Native plants are becoming increasingly popular as options for landscaping at homes and businesses. And there are places where anyone can view native plants in the wild to get ideas for their gardens.
There are many areas not too far from Springfield where native plants are on full display – from early spring to late fall.
And, in April, a friend and I visited Cedar Gap Conservation Area, which is located between Seymour and Mansfield not far off of Highway 60 to the south.
The day we visited, there were many early spring flowers in bloom or beginning to bloom, including lousewort, bellwort, woodland stonecrop, milkvetch, Indian paintbrush, shooting star, fire pink, round-lobed hepatica, wild ginger and more.
Some were on glades, others along a creek and some on the forest floor.
David Middleton and his wife, Jenny, have been working to get more native plants in the Missouri landscape for 10 years. They own Ozark Soul, which offers a variety of native plants for sale.
"To us it’s the relationships in the community that you're really building in your yard, and it's getting people in touch with that natural community or that ecosystem that's local," he said. "So much is missing from our more metropolitan areas or suburban landscapes.”
Native plants are much more beneficial to native wildlife, including pollinators. For example, there are specific host plants that native butterflies need to lay their eggs. Monarch butterflies lay eggs on milkweed.
And Middleton said native plants are cheaper and easier to care for.
"You don’t have the intensive input, say, of using pesticides, fungicides, the little things to keep maybe a boxwood hedge really healthy looking," he said. "They're notorious for scale and mites, and so there are — you can really kick your feet up in the area of applications of other chemicals, which should make most people very happy, especially if they're concerned about their health and environment.”
And as the climate changes, Middleton said the native plants will continue to perform beautifully.
He got hooked on natives when he was working at the Whitmire Wildflower Garden at Shaw Nature Reserve near St. Louis, which only used native plants. That’s where he met his wife. They would go on seed collecting trips and bring back species they hadn’t gardened with.
"We would germinate them, grow them, plant them, and so we were learning all aspects about these native plants," Middleton said.
They moved to Ozark County – their nursery is in Theodosia (it’s not open to the public) – and started thinking about how to support themselves so far from a larger town. That’s when they decided to start growing native plants and selling them. What started out as a part-time gig is now their livelihood. And Middleton said he’s blessed to be able to do it.
He gives a shout out to Mervin Wallace who started the Missouri Wildflower Nursery, a few miles from Jefferson City, in 1984 for making it possible for him to be in business today. That’s a native plant business open to the public.
Middleton has some advice for those wanting to start planting natives in their own yards.
"Number one, you really do need to have a solid plan, and, number two, you need to keep that plan in the proper perspective in scale," he said. "And so we always recommend starting small. The smaller, the better, especially if you're just you're just getting into it and you're not maybe as experienced with gardening, it — I would start with maybe a little 6X6' plot, try a few things, but starting small and having a solid plan is going to allow you to have better success.”
Some of the top plants he recommends are foxglove beardtongue, shining blue star, Bradbury’s beebalm, cliff goldenrod and aromatic aster. He also likes to play with texture – using sedges and grasses “like prairie dropseed, little bluestem. We love palm sedge in the landscape.”
And he said, since native plants typically bloom anywhere from two to eight weeks, incorporate plants that bloom at various times throughout the season.
There are still some native plant sales in Springfield this spring. There will be some in the fall, too. You can find a list at grownative.org. Click on ‘events’ and ‘native plant sales.’
