Native Plants: Place, Perception
Plant Guides, Choice, and How People Actually Learn
Mike Berst
This discussion grew out of repeated real-world conversations about native plants, especially in nursery settings.
Most existing plant guides fall into two categories: academic or institutional guides (rigorous, precise, and often inaccessible), and commercial or nursery guides (accessible, simplified, and oriented toward purchase and success). Both tend to narrow thinking. Both exclude people in different ways. Both often collapse complexity into bottom-line guidance. Our goal is different. We are not trying to tell people what to buy, we are not trying to optimize outcomes, and we are not trying to simplify ecology into rules. We are trying to help people orient themselves to place.
Here is a representative conversation. At a nursery, two women were choosing between Liatris scariosa, Liatris squarrosa, and Liatris pycnostachya. They asked, “Which one should we plant? They’re all native, aren’t they?” I said, “They’re all wonderful plants, and it probably wouldn’t do any harm to plant any of them.” Then I stopped talking.
Where do you draw the line?
After a pause, one of them said: “But…?” That pause seemed important. It created space for curiosity to surface rather than being pushed. I then explained my understanding that, historically, Liatris scariosa is native to northwest lower Michigan, while the other two species are native hundreds of miles to the south and west. L. scariosa has become hard to find here in the wild, and it represents a long lineage of adaptation to local conditions. Local insects and birds have co-evolved with it.
The next questions were, “Does it really matter?” and “Where do you draw the line?” To “does it matter?” my answer is: it’s complicated. We don’t have all the answers, and we are learning all the time. Species diverged long ago for reasons tied to place, and what survives here carries historical and ecological meaning. To “where do you draw the line?” my answer is: I draw it as tightly as I can. I acknowledge uncertainty. I acknowledge we are in an emergency situation. And I acknowledge that many people will not take this approach. The result was simple. They said, “Oh — that’s fun and interesting.” They developed a relationship with that species. They adopted a new conceptual framework for their work.
People have since described conversations like these as “life changing,” “transformational,” or “the whole world looks different to me now.”
This directly contradicts the idea that people don’t want to learn, people are too busy, or people don’t want bad news. Those statements may be true for large donors or transactional audiences. They are not true for people who are invited into understanding rather than rushed to action. The core principle is this: we answer the immediate question honestly, then use it to open a wider view. We are not strict or inflexible. Rather, we are attentive and always learning. Our goal is not to narrow choices, but to help people see what their choices involve.
The Inherited Gardening Paradigm
The inherited gardening paradigm is simple and deeply ingrained. Identify attractive plants, acquire them, arrange them aesthetically, and maintain the composition. This is fundamentally a design exercise. Plants are treated as interchangeable elements whose primary job is visual performance.
Much of the “plant native” movement has simply plugged native plants into this same paradigm. Exotic ornamentals are replaced with native ornamentals. Lawn replacements are replaced with native ground covers. Pollinator plants are replaced with native pollinator plants. The underlying mental model remains unchanged. Once that paradigm is accepted, several things follow almost automatically. Success is judged visually, not relationally. Survivability is mistaken for belonging. Assemblages are curated rather than discovered. History becomes irrelevant. Place is treated as a backdrop, not a driver. Within this framework, it makes sense to say things like “goldenrod is good,” “milkweed is good,” or “blazing star is good.” The plant remains the unit of meaning, not the landscape.
The approach we are developing does not refine this paradigm — it refuses it. The goal is not arrangement or decoration. The goal is not even planting, though planting may occur. The goal is understanding what a place is already expressing — historically, ecologically, and relationally. Native plants, in this view, are not decorative solutions to be arranged. They are historical participants in specific places.
“I do not yet know why plants come out of the land or float in streams, or creep on rocks or roll from the sea. I am entranced by the mystery of them and absorbed by their variety and kinds. Everywhere, they are visible yet everywhere occult.”
— Liberty Hyde Bailey
Bridging the Gap Between Gardens and Intact Landscapes
Here is the challenge as we see it. Gardeners and the nursery trade work largely with cultivars and with alien plants. These plants are typically showier, larger, more robust, and more resistant to insect predation. They are intentionally selected and bred for those traits. Native plants cannot compete with that. Trying to “plug in” native plants to replace exotic species within a conventional garden design framework will never work. I learned that the hard way. That framework rewards spectacle, control, predictability, and the visual performance of individual plants.
Cultivars and alien ornamentals dominate because they are products of exaggeration. They are selected for size, color, and uniformity; bred to minimize insect interaction; and optimized to perform as isolated specimens. Native plants often cannot compete in that contest. When natives are inserted into this same paradigm, they are often judged as too subtle, too messy, too slow, or too affected by insects. That is not a failure of native plants. It is a failure of the framework they are being forced into.
At the same time, the few relatively intact areas in the state that I have visited — places like Dowagiac Woods, Aman Park, and Beaver Basin — are more beautiful than any formal garden. These places are few and far between, but they demonstrate something important. They are beautiful not because individual plants are showier, someone curated combinations, insects were excluded, or growth was controlled. They are beautiful because relationships dominate over individuals, abundance replaces spectacle, structure replaces arrangement, and time replaces design. This kind of beauty is emergent, not imposed.
The wild places we value are not aspirational gardens. They are proof of concept.
The real gap we are trying to bridge is not exotic versus native, cultivar versus straight species, or gardener versus ecologist. The gap is between two aesthetic languages: beauty created through control, and beauty created through relationship. Most people have been trained to recognize the first. Very few have been taught how to see the second, although most people are aware of and appreciate the beauty of wild places. Replacing exotic plants with native plants inside the same garden logic preserves the consumer mindset, the emphasis on individual specimens, and expectations of performance and permanence. As a result, native plants are judged unfairly and predictably disappoint. The bridge is not better plants. The bridge is retraining our perceptions.
People need help learning to notice density instead of specimen form, repetition instead of focal points, seasonal progression instead of peak bloom, insect presence as vitality rather than damage, and absence as information rather than failure. That kind of learning does not come from catalogs, plant tags, or design advice. It comes from orientation — from seeing differently. The SBTH grounds are not positioned to compete with nurseries or to win a garden beauty contest. They is positioned to explain why that contest exists, show what it excludes, introduce people to another way of seeing, and help them cross the perceptual gap gradually. The wild places we value are not aspirational gardens. They are proof of concept. The challenge is to help people recognize that they may be judging beauty using the wrong criteria for living systems. That is the bridge we are trying to build.
"One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly with the novice."
— Liberty Hyde Bailey
Living With the Tension
The tension between gardening expectations and ecological reality is ongoing. Both our yard and the Habitat Discovery Center grounds would be described as a “mess” right now if they were evaluated as gardens. There is very little that reads as intentional design. There is irregularity, uneven growth, gaps, and visible disturbance. That can be uncomfortable — even for people who understand what we are trying to do. At the same time, this is where some of the most interesting learning happens. One of the most revealing experiences is watching native plants appear on their own — species that were dormant, absent, or overlooked for years, now emerging without being planted or curated. Those events challenge the idea that we are “creating” something. They suggest instead that we are removing obstacles and allowing processes to reassert themselves. This reinforces the difference between arranging plants and creating conditions.
There is no clean resolution here. The work requires living with uncertainty, with messiness, and with outcomes that do not immediately read as success.
There is a lot to think about.
Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954) was an American horticulturist, botanist, and educator born in Michigan. He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College—now Michigan State University—the pioneering institution that became the model for the United States land-grant university system. Bailey later helped shape modern horticulture and agricultural education through his teaching and writing.