Bring California's natural beauty and benefits to your doorstep. By choosing native plants, you're saving precious resources, supporting wildlife, and creating a beautiful California landscape.
Why garden with native plants?
A native garden gives back
Benefits to you, the gardener
Gardening with native plants is a fun and direct way to connect with nature while you support the life around you. Enjoy exercise and fresh air as you surround yourself with the pleasures of a California native garden.
Experience natural beauty every day
Notice not only flowers but leaf colors, bark textures, sculptural qualities, berries, and nuts of native plants. Marvel as plants grow from seed to maturity. See how they change through the seasons. Enjoy the wildlife around you, like giant bumblebees and hummingbirds zooming from their nests to the flowers.
Avoid harmful chemicals and extra maintenance
Local natives are already well-adapted to your local soil and climate conditions and are likely to thrive in your garden without soil amendments and fertilizers. Native plants slowly get needed minerals from soil, and roots of natives have symbiotic relationships with soil fungi (mycorrhizae) to exchange sugars for soil minerals. In fact, too much nitrogen can harm native plants!
Grow your sense of place
Gardening with local native plants creates an opportunity to "restore" the natural habitat of your area. These are the plants most genetically similar to the plants you might see on nearby trails or conservation areas you enjoy.