This year marks the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Native Plant Trust, the organization dedicated to growing and conserving native plants in New England.

Meteorologist Dave Epstein spoke with Uli Lorimer, the Director of Horticulture, to hear more about the Trust’s work and for his suggestions for native plants you can put in your garden this fall.

Let’s define what a native plant is and why they’re important.

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We’ll start with the native plant question — really you have to consider time and space. We like to define it as plants that have evolved here without human intervention and have been in this place that we call New England for a very, very long time.

I think that to get to your original question about why are natives important, if we assess where we are today, our landscapes are full of plants from other parts of the world, and to some extent, plants that are still here, that have always been here. The trends are all pointing towards these invasive species becoming more and more prevalent, and that’s having an effect on the abundance and diversity of pollinators and on bird species. The native plant movement is really positioning itself as a really forward-thinking act to be able to try to restore the functionality of a landscape that was much more connected across its entirety.

So, making intentional choices in your garden to support pollinators helps repair pollination systems that might be degraded and it helps provide the resources for migratory birds. All the things that you want to see in your gardens are in some way tied to native plants that are the foundation of these ecosystems.

Can you connect the relationship between the importance of native plants and climate change? For example, why someone would fare better in their yard and actually have less work with native plants as we have more extreme types of weather, like big dry spells and big wet spells and everything in between?

The key to all of this is what we call local adaptation, and what lies behind that idea is genetic diversity. It’s sometimes a little bit of a hard concept for people to wrap their head around because it’s abstract. You can’t look at a plant and know inherently anything about whether it’s genetically diverse or not. You can, however, assume that plants that evolved here in our region have adapted to historical changes and are best suited to weather future changes as well, which is why they deserve a bigger place in our gardens than perhaps they currently enjoy. That adaptation, that genetic diversity, is really the key for resilience and that’s what we want in landscapes because we don’t really know what next year’s weather patterns are gonna be. As you pointed out, we’re kind of in this yo-yo or seesaw effect of really dry or really wet, and extreme weather events. These are plants that have adapted to those kinds of conditions and are really going to be able to perform well under those conditions.

Could we talk a little bit about some of your favorite plants? What’s something for the shade and something for the sun that would do well in the garden?

Fall is a really wonderful time for pollinator support and I think the stars of the fall garden are going to be asters and goldenrods. There’s quite a lot of different ones that are out there.

One of my favorites for shade in the aster world is called heart-leaved aster, and it’s got really beautiful small pale purple to white flowers. What I really like about it is the inflorescence is born in a very stout stem, so this isn’t one that’s going to flop over after a rainstorm and it’s an absolute pollinator magnet.

For sunny areas, I’m going to call out the New England aster, which is just a really wonderful, beautiful plant with large purple to pink flowers, very drought tolerant, and again, a favorite of pollinators, of migratory monarch butterflies.

For shady sections in the goldenrod world, I’m gonna call out wreath goldenrod or what’s called bluestem goldenrod. It really thrives in dry shade conditions, which is kind of a hard set of conditions for gardeners to deal with. It features yellow flowers that are born in the axils of the leaves.

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And then for sunny sections, I really like downy goldenrod. This is another one that is found naturally in poor soils and rocky outcrops and it is super drought tolerant once it’s established. If last year’s fall drought was any indication of what we might expect in the future, this is the plant for you.

Could you talk about a plant that folks might see that looks really beautiful, that has flowers, but actually isn’t good for the pollinators, even though for us it’s really attractive?

What comes to mind for me are some of the sheared mums that are very popular as ornaments. I should say that they’re not necessarily bad for pollinators, they’re more like junk food, if you would like. The way a lot of those are created and bred and propagated, oftentimes by cuttings or by cloning, because we want the different varieties of colors, you sacrifice the quality of pollen and nectar, and those are really the important resources for our local pollinators. So those plants, while they look pretty on the outside, are not really giving pollinators all of the food and things that they need, as opposed to our asters and our goldenrods, which have co-evolved with the full suite of pollinators and are really providing much more nutritious food resources for all of these pollinators.