Desire and Dollars. Native Plant Trends are Nothing New

Where I grew up, we revered our native plants. We grew them for beauty, fascination, food, and shade, knowing that our plants captured the imagination of the rest of the world. 

Our native plants appear in literature, paintings, movies, and even comic books. Native plants of the Deep South have inspired emotion and provided nursery income for centuries—they even played pivotal roles in the country's founding.

Recently, a young horticulturist said to me,

 "Y’all (meaning older horticulturists)focused on pretty flowers and pretty gardens. It’s time to think about plants that do more. Time to give native plants an important place in the nursery industry and in home landscapes.”

That sort of got my dander up because it's flat-out wrong and more than a little dismissive of my career. Most importantly, it fails to advance her passion for changing the garden industry and for promoting plants that stir her passion.

But I didn’t say a word at that moment. I mulled it over, trying to come up with a clear and helpful response. My first thought was that native plants are iconic here and always have been. But was I right about that, or was it just a feeling?

That evening, I did a little poll on Facebook to get a sense of what others think of as iconic plants of the Deep South. I wanted to know if people thought as I did - that native plants are and always have been iconic and filled nurseries in the Deep South. I asked folks to write one sentence describing the picture that comes to mind. That was it— my request wasn’t leading in any way. Wow— People loved this. Within two hours, 168 people responded. Nine out of 10 listed a native plant. (Actually, it was 8.2 out of 10.)

The winner was exactly what I imagined it would be.  

The Clear Winner: A Tree

Actually, the most described scene included two native plants that often live together: live oaks with Spanish moss hanging on the limbs.

Coming in at a close second is the stately Southern Magnolia, with its fragrant architectural flowers. This massive tree inspires awe all over the world, which means a lot of nurseries make money growing it. Every design job I do, the client begs for a magnolia. Plenty of nurseries and breeders make a living as they develop new, smaller cultivars that even urban folks can grow. There’s also an industry supplying the floral trade with leaves, flowers, and even magnolia cones. 

Then cypress trees came in third. Cypress seems to convey a sort of dark romance, bringing up images of swamps and rivers. They, too, are grown around the world. They’re amazing urban tolerant trees, a handsome and tidy favorite for gardens. It is probably the most adaptable, beautiful tree for streets and landscapes of all sizes. Cypress is extremely wind tolerant - always left standing after a hurricane. In Asia, nurseries produce them by the tens of thousands to be planted for erosion control. There’s a lot of money for modern nurseries growing cypress trees— and even more for cypress lumber.

Smaller trees, dogwood trees, redbuds, red cedar, and American and yaupon holly all inspire desire—and plenty of nursery dollars, too. 

One small tree made the father of American botany plenty of money. John Bartrum supported his Philadelphia nursery by collecting and selling pounds of seeds of the cherished evergreen Carolina cherry laurel. 

Plenty of spectacular shrubs like Carolina allspice and purple beautyberry inspire desire, too. We can’t leave out dwarf yaupon holly, of which millions are sold every year. 

Renowned Vines 

The State flower of South Carolina, Carolina jessamine, is cherished all over the world. Its wafting, clean fragrance contains the same chemical compound used in many storied perfumes like Coco by Chanel. The vine itself has charmed for centuries. The oldest selection that I know, ‘Pride of Augusta’, was made in the late 1800s by Fruitland Nursery (now The Augusta National). People have been making money with this adored vine since at least the 1750s—that’s when George Washington’s gardener first planted it at Mount Vernon.

There’s cross vine, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle, clematis, climbing hydrangea (Decumaria), and Virginia creeper.

Everybody wants our state flowers, Carolina Jessamine. Here plants are sold in a nursery in Florence, Italy.

The Native Palmetto & The American Revolution

Every fourth grader who takes South Carolina history class knows this story about our most famous native palm. Palmettos played a pivotal role in the revolution, almost as important as tea in Boston. Palmettos helped save Fort Moultrie and prevented the British from taking over Charleston harbor. There’s something about that story that inspires children. If you don’t remember anything else, you remember that British ships shot cannonballs into the fort, expecting the wood to shatter – as wood does. But the fort walls were made with sand and palmetto logs, which are not wood at all but spongy logs of super-strong fibers. Cannonballs lodged. The palmetto, our state tree, sold in nurseries across the world today, saved the Revolution.

There is a reason the South Carolina state flag has honored a native plant - since 1765.

Favorite Flowers

One of the most famous perennials in the world is a Carolina native. When I mentioned this to a friend she rolled her eyes and said that’s an anomaly. 

