The Plants Gardeners Used To Pull As Weeds Are Now Selling Out Everywhere

For most of the past century, native plants were treated as a problem to be solved — the unwanted volunteers that kept pushing up through manicured lawns and tidy flower beds no matter how many times they were pulled. That has changed dramatically, and the shift is now showing up in numbers that veteran horticulturalists say they simply did not see coming. At Kilbourn Park in Chicago, the annual Mother's Day plant sale drew more than 2,300 shoppers this year, more than double the usual attendance, and nearly one in five plants on offer was a native species, a category that barely existed at the sale just a few years ago. In Minnesota, Prairie Moon Nursery, a 44-year-old native plant greenhouse, has seen its sales grow by 350 percent over the last seven years, with orders having tripled as gardeners from across the country flood its website.

What is driving the surge is a mix of practicality and purpose that resonates deeply with people paying attention to what is happening to their local landscapes. Native plants have deep root systems that absorb water and help prevent flooding, they require far less water and maintenance than most ornamental varieties once established, and they provide the food, shelter, and habitat that pollinators and local wildlife have depended on for thousands of years. The National Wildlife Federation's habitat education lead for the Great Lakes region put it plainly: native plants have been adapting to change for thousands of years, they need less of everything, and they are both practical and beautiful. The movement has been building quietly in community gardens and schoolyard plots and backyard corners for years, but nurseries say the demand has shifted from a niche interest to something that looks more and more like a mainstream one, a generation of gardeners deciding that what grows naturally might actually be exactly what belongs there.

Source:https://grist.org/solutions/once-dismissed-as-weeds-native-plants-are-now-flying-off-the-shelves/