Making the switch from conventional gardening to gardening with native plants can feel intimidating — especially when you’re staring at a landscape filled with familiar favorites and wondering what belongs in their place. This week, Elise Howard, the author of “Plant This, Not That,” offers a practical way forward, showing how simple swaps can transform a traditional garden into a thriving, ecologically beneficial space.
Drawing from her book, Elise shares how to replace common nonnative plants with regionally appropriate alternatives that support pollinators, strengthen local ecosystems and still deliver the beauty gardeners expect.
Elise Howard is the author of “Plant This, Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden.”
Elise’s book answers a question aspiring native plant gardeners struggle with: What can I substitute my plants with? The pages include 200 plants chosen for both their beauty and their ecological benefits.
“In the case of introduced plants, we don’t ask ourselves, where should this plant grow? Or where does this plant want to grow?” Elise says. “We ask ourselves, where will it grow?”
She looked at common and traditional gardens, and sorted popular nonnative plants by their USDA plant hardiness zones. Then she found at least one good native replacement for each plant.
Meet Elise Howard
Elise is a lifelong gardener. She followed in the footsteps of her father, who was passionate about gardening.
“When he was gardening, it was, ‘What’s the most wild, exotic, interesting thing can you bring into your garden?’” she remembers.
Going through stacks of catalogs to find plants that are not bothered by pests and diseases was common practice then. “Now we know that means not so beneficial to our ecosystem,” she says.
She started gardening as a child, and when she grew up and lived in apartments, she would garden in window boxes and found at least a little patch of yard wherever she could.
She raised her son in the New Jersey suburbs and commuted to New York. When her son graduated college, she moved back to the city.
“The first thing I did from my apartment there was make a beeline for Riverside Park,” she says. “That would’ve been 2011, and virtually every shrub or perennial at that time in our post-recession world was cared for by a volunteer.”
She became one of those volunteers. She was given a space adjacent to the Forever Wild Nature Preserve area of the park. It’s a wooded, challenging area to maintain. These days, goats are brought in every year to control invasive species.
The head of volunteers and horticulture asked Elise if she would garden with native plants.
“ I was really excited to do that and not very knowledgeable about it,” she recalls. “As luck would have it, my day job was at Workman Publishing, which is the owner of Timber Press.”
Timber Press is a leading publisher of books by experts in the fields of gardening, horticulture, and natural history. A friend there introduced Elise to the books of Doug Tallamy, the renowned entomologist and conservationist.
“That was a way to just jumpstart my native plant education with ‘Bringing Nature Home,’ with ‘The Living Landscape,’ which he did with Rick Darke.”
Researching Her Book
Before working as an editor and publisher, Elise went to journalism school.
“ I thought that I might like to write about the natural world,” she says. “Life had other plans for me. So in a way, this is really the fulfillment of something that I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about for a long time. “
In researching her book, she relied heavily on the BONAP maps — from the Biota of North America Program in North Carolina.
”They update these maps every few years as more information comes in. But the information that they’re using is where plants are historically native down to the county level across the United States, and they’re doing this by assembling, basically, reports that come into them from scientists and observers and citizen scientists and horticulturists, especially, all over the country.”
What’s native and what’s not native can be muddled because plants have moved around due to human intervention for many generations. And some native plants have been extirpated from ecoregions where they used to grow.
“No tool for plant nativity can be perfect because as plants are disappearing from our landscapes, we just don’t know,” Elise points out. “And we also don’t know how long a plant has been somewhere. Or if it used to be there and is no longer there. But I love the BONAP maps because they really get it down to the county level.”
She also relied on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center as she pieced together what native plants were right for which ecoregion.
“Plant This, Not That” indicates when a tree or plant is native to your state. Courtesy of Elise Howard
Removing the Intimidation Factor
Elise often hears from gardeners the reasons why they are hesitant to adopt native gardening.
“They are overwhelmed by the idea that they should take everything out and start over again,” she says. “And that’s overwhelming because of knowledge, because of time and labor, and because of money.”
The fact is, transforming a garden is not something that has to happen overnight in order for it to be worth it. Replacing nonnative plants with native plants is a process you can just dip your toe into to get started — you don’t need to dive in right away.
“ I will confess, I’d love to one day have a hundred percent native plant garden,” Elise says. “I think it’s doable. I like the intellectual challenge of having a beautiful, sustainable, beneficial garden with all locally native plants. But I’ve just come into a property that has mature, established gardens, and it’s going to take years, not months, not a couple of seasons. It’s going to take years for me to get to that.”
Local ordinances can be another factor.
“ A lot of suburban communities are not ready for front yards full of native plants, and there are even regulations people have to deal with that you must have so much lawn and that your lawn must be X height and that your plants cannot droop over the sidewalk,” she notes. “So there is a lot of intimidation.”
Even Doug Tallamy says shooting for 70% native plants rather than 100% native plants is a great goal to strive for and provides a lot of ecological value. Elise adds that the 70% figure is measured not by the number of individual plants but by biomass. So the addition of native trees and shrubs will go a long way toward hitting that goal, especially oaks, which benefit a disproportionately large number of pollinators and insects.
Elise says the first thing to keep in mind is to not introduce invasive plants — nonnative plants that spread and take over, displacing native plants. Second, work to remove invasive plants as you encounter them in your garden.
She can sympathize with gardeners combating invasives. Working in her two-acre garden in Western Massachusetts, which is still new to her, she deals with bittersweet, goutweed, lily of the valley, burning bush and honeysuckle.
“ I sometimes joke that I could make a nice bundle of money opening an invasive plant nursery,” she says.
To get down to zero invasives on a property that’s more than a quarter acre, just keep working on it, Elisa advises.
“The goal has to be to continue to mitigate the invasives because unless your entire neighborhood and your town and your state are in it with you, those issues are going to keep coming up,” she says.
Why Go Native
“If you just keep on adding new natives, you are doing better and better work for the ecosystem,” Elise says, noting that a driving reason behind native plant gardening is that natives are host plants for caterpillars and other larval insects that become food for baby birds.
“Those birds are important to larger birds and mammals, and we are seeing a kind of a devastating loss of pollinating insects and caterpillars and butterflies, and it is essential that we start adding native plants into our landscapes, and I would say the more you do the better, but do what you can do,” she says.
These chewed-up leaves are exactly what you want to see. Purple passionflower is the native host plant for Gulf fritillary caterpillars. So while it may look like damage, it’s actually a sign your garden is doing its job. (photo: Amy Prentice)
Building Layers
Native plants provide more sustenance to the ecosystem while requiring less maintenance. So the more native plants the better, and one of the best ways to add more native plants is to think in layers. When a garden has a canopy, an understory, a ground cover and the in-betweens, it’s gorgeous. And it has a lot of biomass to support wildlife.
“There are, for instance, birds that live at each of those levels, and there are also other insects and animals that thrive at each of those levels. So you want to make sure that you’ve got a garden that integrates all sorts of plants that live at all those levels,” Elise says.
It’s also better for plants and wildlife to grow plant communities rather than a single perennial species framed in mulch, and then another perennial framed by mulch, and so on.
“ We want plants that grow well together and that mingle well,” Elise says. “ And so you want to get familiar with what the shyer plants are, what the more assertive growers are. And if you take that into account when you’re doing your planning and designing of your garden, you’ll have plants that really support each other and need much less human and mechanical intervention.”
Less maintenance also has benefits to wildlife. When plants are left standing throughout fall and winter rather than chopped down at the end of the growing season, they provide food and shelter for insects and birds.
“ It is just the wildest and most beautiful thing to see a goldfinch supporting its entire body weight on a single blade of wintering grass,” Elise says.
Native plants don’t need to be wrapped in burlap in winter — as is common practice in the Northeast for nonnative shrubs.
“It doesn’t have to be a neat, clean, leafless winter landscape,” she adds.
Refraining from deadheading, removing the duff later and other maintenance work really does pay off for wildlife. Taking a hands-off approach means you are helping fireflies, turtles and various overwintering insects that will be consumed by the mama birds for their babies come spring. It gives you license to feel really good about the fact that you didn’t have to work so hard to clean it up.
Plant This, Not That
Elise shares a few examples found in her book for native plant swaps.
Bradford pear
Bradford pear (Callery pear) has an infamous outdoor and doesn’t provide much interest after it blooms. It was created by science to be sterile but it turned out that it did cross-pollinate with other plants and became invasive, now found all over roadsides and highways.
Swaps:
Native hawthorns, with white flowers in spring followed by attractive red fruits
American dogwood (Cornus florida) has been hybridized for disease resistance but in a way that maintains its native plant benefits.
Eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis) flowers before it leaves out, and the flowers form all up and down the tree.
Serviceberry (Amelanchier) is a genus with many native varieties. It blooms early in spring with lovely fragrant blooms and edible fruit.
Butterflybush
Butterflybush is popular with butterflies but it does not give butterflies what they need to thrive.
“It’s a little bit like giving soda pop to insects in that it doesn’t have the same nutritional value as the nectars from some native plants that those pollinators could be visiting. And then also if the butterfly bush is drawing all the pollinators, guess what’s not happening?” Elise says. ”The native plants are being less visited and so they’re not reproducing as productively as they could be.”
Butterflybush is a woody shrub but tends to die back in the winter, she points out. She had identified a few alternatives that provide more winter interest.
Swaps:
Joe-Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) grows from three feet tall to more than seven feet. They are prolific producers in the garden, and they make beautiful, fragrant pink to mauve to purple compound flower heads that are equally as covered with monarchs and swallowtails and fritillaries and other butterflies as the butterflybush is.
Virginia willow (Itea virginica) grows more like a shrub than Joe-Pye weed and attracts bees and beneficial wasps.
Summer sweet (Clethra alnifolia) is not as widely native as Virginia willow but it is another beautiful plants with bottle brush blooms. It blooms later than Virginia willow and likes moist soil.
Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) has round, compact, distinct flowers.
New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus) has white flowers and a light fragrance
Joe Pye weed is one of the best native alternatives to butterflybush, loaded with nectar and always buzzing with pollinators like this butterfly.
English Ivy
English ivy brightens up the ground level but spreads aggressively and displaces native plants, taking over forest floors.
Swaps:
Virginia creeper or woodbine (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is a good swap for English ivy if you want a plant that will roam and ramble, covering a lot of space. It also lights up the fall landscape when the leaves go from green to red.
Wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens) is covered with red berries for much of the season and has a pleasant scent.
“Plant This, Not That” is a treasure trove of practical information for native gardening.
If you haven’t listened to my conversation with Elise Howard on native plant swaps, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
What native plant swaps have you made? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 071: Gardening for Wildlife: How-to Create an Inviting Habitat, with NWF’s David Mizijewski
Episode 077: The Beauty and Importance of Native Plants: The Ethos of Mt. Cuba Center
Episode 133: Native Plant Design in a Post-Wild World, with Thomas Rainer
Episode 134: Bird Population Decline and What Gardeners Can Do to Help
Episode 142: Why Our Plant Choices Matter: Nature’s Best Hope, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 206: Our Most Essential Trees: The Nature of Oaks, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 262: Garden for Wildlife: Accessing the Right Native Plants, with the NWF
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
Episode 413: Easy Actions Anyone Can Take To Support Wildlife
Episode 421: Doug Tallamy Answers the Question, How Can I Help?
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“Plant This, Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden” by Elise Howard
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