Plant with a Purpose

When you think about how to landscape your property, you should consider more than just aesthetics.

Planting with a purpose means selecting plants that not only add beauty, color, and texture, but support functioning ecosystems and healthy watersheds. 

You can do this by planting native plants and removing non-native invasive plants in your landscape. Educate yourself to understand what’s native and what’s not and strive to “plant with a purpose”.

Native Species originated and evolved in a place long enough to adapt to living in that particular environment and to develop complex relationships with the other organisms in that ecological community.

Plant Native For:

  1. Biodiversity
  2. Clean Water
  3. Birds
  4. Carbon Footprint
  5. Ease
  6. Beauty

Plant Native for Biodiversity

Native species help to increase and preserve biodiversity.

Biodiversity is the combination of the words biological and diversity, and essentially refers to the variety of life on Earth at all levels, from genes to ecosystems.  In terms of planting in our gardens, we can think of it as the total number of different species in a given area.

Why is biodiversity important?

Every single species has a role to play! Think of a baseball team.

There are nine different players on the field at any given time, all with their own responsibilities at their own position. Each offering their own unique skill set to the overall goal of the team.

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This same principle can be applied to a landscape.

Some plant species have deep roots that help to keep the soil in place, to lessen erosion, and to store water in the soil. Some plant species have colorful flowers to attract pollinators such as butterflies and insects. Other species have flowers of a different color or shape to attract different pollinators such as hummingbirds and bees.

Many plants have chemicals that act as a natural pesticide to deter herbivores from eating them, but certain insects or caterpillars have evolved mechanisms to enable them to still eat those plants. In many cases insects have evolved to require native plants to complete a part of its lifecycle. The insects that eat plants in turn support birds and the larger food web.

All in all, each species in a healthy ecosystem plays its part to keep the overall community healthy and functioning.