Looking for mature native plants for your home landscape?

Finding native plants from your own state, propagrated and ready to plug into your yard, landscape, and plantings can be challenging and expensive. Many of you love butterflies but do not love common mildweed. Have you considered other spcies such as swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, with it's stately narrow leaves, beautiful purple-pink flower that attract monarchs, bees and wasps, and other butterflies?

I can provide mature sized swamp milkweed, or seedlings that are easy to transplant into your landscape. Adding milkweed, blazing star, iris, and lilies around an outdoor lightpost was a simple way to nativize the plants, attract pollinators, and reduce the effort to maintain that feature.

Monarch butterfly feeding on swamp milkweed planted with blazing star and lilies around light post.

Blazing star, Liatris speciosa, is a great mid-late summer bloomer in Eastern North America, where it adds color, pollination opportunites, and keeps a narrow profile. It is wise to chop down the stems and seed heads after flowering, unless you want seedlings of Liatris to spread the following year. This is a transplant from seedlings to bring color and food near a water bath birds and insects both use.

Another native plant rare in the wild, but available for landscapes is the versatile mountain mint, Pycnanthemum virginianum, which has a strong minty fragrance, attracts bees and wasps, and stays small and narrow. Harvesting the stems in the early fall provides seed for sowing and leaves for medicinal and beverage use (however this is nothing like spearmint or pipermint so caution is advised, and research into the safe use of this plant). Here is a nursery I recommend for purchasing quart-sized containers of mountain mint.

Mountain mint along a narrow house planting, note the wasp feeding on the white flowers in the foreground. This plant is rare in the wild but can be purchased from Conservation Districts.

Lastly, did you know that Eastern prickly pear cactus is Native to Michigan and even has wild populations as far north as Mecosta County. These are offspring and populgules of a local native population that is being monitored, maintained and expanded thru restoration. If you are looking for information, help finding and growing them, reach out to me scottmherron@gmail.com.

Wild population of eastern prickly pear cactus near Big Rapids, Michigan, in a dry oak-savannah habitat.