The Importance of Native Plants

jhansen49
3 days ago
4 min read

April is National Native Plant Month, first established by Congress in 2021. Events may be planned in your community to celebrate native plants and help educate others about the many benefits of native plants to our fragile ecosystems, or you can work on your own or with your neighbors to help support native plant gardening.

Why are native plants so important?

Because they are a source of food and shelter for native bees, butterflies, birds, caterpillars, and all wildlife. Plants are the foundation of all food webs. Almost every living animal either eats plant leaves directly or eats parts that are produced by plants including seeds, fruits, roots, and stems, or feeds on the animals that eat plants.

ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

Green plants also protect our planet’s natural resources including air, water, and soil. They provide significant benefits that humans obtain from natural ecosystems and that support life and human well-being (called ecosystem services), such as the following:

Plants:

Convert sunlight into food
Produce oxygen
Filter and clean the air we breathe
Reduce stormwater runoff during heavy rains
Prevent floods
Dampen severe weather
Prevent or reduce erosion
Clean water by filtering it and slowing its travel to the sea
Absorb nutrients from the soil, making them available to browsing wildlife
Capture carbon and pump it into the ground
Build topsoil from the organic matter in leaf litter
Stabilize soil through their roots (especially compared to shallow-rooted lawn grass)

But non-native plants, whether ornamental or even invasive, provide these ecological services too. What’s the important difference?

DEFINITION OF A NATIVE PLANT

A native plant is one that has developed over hundreds or thousands of years in a specific geographic region or ecosystem, alongside local flora and fauna, without human intervention. Only plants found in this country before European settlement are considered to be native to the United States.

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Native Plants are special because they have evolved alongside native bees, birds, and wildlife. The relationships that have developed are highly specialized and cannot be replaced with ornamental, non-native plants. Our landscapes today often contain plants collected from around the world, but many of our insects and caterpillars have not evolved quickly enough to be able to eat these strange, exotic foods.

Native plants include all types of flora – large canopy trees, understory trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, and perennial flowering plants – that are indigenous to particular geographic regions with special soil, moisture requirements, and growing conditions.

A lack of food has led to a major decline in pollinators and wildlife species, especially birds, which is due in large part to the use of so many non-native plants in our landscapes and gardens. To help reverse this, many more native plants need to be planted across the country, including a wide variety of native plants with flowers that have different blooming times, flower colors, and flower shapes.

Increasing the number of native plant species in a natural habitat, not only increases the number of pollinators, but also increases the number of natural insect predators like spiders, wasps, and beetles, which feed on destructive insect pests like aphids. This then decreases the need for pesticides, which is another of the major causes of our insect population decline.

NATIVE PLANTS IN YOUR GARDEN

Native plant gardening is a practical and positive way to help local wildlife and ecosystems recover. Small, well-informed actions in your own garden —done alone or with neighbors—create real habitat, support insects and birds, and add resilience to changing environments. Other benefits are that native plant gardening requires much less water, is generally lower in maintenance, and helps replenish the soil.

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To get going, start small. Choose a few regionally native species that suit your yard. Native Plant Finder at https://nativeplantfinder.nwf.org/ can help with that. Remove problematic non-natives first (e.g. barberry, honeysuckle). Join local native plant groups or use resources like Home Grown National Park (a great website!) https://homegrownnationalpark.org, established by Dr. Doug Tallamy of the University of Delaware, or Backyard Habitat programs such as Plant Native https://plantnative.org › creating-a-backyard-habitat.htm). These will also give you locations to obtain native plants or seeds.

There is a wealth of information available to you, including through your local county conservation office and Rutgers extension services. Other good sources are:

The Native Plant Society of New Jersey: https://npsnj.org/
Jersey-Friendly Yards: https://www.jerseyyards.org/jersey-friendly-plants/native-plants/
New Jersey Audubon: https://njaudubon.org/what-to-plant/
Pat Sutton’s list of native plants of New Jersey, including the Pine Barrens: https://www.nj.gov › pinelands › about › events › handouts › handouts › Pat …
United States Botanic Garden: https://www.usbg.gov/native-plant-recommendations
Wild Ones, an organization that promotes native landscapes through education, advocacy, and collaborative action: https://wildones.org. Their local South Jersey chapter is at https://southernnewjersey.wildones.org/. A list of the number of “Native Caterpillars,
Moths, and Butterflies [that are supported by] Native Woodies,” compiled by Dr. Doug Tallamy, is in the very informative The Wild Ones Journal, Issue #2 (March/April) 2014. Go to https://wildones.org/journals/ and scroll down to 2014.