted some forty million acres in lawn. Each weekend we mow to a one-inch height an area the size of Missouri or Oklahoma, and congratulate ourselves on a job well done.

To make things worse, the little woodlots and "open spaces" that we have not paved over or manicured are far from pristine. Nearly all are second-growth that has been thoroughly invaded by alien plants like autumn olive, multiflora rose, Oriental bittersweet, and Japanese honeysuckle. So far, over thirty-four hundred species of alien plants have invaded nearly two hundred million acres of the United States.

To nature lovers these are horrifying statistics. I stress them so that we can clearly understand the challenge before us. We have turned fifty-four percent of the lower forty-eight states into cities and suburbs, and forty-one percent more into various forms of agriculture. That's right: We humans have taken ninety-five percent of nature and made it unnatural. Most of the five percent we have left pristine is either too high or too dry to support much of anything.

So what does it matter? Are there consequences to turning so much land into the park-like settings humans enjoy? Absolutely. Both for biodiversity and for us. Our fellow creatures need food and shelter to survive and reproduce, and in too many places we have eliminated both. State natural heritage folks estimate that as many as thirty-three thousand species of plants and animals in this country are "imperiled." Many of those that haven't suffered local extinction are now too rare to perform their ecosystem role effectively. These can be considered functionally extinct.

The song birds that brighten spring mornings have been in decline since the nineteen sixties, having lost forty percent of their numbers. Birds that breed in meadows are in even more trouble. Once-common species such as the northern bobwhite, eastern meadowlark, field sparrow, and grasshopper sparrow have declined eighty-two, seventy-two, sixty-eight, and sixty-five percent, in total numbers, and are completely absent from many areas that used to support healthy populations. Evening grosbeaks have declined ninety percent in fifteen years because we are leveling their boreal forest breeding grounds to make junk mail. For most of us, hearing such numbers triggers a passing sadness, but few people feel personally threatened by the loss of biodiversity.

Why We Need Biodiversity
Here is why every one of us should feel threatened. Here is why it matters. Losses to biodiversity are a clear sign that our own life-support systems are failing. The ecosystems that support us - that determine the carrying capacity of our Earth and our local spaces - are run by biodiversity. It is biodiversity that generates oxygen and clean water, creates topsoil out of rock, buffers extreme weather events like droughts and floods, pollinates our crops, and recycles the mountains of garbage we create every day.

Now, with human-induced climate change threatening the planet, it is biodiversity that could suck that carbon out of the air and sequester it in living plants if given half a chance. It is plants that turn sunlight into all of the food that supports life on Earth, yet we continue to reduce complex forests into lawns the world over.

Humans cannot live as the only species on this planet because it is other species that create the ecosystem services essential to our survival. Every time we force a species to extinction we promote our own demise. Biodiversity is not optional.

Parks Are Not Enough
I am often asked why the habitats we have preserved within our park system are not enough to save most species from extinction. Research has shown that the area required to sustain biodiversity is pretty much the same as the area required to generate it in the first place. Put another way: Species are lost in the same proportion with which a habitat is reduced in size. The consequence of this simple relationship is profound. Since we have taken ninety-five percent of the United States from nature, we can expect to lose ninety-five percent of the species that once lived here, along with the services they have provided us.

 The good news is that extinction takes a while, so if we start sharing our landscapes with other living things, we should be able to save much of the biodiversity that still exists.

Start Locally: Redesigning Suburbia
Scientific facts, deduced from thousands of studies about how energy moves through food webs, outline for us what it will take to give our local animals what they need to survive and reproduce on our properties: Native plants, and lots of them.

Here is the general reasoning:
• Plants are the source of all energy that supports life. In other words, all animals get their energy directly from plants, or by eating something that has already eaten a plant.
• Some animals don't eat plants directly. They must rely on other animals, which do eat plants, to transmit the energy.
• The group of animals most responsible for passing energy from plants to the animals that don't eat plants directly, is insects. This is what makes insects such vital components of healthy ecosystems. So many animals depend on insects for food (e.g., spiders, reptiles, amphibians, rodents, bats, and ninety-six percent of all terrestrial birds), that removing insects from an ecosystem spells its doom.

If you think back on our suburban landscaping history, getting rid of insects is exactly what we have tried to do. For over a century we have favored ornamental landscape plants from China and Europe over those that evolved right here. Among the reasons for favoring the imported plants has been the observation that they "are not subject to insect infestation."

