Why you should add native plants to your garden
Amid climate change and a biodiversity crisis, gardeners are bringing native plants back to their yards.
The suburban yard of Drake White’s San Antonio home doesn’t have what most yards have—grass. Instead, there are violet pillars of bluebonnets, pillowy white flowers blooming on jimsonweed, and delicate red blooms dotting a sprawling Texas betony.
“I started with an old sandbox and turned that into a little garden. And very quickly it just took off,” says White. “It went from creating a pollinator space to a whole ecosystem.”
That ecosystem has hosted a pair of great horned owls living in a live oak tree, monarchs stopping for milkweed nectar on their thousand-mile migrations, and a variety of songbirds that make White’s yard sound as wild as it looks. Her urban oasis exists thanks to native plants—flowers,
