Planting Native Plants

There are many times when it is smart to resort to native plants in your landscape. They are survivors in your climate and soil conditions.

This week we got the first rain for quite a while and I think that I will have to adjust my thoughts on what to plant. The weather down in Georgia is clearly much drier, as well as warmer, than the northern states, and this has to be taken into account with my plant choices. This is a one of the great reasons for starting to use native plants. Native plants are those that have found ways to cope with the natural rhythm of weather in your locality and have been doing so for many hundreds of years. Native plants were not introduced to the area from Europe or Asia, but have always been here, or spread by natural, non human means. If a plant is native to your area then it has a really good chance of surviving with very little care from you or me. Of course, some introduced plants also have a tendency to be survivors too. When these introduced plants take over the land, they are termed Exotic Invasives. The queen of the exotic invasive species is the Kudzu vine that drapes over, and eventually kills trees, shrubs and anything above ground. Kudzu vine is rampant across much of the southeast.