Research now tells us that not all plants are created equal. Every plant species protects its leaves with a species-specific mixture of chemicals. With few exceptions, only insect species that have shared a long evolutionary history with a particular plant lineage have developed the physiological adaptations required to digest the chemicals in their host's leaves. Insects have specialized over time to eat only the plants carrying particular chemicals. When we present insects from Pennsylvania with plants that evolved on another continent, chances are those insects will be unable to digest them.

We used to think this was good. Avoid insect infestation by planting suggested species, and/or spray and kill all insects that do show up on our plants.

Now we know that an insect that cannot, for whatever reason, eat part of a leaf, cannot fulfill its role in the food web.

We have planted Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa), a species from China that supports no insect herbivores, instead of our native flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) that supports one hundred and seventeen species of moths and butterflies alone. On hundreds of thousands of acres we have planted goldenraintree (Koelreuteria paniculata) from China, a tree that supports one caterpillar species, instead of a variety of our beautiful oaks, and we have lost the chance to grow five hundred and thirty-four species of caterpillars, all of them nutritious bird food. My own research has shown that native ornamentals support twenty-nine times more biodiversity than do alien ornamentals. Further, it's unnerving to learn that eighty-two percent of the woody invasives in our country are escapees of the horticultural industry.

Your Garden Has a Function
In the past we have not designed gardens that play a critical ecological role in the landscape, but we must do so in the future. The importance of our doing this cannot be overstated. We need to quickly replace unnecessary lawn with densely planted woodlots in the East and West, and natural prairies in the Midwest; whatever can serve as habitat for our local biodiversity.

Homeowners can do this by planting the borders of their properties with plants native to their region: In the East, native trees such as white oaks (Quercus alba), black willows (Salix nigra), red maples (Acer rubrum), green ashes (Fraxinus pennsylvanica), black walnuts (Juglans nigra), river birches (Betula nigra) and shagbark hickories (Carya ovata), under-planted with woodies like serviceberry (Amelanchier canadensis), arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum), hazelnut (Corylus americanus), and blueberries (Vaccinium spp). Our studies have shown that even modest increases in the native plant cover on suburban properties significantly increases the number and species of breeding birds, including birds of conservation concern.

We have also recently demonstrated that homeowners needn't worry that native insects will defoliate their gardens. A diversity of native plants will support a diversity of native insects that, in turn, support a healthy community of natural enemies that keeps them in check. One bluebird pair brings up to three hundred caterpillars back their nest every day. You will be hard-pressed to find any caterpillars in your yard if you create habitat for breeding birds. In a recent study, homeowners who planted natives exclusively found that only three percent of the leaves on their properties  were damaged by insects.

As gardeners and stewards of our land, we have never been so empowered to help save biodiversity from extinction, and the need to do so has never been so great. All we need to do is plant native plants.

Doug Tallamy is Professor and Chair of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware and author of the book “Bringing Nature Home.” This article reprinted from the Wild Ones Journal Vol. 22, No. 2.

From http://blog.nwf.org/2014/07/dead-logs-are-anything-but-dead/?s_email_id=20141122_MEM_ENG_Habitat_News_November_Edition|OldP 

Dead Trees Are Anything But Dead

from Wildlife Promise

3 7/16/2014 // By Dani Tinker // cover, dead wood, fungi, lizards, logs, reptiles, Salamanders, snakes, Trees

This fallen log was found behind NWF’s headquarters building in Virginia. Photo by Avelino Maestas.

I recently learned that dead trees provide vital habitat for more than 1,000 species of wildlife nationwide. The two most common types of dead wood you’ll find in your yard, along a trail or at a park are snags (upright) and logs (on the ground). Despite their name, dead trees are crawling with life. From the basking lizards on top to the beetles underneath, the list of wildlife that depend on logs feels endless. Here’s a sampling of what you may find if you explore a log more closely. What have you observed on, under or near a dead tree?

Atop

Summer is a fantastic time to find lizards, turtles and other cold-blooded species basking in the sun. This behavior is primarily a matter of thermoregulation, but may also be a means to regulate Vitamin D. Ants, snails and other insects are often found crawling along a log, while chipmunks and squirrels may use it as a place to rest.

Broad-headed skink on top of a log. Photo by Dani Tinker.

Inside

Logs provide great cover for small mammals like foxes, rabbits, bobcats, skunks and raccoons. Bobcats are known to nap inside logs, while foxes may use it as a place to build their den. The inside of a log also provides protection from some predators. The picture below is of a red-tail hawk attempting to get a squirrel, who cleverly took refuge inside a log.

Red-tail hawk trying to get a squirrel out of a knot hole in a log, where it had taken refuge. Photo by National Wildlife Photo Contest entrant Cara Litberg.

