With the plight of the pollinators becoming ever more urgent, the University of Maryland has partnered to reinvigorate the state’s native landscape through the development of a new Native Plants Program, the first cooperative Extension program of its kind.
Designed to assist homeowners, landscapers, and other industry professionals, the program aims to educate Marylanders on the important role of native plants in the environment while offering practical tools to implement native landscaping across the state.
“Every plant species has a unique chemistry, a unique nutritional profile. The local insects have co-evolved with the local flora, and they have evolved for thousands of years to utilize the native plants,” said Lisa Kuder, the new native plant specialist for the University of Maryland Extension (UME) program.
“And research has shown that some of our native insects use only a small selection of plants, which we refer to as keystone species. If you’re interested in helping pollinators, you can’t separate them from the plants—it’s a system.”
With the advent of initiatives like No Mow May (in which homeowners forgo mowing their lawns for a month to provide habitat for pollinators) and the USDA’s Leave the Leaves! (which encourages people to let fallen leaves lie rather than rake them), Marylanders are becoming more aware of the need for natural spaces and breeding habitat for insects. “We’re shifting,” said Kuder. “People are more open to adding more species to their lawns to create biodiversity.”
Research indicates that a yard with at least 70% native vegetation can support a robust and healthy food web, Kuder says. The new program—a partnership between the Maryland Department of Agriculture (MDA), the Maryland Native Plant Society, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and UME encourages the incorporation of native biodiversity using those keystone species to support healthy insect populations.
Native landscaping isn’t just good for the environment, it can also be more economical, said Kuder.
“Once native vegetation is established, it generally requires less care—certainly a lot less care than lawns. And when you have a healthy balance, you need fewer chemicals, fewer inputs—including time for things like weeding.”
In its first year of development, Kuder is assessing the available resources and creating tools that will serve to guide Marylanders in the adoption of native landscaping. Currently, a new commercial plant list has been vetted by experts and released with over 600 native species approved for planting that meet grower requirements and ease of propagation.
The list serves as a foundation for building an online database through a partnership with the UMD iConsultancy program. The database will allow users to filter by plant types, like flowers, shrubs, or trees, as well as by color or other characteristics. Once complete, it will then be expanded to provide homeowners with design suggestions for particular projects, such as a rain garden.
Complementary to the online tools, Kuder is also working with experts in the field to produce native plant guidebooks for each of Maryland’s ecoregions— the mountain, Piedmont, and coastal plains regions—that will include educational articles, in-depth information on native plants accompanied by high resolution photos for identification, suggestions for dealing with difficult areas like slopes or gullies, as well as alternatives for non-native ornamentals.
The guidebooks, once complete, will be available in print and online. “Native plants are gorgeous and they look beautiful in residential and commercial landscapes,” Kuder said. “We want the guidebooks to serve as inspiration in designing these spaces.”
In the future, Kuder would like to work more closely with developers to increase the use of natives around new construction areas and help homeowners rethink their personal green space. “When you drive through new neighborhoods, the palette is limited to only about two dozen species, and most of those are non-natives. We have an opportunity here to change that and make native plants the norm,” said Kuder. “This is one of those areas where it seems like the decisions are small, but those small decisions— those are the ones that can really make the biggest impact.”
Learn more, including the release information for the new guidebooks at: go.umd.edu/MDNATIVE
by Laura Wormuth
