Native Plant Garden

I was inspired by reading Douglas Tallamy‘s book Nature’s Best Hope, which our older son read for a class and recommended to me. It had such power that I decided to tear out our invasives and go to native plants.
I feel strongly that native plants are a big help to our ecosystem in terms of providing plant life that local wildlife can benefit from, be it birds, insects or mammals. To that end we installed about 1600 natives plants over the course of the first year, another roughly 400 in the second year, and hope to keep adding natives and removing some of the alien plants over the next few years. We put our yard on the Homegrown National Park website.

My overall goal for the future is to remove as many of our non-native plants as possible (leaving mature healthy plants that are not aggressive and are serving a function in the eco-system like shelter for birds), and create a lush multi-layered habitat of native plants. This is to help restore our native pollinators, birds, the soil health, and small wildlife. I love that we are getting the eco-system’s top predators back (hawks, eagles, foxes), which means the eco-system is doing well enough to support them.

Click in the top half of any photo below for a gallery and description about that phase of the transition — the pages are also listed at top right for navigation.

Not really related to native plants, but we also raise oysters at the end of our dock with the Chesapeake Bay Program, and we have houses for purple martins, which I really enjoy watching — some videos here.

Our house was on the Virginia Historic Garden Tour in 2025 — it was a great day with about 600 people through the yard, many interested in native plants. My plant labeling signs are here (note that the pagination gets messed up in Google Docs, but is correct if you download it as a Word doc), and some photos of set up and tour day are here.