New Feature; New Contributor

There are two things to celebrate today. PRG has a new feature AND a new contributor. Starting today, new contributor Wendy Brister will start by authoring “Diggin’ the Natives,” a native plant of the week profile. Wendy, a Landscape Designer and Horticulturalist, really knows her plants. She’s a self-described plant geek specializing in perennials. She will recommend plants she knows will thrill while thriving.

Diggin’ the Natives will be short profiles on some of Wendy’s favorite plants.  They will most often be posted in the top feature position  and I will aggregate them into one place at the end.

She’ll begin with spring ephemerals. So as not to miss a super cool plant and to keep it interesting to readers outside our Mid-Atlantic region, she’s going to include plants native to other regions of the US occasionally as well.

Wendy has a lot to offer on the subject of growing stuff -as a whole. I’m expecting her to have enough fun here, that she’ll share all sorts of great nuggets of plant knowledge with us over time.

I asked Wendy to begin with native plants because, in part, they are still misunderstood. One gardener friend looks at me funny each time I mention, ‘natives,’ without ‘plants’. He says indigenous people always come to mind first.

Baptisia, or False indigo, is a native plant that now has many cultivars.

Others may think, “Oh, those weedy looking things.” There is a misconception that the number of native plants is small or that they are hard to find. A myth exists that native plant enthusiasts are intractable; perhaps dressing in camo and sneaking into backyards to rip out English Ivy while the rest of us rest.

This is all wrong. Down right baloney. Most gardeners have cultivated and loved native plants for years; many without knowing it. We hope to clear up some of these misconceptions.  I’ve written about native plants before on PRG.

And the native plant world is changing. Increasing the number of natives on the market was the gist of a green industry insider conference that I attended recently. Over the last five years a number of native growers and nurseries have established and are doing very well.

Also, appealling to plant geeks who love to discover something new or different in the plant world, there is growing acceptance of the breeding of cultivars from two native plants species. Plantsman Allan Armitage has dubbed these plants, ‘nativars.’ What ever you call them, the practice is creating native plants in different colors, different habits or different heights that give gardeners greater flexibility to incorporate them into their gardens.

These cultivars also give plant geeks, like Wendy and me, something to talk about around the water cooler. Or perhaps more appropriately, ‘nativars’ give us something to chat about during a break from mulching.

Thanks for joining us Wendy.