Landscaping with Native Perennials for Four-season Interest
Photograph source: Fort Worth Botanical Gardens
Many homeowners have heard the buzz about native plants and are interested in using them in their landscapes, but they may not know how to get started. Our purpose is to help you navigate the seemingly complex topic of using native plants in your landscape. This is one example of how to plan and execute the transformation of a traditional landscape to an attractive native landscape with all its advantages. Search our site for more information on this and related topics.
Four Seasons for Biodiversity
The most obvious reason to strive for four-season interest is to have a beautiful landscape to draw attention to your property all year, but a less obvious, but more important, reason is to improve the biodiversity of your yard. The Homegrown National Park program, started by Douglas Tallamy and Michelle Alfandari, is spreading the word about how individuals can contribute to healing the planet by the way they manage their home landscapes.
Flowers get the most focus because they obviously provide food for pollinators, both adults and larvae, but other trees, shrubs, and even grasses are equally important. Many provide food, shelter, and nesting materials and sites for birds and other small wildlife.
Why Natives?
Native plants offer several advantages:
- Improved biodiversity: meet the needs of native insects and wildlife because they evolved together over thousands of years.
- Less water: used to our average rainfall and its variance.
- Less work: don’t require fertilizer, need less protection from weather, fewer pest problems.
- Less expense: less need to replace plants, lower water cost, less fertilizer, pesticide costs.
Why Perennials?
Perennials are good choices for your landscape because they:
- Cost less: don’t have to be replaced every year because they either reseed themselves or survive the winter and re-emerge in the spring.
- Need less maintenance: usually only need a bit of pruning and occasional division to keep them looking good.
steps in Landscape Planning
Many people get excited about making landscape changes and just leap right in. While that feels good at the beginning, it almost always leads to regret quickly. Planning is boring, it’s true, but it also saves time, effort, and money in the long run. And you will be happier with the results because, not only will it look good, but the plants are also much more likely to flourish because you took their needs into account.
Site Assessment
The first step in any plan is figuring out where you are right now. You can’t know what you need until you know what you’ve got now. A good way to keep track of things is with a landscape map. It doesn’t need to be fancy. Hand-drawn is fine. If you’d like somthing a bit more polished, check out “Easy DIY Landscape Mapping.”
Factors to Consider in a Landscape Plan
- Soil: If you haven’t had the soil tested in the last couple of years, now is the time to do it. You will know whether supplementation is needed and what kind.
- Light: Mark areas at least as full sun, part sun, and full shade. You can be more specific if you choose. For information about light definitions, read “What Kind of Light Do You Have?“
- Water: Mark areas that are fast draining and those that stay moist. Indicate where ponding occurs and any erosion caused by drainage. Mark the location of sprinkler heads, faucets, and downspouts.
- Hardscape: Draw buildings, sidewalks, utility meters, patios and other permanent structures. Outline any beds that do not have borders, also. You may also want to mark the approximate location of water and electric lines in case you need to dig. If you do dig, contact the utility companies to get someone to formally mark them for you; it’s important for liability insurance.
- Plants: Mark your plants with the genus (and species) if known. You can often identify common plants using free online plant identifiers that search for matching pictures. Outline the drip line of trees. Mark plants that you definitely want to keep and those that you want to move to another site in the landscape. Decide if the remaining plants can be given to friends or just discarded. (Think mulch and compost.)
- Challenges: What things stand out as problems? Drainage issues, like ponding or washed-out areas? Heavily shaded areas or areas that are all sun, all the time? These conditions require special attention, especially when selecting plants.
Making a Specific Plan
- Goals: If you haven’t already, write down what you want to accomplish with your landscape, especially things that haven’t been mentioned, like attracting pollinators in general or specifically butterflies or bees, attracting beneficial insects, like dragonflies and ladybugs, attracting birds or other small wildlife, like frogs, lizards and turtles. Plant selection is extremely important in achieving these goals.
- Budget: Landscaping can be expensive, especially if you must hire labor, but an advantage of this type of landscaping is that there’s only one large expense that reduces future maintenance costs. First, determine what you can do, and what you must pay someone to do. Next, decide if you can accomplish your goal in phases, for example, laying out the new beds in winter to be ready to plant in spring. Or planning to replace and plant new perennials in the early fall to give them time to develop roots before winter. After you finish items b and c, revisit your budget and make adjustments.
- What stays, what goes: You do not have to remove all your adapted landscape plants, but you should remove any that are invasive or that have caused you problems or extra work. Check native plant sites to figure out what natives you already have.
- What will be added: Decide on the plants you want to add based on your goals. When that’s done, the first thing to do is not go to the nursery. You can if you’ve already got a money tree, but the best way to save is to ask your friends and family if they’ve got something they don’t want that you can move or something they don’t mind you propagating. When you’re doing the next step, include annual native plant sales in the timeline. These are great places to find inexpensive native plants and sometime native plants that don’t show up in nurseries. Check with nearby Master Gardener Associations; there’s one in most Texas counties. Also, local arboreta often have plant sales in spring and fall that include some native plants. Finally, you’re ready to check out nurseries. The Native Plant Society of Texas has a list of nurseries that stock native plants.
- Task list and timeline: Please don’t skip this step. People are amazed at the things they forgot to consider when they take time to do this. What you discover may result in reconsidering your budget, your plans to do work yourself, and even what plants you finally choose to use. The timeline will also clarify the workflow, especially when certain plants can be planted, transplanted or propagated.
Working the Plan
- Expect the plan to change.
- You may not find the plants you want, so be prepared with some back-up ideas.
- After you’ve started planting, you may realize that there is more space than you thought, which is better than the other alternative: you have less space than you thought. Remember that the plants are going to grow, so consider their probable size before you panic. Having open space at first isn’t bad; you can always add more plants later. Having too little space is not immediately a problem, but you should be prepared to relocate (or rehome) some plants as they become larger.
- There will always be surprises, so expect them and work through them as they come up.
Assessing the Outcome
- Taking pictures during the process will help you see where you started and how it matches your vision.
- Take wide angle shots for an overview.
- Take closeup of individual plants so you can judge how quickly they are growing.
- Take shots throughout the year to see how it looks in all seasons. It’s best to try to take these shots from the same place to make comparing them easier.
- Make any changes or additions to your original plan based on your assessment of how well your results match your vision, which may have changed from the original.
- Taking pictures during the process will help you see where you started and how it matches your vision.
Ongoing Maintenance
- Monthly (at least): Check all your plants for signs of disease or damage. Natives are usually able to handle pests, but they occasionally can be overwhelmed. Learn which plants might need extra attention because they are susceptible to a specific disease or pest.
- Seasonally: Learn the best time to do specific tasks.
- Pruning
- Transplanting
- Propagating
- Fertilizing
- Planting
Take a look at the case study we are creating based on the information provided above. We describe each step and illustrate them with photographs.