COLUMBIA, Mo. – Whether starting a small container garden on a porch, planting a native canopy tree, or filling a bed with many grasses and wildflowers, anyone can garden with native plants—no experience or “green thumb” required. For would-be gardeners with little or no gardening experience, the Missouri Prairie Foundation’s (MPF) Grow Native! program has launched a free Guide for Beginning Native Plant Gardeners for do-it-yourself (DIY) native plant gardening in the lower Midwest.
A monarch butterfly flies past a garden planted with eastern blazing star (Liatris scariosa) and Texas green eyes (Berlanderia texana). Monarch butterflies need nectar from fall-blooming plants like these to fuel their migration south. Photo by Scott Woodbury.
The online Guide for Beginning Native Plant Gardeners (or “Beginner’s Guide”) features step-by-step instructions for planning, preparing, and installing a new native plant garden, worksheets to guide the process, and beginner-friendly garden plans. Special topics include conducting a site assessment, transforming areas of lawn into native plant beds, and shopping for native plants. It also includes links to resources from Grow Native! and its conservation partners with information about the region’s pollinators, songbirds, butterflies, edible native plants, and more.
The Beginner’s Guide is available to use online at grownative.org/beginner-guide. It is also available to download as a PDF at the link.
“When I started thinking about native landscaping in my own yard, I was very enthusiastic about native plants, but didn’t know where to start,” said Emily Gustafson, MPF’s Director of Operations who developed the guide. “With the new Beginner’s Guide, we sought to craft a resource tailored to folks just starting out that would be accessible, practical, and inspirational, while drawing on the wealth of educational materials Grow Native! has produced over so many years.”
While intended primarily for residential projects, the Beginner’s Guide can be instructive for schools, community and volunteer groups, churches, and others getting started on small native landscaping projects.
From prairies to rocky glades, wetlands, and woods, the lower Midwest is home to many habitats where native plants thrive and are the basis for a healthy food chain. To provide food and habitat for native pollinators, butterflies, songbirds, and other wildlife, you can use native plant species from nurseries and seed sellers in home gardening. Native plants also help people, by providing shade, intercepting and absorbing rainwater, storing carbon, producing food for people to eat, reducing mowed areas, and creating beautiful, resilient landscapes that can be enjoyed throughout the year.
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The Grow Native! Beginner’s Guide features garden plans suitable for novice gardeners, including this Butterfly Mixer plan that uses host plants for different butterfly caterpillars to fill in a small garden bed. These plants also have flowers that feed adult butterflies and other pollinators. Illustration by Emily Gustafson.
The Beginner’s Guide joins many additional resources Grow Native! maintains online for both home gardeners and landscaping professionals, including a Native Plant Database with 400+ species featured, a Resource Guide directory for native plant products and services, many top 10 lists and native garden landscape plans, and more. Grow Native! and MPF also maintain an archive on YouTube of recorded webinars on topics including native landscaping; pollinators, butterflies, and other wildlife; and native grassland ecology and management.
“The Grow Native! program works to provide authoritative native landscaping information useful for gardeners of all levels, and we are very pleased to expand Grow Native!’s educational materials with the Beginner’s Guide,” said Carol Davit, MPF Executive Director.
Grow Native! is the 26-year-old native plant marketing and education program of the Missouri Prairie Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit land trust. Grow Native! helps protect and restore biodiversity by increasing conservation awareness of native plants and their effective use in urban, suburban, and rural developed landscapes. Through collaboration with consumers, private industry, non-profit organizations, and government agencies, Grow Native! aims to significantly increase the demand and use of native plants in the lower Midwest.