Should we start calling natives 'eco-beneficial plants'?

Photos © Rob Cardillo, courtesy of Thomas Rainer/Phyto Studio

Rudbeckia hirta was known as a “wildflower” long before a “native plant” sign hung above the pots of black-eyed Susans in the local garden center.

Saying the word wildflower creates an immediate agreement on what is being communicated. They are wild in the sense that they grow, often prolifically, where it is most optimal. They eschew the tidy mannered places of the world and thrive with the animals they co-evolved to feed. They are associated with meadows and Laura Ingalls Wilder cavorting down a grassy prairie hill with her dog.

It’s important to note not every wildflower is a native plant, and not every native plant is a wildflower. Still, many one-time wildflowers have become better known as “native plants,” and in the reclassification have lost some of their cultural luster, according to Thomas Rainer, principal landscape architect at Phyto Studio.

“My first experience of natives, very personally, intimately, was joyful. It was hedonic,” he says, recalling his childhood in the Georgian woods, where outcroppings of granite rock harbored colorful flora throughout the year.

That fauna became one of the core subjects of his studies. Rainer attended the University of Georgia, where famed landscape architect and professor Darrel Morrison had been incorporating wildflowers into his designed spaces since the 1960s — a practice Rainer describes as almost heretical in those days.

“He took us to some of the wild places,” Rainer says. And his love for native plants grew.

But once he started his professional career, Rainer noticed polarization of the conversation around cultivars and natives. A gulf had formed in the plant world between the big showy flowers of cultivars, which drove Mother’s Day sales in spring, and native plants that were for the “need to do something ecological.” One for pleasure; the other, utility.

“I think I’ve always been a little mystified why native plants being sustainable has to be such a sacrifice,” Rainer says. “Why can’t it be more pleasurable?”

So, he designs for the pleasure of wildness. His landscapes feature indigenous plant communities that thrive together and work to both touch the human soul and support the ecosystem.

Rainer is in the vanguard of landscape architects and designers, activists and ecologists who are trying to shift the way Americans in particular think of native plants. It’s a community looking to break through the polarization that pits the eye-popping, branded and bred world of cultivars against the feel-good, environmentally friendly subtlety of native species.

What does 'native plants' mean?

The classification of native or indigenous plants has been around since long before Charles Darwin suggested the coevolutionary link between plants in an ecosystem and the fauna that thrived around them. British naturalists used the term freely as they sought to catalog and collect the interesting across the ever-sprawling empire.

But it’s that history of colonization and the “othering” of non-Anglo populations by condescendingly calling them “natives” that is partly to blame for complicating the term “native plant” in our modern times.

“The word native unfortunately has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. It can be a polarizing topic,” explains Sarah Jayne, educator and author of “Nature’s Action Guide: How to Support Biodiversity and Your Local Ecosystem.”

But the polarization is more than just what some might describe as “PC culture run amok.” Apart from social implications, the term native is also scientifically problematic. The fact is that ecosystems are far more dynamic and complicated than we give them credit for. A plant that is indigenous to a vast swath of the country may be more or less beneficial in certain small micro-climates due to unique topography and atmospheric conditions.

And who gets to decide when exactly a plant becomes an indigenous species? Is it plants that were growing before human intervention? And which humans, exactly? After all, the Indigenous people of North America were consummate managers of the plants and landscapes they lived in.

Jayne recommends removing the term altogether and divorcing the concept from human intervention and history.

“One way to circumvent the whole topic is to refer to plants as co-beneficial,” she says. “I know when I started out, I thought that you planted native plants because that was the right thing to do, rather than really understanding that we plant natives because they have the interrelationships with other flora and fauna. So that we’re not just planting for natives’ sake. And I sometimes think that gets lost in the conversation.”

Jayne is aware of the power of semantics, and changing terms for things isn’t necessarily an easy process. Gardeners know generally what a native plant is, so she still uses the term. But she will also use the term ecologically beneficial or eco-beneficial to describe plants that work to support the creatures that live in or adjacent to a particular landscape.

The idea, Jayne says, is to work with gardeners to help them understand that there are plants, certain “keystone species,” that to do the most good for the ecosystems by supporting the most animals. Any increased planting of these species is a huge step forward in slowing the loss of birds and insects that have seen the destruction of their habitats.

And it’s an important issue. A 2019 study published in the journal Science by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and a raft of research partners found that Canadian and North American bird populations declined by nearly 3 billion since the 1970s, with the biggest losses (more than 90%, or more than 2.5 billion) in common bird species such as sparrows, blackbirds, warblers and finches.

A new study looking at U.S. butterfly populations published in Science this March found that “Between 2000 and 2020, total butterfly abundance fell by 22% across the 554 recorded species. Species-level declines were widespread, with 13 times as many species declining as increasing.”

Beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’ plants

Champions of eco-beneficial plants often have ideological concerns that drive their gardening behavior. That may not be the case for the average gardener.

In a recent survey of American gardeners, Axiom Marketing found that 39% desire plants that produce more blooms, fruits and vegetables. That need for “more” from nearly half of the gardening population doesn’t necessarily align with ecologically beneficial plants. It does, however, align with the goals of plant brands working with breeders selecting genetics that lead to more prolifically blooming plants with bigger and more interesting flowers.

The problem, Jayne says, is that when flower morphology is changed to meet consumer demands, the beneficial characteristics are often lost. For instance, an echinacea with a double blossom may be visually stunning, but it loses any ability to support the species that rely on the plant’s central disc floret for food.

