Go native and watch your garden grow

Go native this gardening season. Plant what grows naturally in our part of Virginia: beautiful old faithfuls like willow oaks, sweetbay magnolia, witch hazel and Jack in the pulpit.

By choosing trees, shrubs, perennials, grasses, vines and ferns that have thrived here near the coast for hundreds of years, you'll embrace our climate and soil rather than fight it. You may even have fewer gardening failures, and you'll certainly do local wildlife a favor by providing their preferred seeds and berries.

When they visit nurseries, customers often don't realize they have a choice of plants native to Virginia.

Mike Bender, trees and shrubs manager at McDonald Garden Center in Virginia Beach, has a long list of favorites and good reasons for chatting them up to local gardeners.

"Native trees are set for our environment," he said. "People run into problems when they bring in things like palm trees. You can get them to work, but you have to wrap them and do all kinds of special things."

Instead of a tree from elsewhere, he suggested, try something like the white-blooming fringe tree - also called the "old man's beard."

"One of the nice things about it is it stays under 20 feet, so you don't have to worry about it going into power lines," Bender said. "Another one is a sweet bay magnolia. It's a small tree and could be considered an alternative to a dogwood. It's hardier than dogwood, and dogwood is an understory tree. You cannot put a dogwood in full sun.

"Also, sweet bay magnolia has seedpods that provide food for birds. And the bald cypress is a native tree that can work in wet or dry climates. If you have a wet spot in your yard, bald cypress is the name of the game."

Darren Loomis - though he claims he's not a gardener - regularly champions native trees and other plants. He is Southeast Virginia Natural Areas Steward for the Natural Heritage Program, part of the state's Department of Conservation and Recreation.

The role of the Natural Heritage Program, he said, is to preserve the best of the habitats still left in Virginia for rare, threatened or endangered species and conserve the state's biodiversity through inventory, protection and stewardship.

Home gardeners may think they have no role in this. But they do. They can help by making thoughtful nursery purchases.

Planting native plants, Loomis said, keeps gardeners from choosing species from elsewhere - so-called aliens - that could become invasive in the natural landscape.

He and his like-minded colleagues regularly battle invasives, including phragmites or non native reeds, Japanese honeysuckle, Chinese privet and the infamous kudzu vine.

Once invasive plants are in the ground, birds broaden the problem.

"Birds are a big vector for native and non native plants," Loomis said, "because they eat and spread the seeds around."

He'd rather birds' choices were limited to plants that don't turn into headaches. Take the native hawthorne in his own front yard: Every year birds pick it clean of seeds, and then do a good deed by spreading a native into the environment.

Nearly a dozen different native oaks, too, he said, produce animal food.

And, Loomis said, there are aesthetic advantages to going native.

"If people would plant more native trees in their yard - things like redbud that flower for three weeks - they'd be choosing beautiful natives," he said. "Instead, people plant Bradford pears that flower for three days, and that's it."

One non native shrub that illustrates the problem that a "stranger" in the environment can have is the red tip, or photinia. About 25 years ago, municipalities and home gardeners planted the shiny-leafed shrub throughout Hampton Roads. Within a few growing seasons, black spot on mature red tips was rampant, often killing entire stands of the shrub.

"People brought it up from southern part of the United States," Bender said, "but in our environment it was sus ceptible to a virus."

A good alternative to photinia and igustrum is bayberry, or wax myrtle. It can be grown as a tree or shrub, is evergreen, works in wet to dry conditions, is fragrant and has berries for wildlife. Serviceberry is another good shrub. It comes in a tree form also, said Bender, and has berries.

"And here's one that you don't want to forget - the yaupon holly - ilex vomitoria," he said. "It's a native American holly." Plant both a male and a female plant to have red berries.

Mary Lou Osterhous, the nursery manager at Winesett Nursery in Virginia Beach, praised several native shrubs: beautyberry for its deep purple berries and buttonbush with its unusual flower - a round, creamy, yellowy-green shaped like a soft gumball.

She also likes Virginia sweetspire, or Itea virginica.

"That's a real good plant," she said. "It has a really pretty white spring flower and is very tolerant of poor soil. It grows in heavy, heavy clay. It can take dry, but it does have to have some moisture. But if it's wet clay, it doesn't care. "

She's also a fan of shade-loving Leucothoe, an evergreen shrub with attractive leaves and red/burgundy fall and winter color. It flowers white in spring and stays under 3 feet tall with a potential 5-foot spread.

When Osterhous thinks of native perennials, the first one that comes to mind is Joe Pye weed.

"It's a beautiful plant," she said. "It has a really pretty flower and is very easy to grow. It will take dry and wet circumstances, you can prune it to keep it down lower if it gets too big."

Shorter varieties of this perennial, a favorite of moths and butterflies, also are available.

Osterhous also likes Rudbeckia, or black-eyed Susan, a prolific bloomer with bright yellow flowers.

Native plant or not, the most important thing is learning what a plant's requirements are, Osterhous said. Some non natives do thrive in Hampton Roads if given the proper microclimate. But before trying to grow any plant, she said, first restructure the soil of a bed.

"People think backwards," she said. "They think of what they want instead of what the plant needs. That's where they run into problems. No matter how much you want a rose to bloom in shade, it's not going to do it."

Krys Stefansky, (757) 446-2043, krys.stefansky@pilotonline.com