We believe native plants are essential to support our natural world and they are too hard to find in Richmond, VA. By opening a nursery selling ONLY native plants, we can make sure there is always a resource for finding plants that are best suited to our area and provide the best support for the wildlife with which we share space.
Native Plants Save Lives
Native plants are much better suited to support all of the critters that are essential to sustaining our ecosystem, ultimately helping sustain human life as we know it. Simply put, native plants save lives!
How are they better suited? Evolutionarily speaking, things that evolve together over long periods of time tend to learn and adapt to each other to provide/receive the most from one another. Insects from Virginia have spent eons adapting themselves to use our native plants so that they can make homes, find food, and safely procreate so they can continue to provide services to our ecosystem.
Meanwhile, humans have spent hundreds of years clearing native lands of valuable plant resources and habitats so that we can build our own habitats; if we do not replenish the ecosystem with plants that serve the wildlife, then the wildlife cannot be sustained. The risk you take when you do NOT use native plants in your landscape is that you are providing little to no sustenance or habitats for critters in need, and thus they will go extinct. Non-native plant species may also become invasive, and take over natural spaces that would otherwise support native plants, thus further reducing food and shelter supply.
Native Plants Know How To Live Here
Not only is our local wildlife population in need of native plants to thrive, our native plants have adapted to our climate, soils, water availability over eons. Once established, native plants are much more resistant to natural climactic swings that occur locally. Mature native plants can thrive with little to no watering and no chemical additives.
A great contrast to this would be the never-ending maintenance needs of grass lawns. In order to maintain that idyllic green lawn, homeowners are spending big bucks to have regular chemical treatments and watering systems to keep the look alive. As much as we all have been told all of our lives that we MUST have a lawn (and lawnmower), the grass does not provide much to our local wildlife. The chemicals used to maintain that lawn can adversely affect wildlife populations, not to mention run off into our water supply.
Native Plants Are Beautiful
Just because native plants are not the most well-known at your local garden center (if they are even there at all), doesn't mean they aren't beautiful. There are so many different kinds of perennials that boast unique and magnificent flowers, so many shrubs that flower and berry in their own wonderful ways, trees that bring us shade and burn bright with color in fall, that you will not lose interest in a native landscape. There is the added beauty of seeing butterflies, pollinators, songbirds and hummingbirds paying native plants a visit instead of avoiding your yard altogether.
We could go on and on about native plants, and will do our best to address as much as we can about their importance as we grow our nursery. There are so many great resources to take a deep dive into the importance of native plants, a few of which we have linked to below.
A Small Selection of Virginia Native Plant Resources: