Dear Members and Friends,
As I write this, it is raining, with more rain in the forecast for the next few days and more seasonable temperatures after the 90s earlier this week. But New Jersey is back in a drought, severe drought in places. Native plants are better than exotic ornamentals and lawns at surviving dry spells, but they are not invulnerable, especially when newly planted. The kind of long-term drought we have been having can kill new plantings and stress established ones as well. Don’t neglect them!
On a brighter note, it is late May, and my woodland garden is at its peak again. Every year, in the seemingly empty days of winter, it seems an absurd leap of faith to believe that the ground layer will return. But it does. Now thousands of woodland ephemerals and ferns fill the slope under my trees, reminding me why I made this garden in the first place. Only a decade ago, the same spaces were filled with invasive plants like garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) and periwinkle (Vinca minor) or just bare, compacted soil. A quarter acre of steeply sloped hillside is not an easy place to plant or manage. But I’m getting there, one plant at a time—or, more honestly, one carload of plants at a time. My wife and kids may quietly suggest to their friends that I have gone a little overboard, that maybe I have a plant problem, but my garden would not be the same without that excess.
If there is one place where buying too much can become a virtue, it is in native plant gardening. I often think of something that one of my favorite podcasters, the botanist Matt Candeias, said on In Defense of Plants: we live in a culture that rightly tells us to consume less, buy less, accumulate less, and stop treating the world as an endless warehouse of things. We are told to declutter, downsize, even start “death cleaning,” a term that makes heading to my basement more depressing than it already is. But native plants are different. A plant is not another object on a shelf. Plants are life and, in the right place, they become infrastructure for life.
Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), Canada anemone (Anemone canadensis), Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides), ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), marginal wood fern (Dryopteris marginalis), and jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) forming a dense, green mulch.
We are all at different stages in our native plant journey. If you are just starting out, lists of “ten great native plants” are genuinely useful. They give you a foothold: milkweed, Joe-Pye weed, mountain mint, goldenrod, asters, coneflowers, bee balm, maybe a serviceberry or an oak if you have room. These plants matter, and many of them are keystone species. But don’t stop there. The real fun begins when we move past the general recommendations and start asking what belongs to a particular place. Start by learning the site in which you are planting. Look up your Level III and Level IV ecoregion, then check the USDA NRCS Web Soil Survey to see what soil series is actually under your feet. These tools will not design the garden for you, but they help you stop thinking of your yard as generic “sun” or “shade” and start seeing it as a particular site with a particular history, geology, drainage, and plant community. What grows in dry shade, under shallow-rooted trees, along a wet edge, on a slope, in compacted soil, or in the narrow spring window before the canopy closes? Those questions lead away from the obvious plants and toward the specialists: sedges, ferns, spring ephemerals, groundcovers, shrubs for wet feet, plants for poor soil, plants that feed particular insects, plants that knit a community together.
This matters because biodiversity is not produced by good intentions alone. At our Annual Meeting in March, Dr. James Shepherd spoke about how loss of biodiversity contributes to the rise of infectious diseases; you can watch his NPSNJ talk on YouTube, and he also discusses the same subject with Matt in Episode 529 of In Defense of Plants, “Native Plants, Habitat, & Infectious Diseases”. The lesson for our gardens is direct: ten charismatic native plants are not enough. We need layers, seasons, niches, and redundancies. We need plants that bloom in March and plants that bloom in November, plants for bees and plants for moth caterpillars, plants that hold soil, plants that shelter overwintering insects, plants that fill the bare places where invasives otherwise return. That kind of planting means getting past the ordinary garden center native section and going to specialist nurseries. To find these plants, use NPSNJ’s newly revised Spring 2026 Where to Buy Natives list, which includes native-only nurseries. You may have to order online or take a drive to one of them, but the drive is well worth it. Most of them are in beautiful parts of New Jersey or just across the border in Pennsylvania. Make a day of it. Visit a nursery, then visit a natural area nearby and look at how plants actually grow together: not as isolated specimens, but as populations. The more you see plants in real communities, the better you will understand what to buy and what to plant it with.
The vast overpopulation of deer in our state is a challenge, of course, but lists of “deer-resistant plants” can become their own trap. If we only plant the handful of species deer are least likely to eat, we let deer determine the biodiversity of our gardens. The result is a narrow palette of plants rather than a richer community of plants that belong on the site. Deer pressure is real—I know it too well—but the answer cannot be to give up on ephemerals or young trees and shrubs, and everything else deer eat (which, honestly, is everything eventually—the overpopulation means they are constantly starving). If you can't build an exclusion fence around your property, try fencing individual plants, especially until trees and shrubs get tall enough that they can resist browsing. I have had good luck using motion-activated sprinklers such as the Orbit Yard Enforcer to protect vulnerable areas during the growing season. It is not perfect, and you will occasionally get sprayed, but it lets you plant for biodiversity rather than surrendering to deer.
One more thing. I mentioned looking to plant communities for a cue, but unless you are building a restoration, you probably want to increase natural density rather than reproduce it exactly. In a garden, dense planting can help crowd out invasive weeds. That means planting more closely than usual to create a green mulch—the new term for groundcovers, which always sounded to me like a cheap rug—that gives invasives fewer chances to get established. Of course, that means still more plants. To me, at least, that is an opportunity.
Finally, growing your own is a fabulous alternative to buying plants. We have lots of resources on how to do that in our Wednesday Webinar series.
Enjoy planting season—and don’t be afraid to bring home a few more plants than you planned.
Happy gardening,
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.
President, the Native Plant Society of New Jersey