In a conversation about desire and dollars, anomalies count. In fact, that native with a sexy reputation should be the dream goal. If I could create the desire and the same decades-long sales dollars for my obsession, Crinum americanum, I wouldn’t be working so hard to pay my bills today. Marketing means money and that singular native perennial has enduring appeal.

Have y’all guessed the plant yet? Hold on. First, here is a list of native perennials cherished and sold in nurseries everywhere: Black-eyed Susan, creeping, garden and woodland phlox, coneflower, Christmas fern, maidenhair fern, iris, asters, and Solomon's seal and spiderwort. A few of our perennials, like vanilla leaf, even became important economic crops at a time with Southerners were extremely poor.

Of economically important perennials, the odd native sphagnum moss may not be famous as a plant itself, but it has been a staple of gardening—even the lesser-quality sphagnum of the Deep South. My family actually mined sphagnum in South Carolina and went bankrupt selling it as garden amendments! Here’s a link to my story about Southern peat bogs.

The most famous perennial of all, though, grows in sphagnum-based soils. Have you already figured it out? Sexy, so desired, so many plants sold, it’s even illegally harvested. Think of a native perennial that, through comic book ads and movies like The Little Shop of Horrors, makes children around the world drool. Though it has an exotic name, it’s native: 

Venus fly trap plants occur in the wild only in parts of North and South Carolina, and Florida.

Timber and Farming. Industrialized Native Plants

I almost left commercial crops out of this discussion. But why? We want them and need them, and specialty nurseries that produce plants only for farms make lots of money growing domesticated native plants. It’s not new.

Sir Francis Drake used a promo spin on plants here to entice Queen Elizabeth and other investors to fund his voyages and establish the Roanoke Colony in the 1570s. He touted plants like live oak, muscadines, and sassafras, which became a famed cure-all tea. 

Pecans, made into pies, are iconic in their own right. Blueberries, of course, make plenty of money, as do pawpaws, elderberries, and persimmons.

My Aunt Martha Bryan Farmer’s career was working in and breeding for a pine nursery for the 25 billion dollar company Weyerhaeuser. Native pine trees make lumber, diapers, toilet paper, and Amazon boxes—forestry nurseries that grow pines employ horticulturists.

In 2011, a factory opened in Georgia to take advantage of a native tree that many Southerners despise – the sweetgum tree. This young entrepreneur realized that in China, a moratorium on wild tree cutting would create a chopstick shortage. Today, native sweetgum is sold to China in the form of chopsticks – 10 million per day. 

Nurseries grow all of the plants needed for these industries. Most folks never see a timber nursery. But in South Carolina, hundreds of thousands of native plants are grown, and some are shipped out to a value of 21 billion dollars a year. These may not be sexy plants that inspire desire, but they feed a lot of families. 

Native trees and shrubs have been critical to the cash flow of nurseries since the 1700s.

Building On Native Plant History

Remember the young woman's comment? Those words that “got my dander up?” I held my tongue because I felt excluded and forgotten personally. But mostly because I want a renewed passion for native plants to thrive. I’m thrilled that a cause I’ve advanced for decades has a whole new, more passionate, more resourceful audience like this young horticulturist.

I’ve been a young person. I get it. She made a generalization based on a lack of understanding of history. Or maybe she grew up in a region that unlike the South, native plants were not so revered.

But throughout our country, native plants have been revered for a long time. In her words, native plants that “do more” were key to George Washington, who planted the first native American garden. He wanted beautiful, native plants that did a lot more— for him, they made a political statement of liberty and freedom from old-world styles. He and others put great hope in the commercial potential of native plants and gardens.

My enthusiasm for native plants never waned. Last Sunday, in fact, I planted a lawn of native frog fruit—millions of home gardeners and professionals have loved and made a living from natives. Just because some of us appreciate plants from around the world that do important things for us, like making food, fiber, and flowers, doesn’t diminish our love of any one type of plant.

Building on history makes for a stronger argument, a stronger plea, and a more inclusive movement.

We are all part of an unfolding story of bringing native plants into gardens and into the spotlight. Young horticulturists tromping through the wild today, looking for more special native plants, have totally changed the nursery palette. People active with technology and social media have changed popular desire and discussion.

Keep on, y’all. Push the envelope of native plants. Pushing the envelope is easier and more effective when you understand how it was made. Envelopes, by the way, are made from pulp, made from pines, an iconic, native tree that’s been a critical part of our gardens and income for centuries.

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Join a select crew of professionals and enthusiasts for a full day of discussions on such issues. We have about 15 seats left. Order tickets here. This event will take place on our organically managed farm and nursery in Beech Island, SC.