So, is there no place for cultivars? Are they “bad” plants? Jayne avoids using that kind of moralistic language because it’s unhelpful and demotivating.

“It’s a real gut-punch,” she says. “I think we don’t need to paint all plants as ‘bad unless they’re good’ because that’s too harsh of a brush, and we won’t get as many people as we need if we have that kind of real hard line.”

While Jayne would prefer gardeners and growers focus on straight species (those naturally reproducing in the wild) grown from seed, there is still room for cultivars. She points to a study by students of Doug Tallamy, the TA Baker professor of agriculture and natural resources at the University of Delaware and co-founder of the Homegrown National Park movement.

They found that a landscape planted with at least 70% eco-beneficial plants is enough to support wildlife, leaving room for 30% of the garden to be a showcase for wild and interesting cultivars that may be less beneficial.

Landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy has seen colleagues put the concept into practice with good results.

“With a butterfly bush, for instance, in theory you’re not supposed to plant them,” she says. “But they actually attract the butterflies, and then you can have all sorts of really important useful plants around them that then can feed them and take care of them.”

Messervy, who worked with Yo-Yo Ma to create the Toronto Music Garden, didn’t start her career with a focus on eco-beneficial plants. But she says she’s learned over the years how important they are to combating species loss and supporting ecosystems. Having watched the conversation shift, she notes that polarization and dogmatic perspectives aren’t helpful.

“I think that the mix of plants is the way to go,” she says. “I think the purists are creating a tough environment and not seeing the big picture, which is we should just plant any way we can plant. All plants are good … or at least they’re good somewhere. And if we need to mix it all up, great. It would be good to become more and more sophisticated.”

For Jayne, there is really only one moral issue when it comes to plants.

“The only time you won’t want a plant is if it’s invasive,” she says. “You really have the moral, ethical responsibility to remove all the invasives.”

Finding balance between beneficial and beautiful plants

The National Gardening Association’s research division, Garden Research, has been tracking the purchasing trends of gardeners buying native species or plants beneficial to birds, bees and butterflies.

Since 2019, they have noted between 2% and 3% annual compound growth in those purchases. Despite that slow growth, there has been a worrying decline. Between 2022 and 2023, purchasing trends for eco-beneficial plants showed a nearly 10% decline, which, according to Garden Research, represents a loss of close to 23 million adults who purchased based on ecological motivations.

It’s possible that some of that loss could come from consumers simply not being able to understand what a native plant is, or their benefits to the landscape. It’s also possible that the prospect of planting eco-beneficial may be too confusing, or the results may not be showy enough for homeowners.

Messervy is looking to combat some of these issues with the release of the Home Outside app, a 3D landscape and garden designer with a unique augmented reality tool. The plant catalogue for designs is comprised of eco-friendly plants.

“I’ve been trying to democratize landscape design the last 12 or so years,” Messervy says. “The hardest thing for people is to say, well, what am I going to do in the first place?”

The Home Outside app allows users to place highly accurate models of single plants or pre-made plant collections and then visualize the design in their landscape. It’s a cutting-edge way to see the beauty of an eco-beneficial garden in their own space. They can also print out a plant list to shop from and print out the design so they know where to place the plants in their yards.

“So, we’re visualizing for them. They don’t have any training, and it’s expensive to hire designers,” Messervy says. “We’re trying to make it really simple and just show you how to do it.”

Being able to visualize a lush space the way a designer would helps to increase the pleasure principle around eco-beneficial plants. And Rainer is certain that native plants can have the same kind of feel-good wow-factor that a planter filled with showy annuals can create.

“I wish it was just more of a hedonism around native plants. I think there could be, especially when they’re designed in ways that evoke wild spaces,” he says. “We do a lot of urban sites, especially in the Northeast. And the craziest thing to me is that clients in these urban sites want it as wild as possible. Sometimes it surprises me how wild their aesthetics are.”

He knows there is a market for more eco-beneficial plants, but he hopes that native plant lovers can make peace with big brands and breeders and recognize that genetically modified plants may also have a place in supporting ecology.

“We could use the tools of selection for ecological quality, for pollen content for nectar,” Rainer says. “This is one of the things where I think it’d be more useful for the American public to drop its polarized views of natives as righteous and exotic as evil and just look more scientifically and optimistically at what we could be doing with these.”

Jayne feels that big growers can be influential, too. She notes that one of the major problems for consumers interested in eco-beneficial plants is that they are hard to source at garden retailers in the same way bedding plants are sold and marketed. She encourages growers to consider creating mixed packs of plants ready to go in the ground, with a plan of how to plant them.

“Set up say an eight pack that had Carex in it, forbs, different perennials and one accent plant that could be a tall grass, which had the same growing conditions,” she suggests. “Here we are, plant people that want to spend money on plants, but there’s just nothing in that’s available. And I see that as low-hanging fruit.”

Rainer is certain that cultivars and eco-beneficials can co-exist for both growers and consumers.

“Find the win-wins,” he says. “Find the ones that are both beautiful and tick your Mother’s Day impulse-buy moment and have some kind of ecological role. There are more than we think there are, and we could be breeding for a lot more than that. And I think it would be nice to market beyond just the word native and pollinator,” he says. “So, it’s kind of a fullness of message, getting beyond buzzwords and really selling plants for a perfect fit.”

This article appeared in the April 2025 issue of Greenhouse Management magazine under the headline "Changing the native narrative."

Patrick Alan Coleman is editor of Greenhouse Management magazine. Contact him at pcoleman@gie.net.