Under

A nature walk rarely feels complete without flipping at least one log. The treasures beneath a log may include beetles, worms, spiders, salamanders, newts or centipedes. What you find on your flipping adventure will depend on the time of year, weather, moisture, and a number of other factors, but it’s all worth it. As you flip, roll the log back toward you, using it as a barrier and giving critters a chance to get away.

This marbled salamander was found by National Wildlife Photo Contest entrant Nicholas Kiriazis after flipping a log in Illinois.

Beside

Snakes will often use the space next to a log to rest or look for food. Since logs are crawling with life (prey to a snake), it’s a good place to find a meal. They might also curl up against or inside a log to rest and stay hidden from predators. Egg-laying snake species may deposit their clutches in or under a logs to keep them protected.

Danielle Brigida found this snake next to a log while hiking in West Virginia.

Attached To

Moss, fungi and lichen are a few special organisms that can be found growing on logs. The simple structure of mosses (a type of bryophyte) allow them to grow where other plants may not be able. Dead wood is a place where many species of lichen and fungi thrive as well.

Photo by National Wildlife Photo Contest entrant Philip Poinier.

Appreciate Logs

Whether you explore logs along your next nature walk. or decide to keep one in your backyard, logs need some appreciation. They provide both cover and a place for wildlife to raise their young. It’s also a step toward qualifying your yard as an official Certified Wildlife Habitat.
Understandably, not everyone wants or has space for dead wood in their yard. You can visit a local nature site and investigate the wildlife that depend on logs near you. Enter your zip code into Nature Find to get a list of parks and trails nearby.

Creating a Wildlife-Friendly Yard With Native Plants By Rebecca Deatsman

Between finishing my undergraduate degree back in 2009 (how has it already been five years) and moving to Walla Walla, Washington this past June, I was moving continuously from one temporary housing situation to the next - a year here, three months there. In those five years I lived in four different states plus a couple foreign countries. All that time, I was telling myself that someday, when I had a house with a yard, there were two things I wanted to plant in it: heirloom vegetables (an idea started by a mild obsession with the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and native wildflowers.

    Well, now I have a yard. The vegetables were easy enough; I helped my then-boyfriend (now fiance) pick out tomato and pepper seeds from the Seed Savers catalog last spring before I even moved in. The wildflowers, however, are a work in progress, and I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned so far in my first official post as a contributor to Living Alongside Wildlife.

Benefits of Native Plants

    Plants provide both shelter and food for wildlife in a number of ways, and native plants, the ones that local animals have adapted to make the most use of, are the best of all. In addition to fruit, nuts, and seeds for food, birds use plants for both material and sites for their nests. Flower nectar will attract and feed pollinators (including hummingbirds as well as insects). And many butterflies can only lay their eggs on specific plant species - think of the famous relationship between monarchs and milkweed.

White-Crowned Sparrows (pictured) passed through our yard during the spring migration, but I’m hoping that by improving the quality of habitat in our backyard, we can tempt them to stay and nest.  Photo by Ingrid Taylar, via Wikimedia Commons

    In addition, since native plants are adapted to local conditions, they can be very low maintenance, requiring less pesticide, fertilizer, and water to thrive.

But What Should I Plant?

    Not all commercially-available “native” flower species are the same as their wild counterparts; many are hybridized varieties that have been specially bred to be prettier or easier to grow. Actual wild-type plants may be a little harder to find, but not only will you be closer to recreating a true native landscape in your yard, they’ll reproduce and spread more readily once you plant them, since hybrid plants often don’t produce viable seeds.

The bright colors and sweet nectar of native flowers like camas lillies (on right) may tempt more butterflies onto our property.

    If you’re not sure what plants are native to your area (remember that “native to North America” doesn’t necessarily mean native to where you live) or which ones would do well in your yard, a great starting point is the regional planting guides produced by Pollinator Partnership, which include suggested species lists for attracting insects and other pollinators. Once you’ve picked a couple to start with, Plant Native has directories of native plant nurseries listed by state to help you find places that can sell them to you.

    I’m starting small. After a lot of Googling, I found a tiny Oregon company that was selling bulbs for Camassia quamash, a beautiful blue lily found here in the Northwest. I planted them at the base of the dogwood tree in our backyard, and with any luck they’ll flower next spring. I’ve started bookmarking other plants that would work well to fill the gaps in our landscaping. Over time, we can attract more insects and birds and make our suburban yard function just a little bit more like native habitat - and so can you.

From  http://www.livingalongsidewildlife.com/2014/11/creating-wildlife-friendly-yard-with.html