Mother Earth’s Garden

Naturalizing with Native Plants

by linette on July 24th, 2008

My favorite garden is actually not really a garden at all. It’s a small patch on the hillside above my house. I planted several varieties of plants and flowers there several years ago, then I’ve just sat back and watched it grow.

Sure I’ve done a little weeding. But I selected the plants for my hillside garden by looking for hardy plants that would come back year after year without any extra help from me. I also tried to find varieties that would expand and fill in, without taking over the entire garden.

It was a bit of trial and error the first couple years, but I thought I’d share the plants that naturalized the best, with little fuss, and that were not too aggressive in my zone 5 hillside garden.

I’m also going to share with you some photos and plants that others have had success with in gardens and prairies in the midwest. I’ll share photos of the complete gardens today, and in the upcoming days, I’ll talk about some of the individual plants that have worked the best to populate these natural gardens.

As I complete the information on the individual plants, I’ll come back here and link them to this post. When I’m all done I should have a good resource of carefree, mostly native, plants for naturalizing.

If you have any information to share on what plants work great in your area for prairies, and native gardens please feel free to share.

Native Garden Images (c) L Gerlach all rights reserved

Share This

Related Stories

• Gardening Around Ponds Part 2
• Native Plants For Your Woodland Garden
• Growing Coneflowers to Naturalize and Beautify
• Grow Green Gardens and Lawns, Not Green Streams and Rivers
• My Garden Zone

POSTED IN: Garden Planning, Naturalizing, eco-friendly gardening