10/13/2026
A fresh look at NATIVE PLANTS in honor of 'Indigenous Peoples Day'
"In recent years we have begun to rekindle and deepen our interest in native plants. This represents a healthy movement to cultivate flora that provides traditional food, shelter, and medicine for our native fauna—heirloom gardening and culinary tradition for the birds and the bees. In many parts of the world, nativity is difficult to define; it’s easy to overlook many pieces of a layered and complex history of travel, settlement, and trade. For instance, it would be hard to imagine a plant more ubiquitous than Rosa rugosa on Cape Cod. It thrives along the sandy shores and dunes and is now an emblematic staple of seaside gardens from Provincetown to Plymouth. So I was stunned to find that pollen and seed analysis dated the introduction of R. rugosa to the 13th century—an impressive pedigree for a Cape family but not one that ran as deep as the seldom-seen natives, R. carolina and R. virginiana. It challenged my notions of what native really means, and while I now understand that it had centuries to naturalize, it made me less stringent about who did and didn’t belong in the tribe.
Native echinacea might have been a familiar sight in the Midwest, but they are as much a foreigner to New England as I am. A New England aster or cranberry that comes from wild-collected seed stock and soils of this particular spit of land carries more weight than a prairie coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) because they hold the genetic makeup and stories of this region, where they have been adapting for centuries. For me, more than native, the word indigenous speaks to the endemic plants that help define regional habitat. That being said, the Three Sisters agriculture of my region originated in the Native peoples of the Southwest. First beans, then corn and squash, defining a shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural people for well over a thousand years. These agricultural siblings represent seeds, plants, and cultural practices that were adapted by tribes as they followed along trade routes and new settlements patterns, all the way to New England and beyond.
I don’t know that there is a right answer, but I do value the cultural awareness that goes along with our latest native plant movement. We often take for granted the things of our daily life. The same roadside New England aster we looked right past until recently was lauded in England as the elegant Michaelmas daisy by 1640. Similarly, our goldenrod arrived in 17th-century European gardens and apothecaries as an exotic flower and medicinal plant. After centuries of populations devaluing and eradicating plants like milkweed, we have learned the hard way (from the still small voices of monarchs, pollinators, and perfumers) that we don’t need to, and often can’t, buy the best things in life. Sometimes we just need to make sure that we don’t mow them down. So, is the dandelion, introduced by early colonial gardeners, any less important to native bees searching out food in the early spring?
We have all met earnest native-plant enthusiasts eager to tell us why we must grow only natives. I will never be that much of a purist about anything. Instead, I see place-based knowledge as a critical way to touch base with, and live peaceably in, our environment. Whether learning from indigenous peoples, the native plants, or the soil sciences we share, we are all relearning how to read the landscape and remember the old names. Sassafras, wuttahimneash, saskatoon. These are times for learning sustainable ways to live in concert with the plants and animals, the seasons, the breezes, the ebb and the flow. What is most important is sharing the outgrowths of plants that define a region and rebuilding a web that helps to feed and shelter an ecoregion.
Our present building and landscaping boom presents an opportunity to preserve and enhance the spaces we have left with all the plants in the web. The wee ones along the path and the ancient ones with canopies among the clouds. Planting indigenous recreates vibrant ecosystems and communities. It respects a heritage not erased but made precious and sacred by scarcity. Ice plant and cedar. Salamander and walking stick. Sacred landscapes reemerging from fallow ground to preserve homeland, habit, and diversity.
Since the difference between value and profit is often lost in late-stage capitalism, box store sales will likely never embrace true natives, which too often fly in the face of industry conventions. That means growing an industry for place-based natives falls to you and me, and the few remaining fine garden centers. Seeding jack in-the pulpit into our backyard, cultivating a line of native plants for your local farmers market or garden club plant sale, designing a wildflower meadow, carefully transplanting and saving the clumps of lady’s slipper otherwise doomed by the developer’s bulldozer, or changing legislation that replants wildflowers instead of mowing our endless highways. And have faith. When we reintroduce natives, we are helping them to spread far and wide, in the ground, on the wind, and maybe, like the rugosa rose, in ways we can never even begin to imagine"
From an essay in my book entitled Indigenous Plants. Woodcut by Mary Azarian https://www.amazon.com/Heirloom-Gardener-Traditional-Plants-Skills/dp/1604699930/ref=asc_df_1604699930/?
