I feel like me, you are attracted to the idea of a thriving native garden and you're just a little curious on maybe what the most popular ones are in your area or just some easy ones to start out with.

Well, this is the episode for you. We have Mary Phillips back on the show. She's the head of Garden for Wildlife at the National Wildlife Federation.

And as we've mentioned a few times, there is a fantastic website with a bunch of resources, but since they run the website, they know what everyone searches for the most and they can kind of put together.

It sounds like Mary a list of some of the most desired and most searched plants.

Yes, absolutely. Yes, we have two ways of looking at that. We have our native plant finder, which is nwf.org slash native plant finder and then also Garden for Wildlife dot com where we're actually providing native plants for people to start kind of DIY gardens with between the two of those and I'll start first the native plant finder.

We have started that in 2016. We have hundreds of thousands of people visiting that site. It's just amazing. And when we run the list to look at most popular sunflowers are often number one followed by milkweed as well as aster's and also wild geranium.

Those would be kind of the top four that we see looked for the most and then interestingly enough golden rod because more and more people realize what a powerful plant golden rod is for wildlife that has been kind of inching up in the numbers so to speak.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I think for me, like coming from the edibles world, I'm getting of course into ornamentals and flowers, some native some not and now trying to get more into natives every time it seems like you go into different category.

The overwhelm can hit you and you're like, oh man, like I don't know any of these names. I don't recognize any of these plants like these don't make any sense to me. So having that that resource I think is super helpful.

So one of the reasons people have been looking at these plants is their ability to support specific numbers of wildlife. So we mentioned the milkweed. It obviously supports monarchs, but it also supports hundreds of other types of butterflies mods and eventually also birds. So that's just an example of how we're really showing that connection between the plant and the wildlife.

Yeah, I'm certainly interested in the native plants from the plants level and how the plants and ecosystems interact, but I think it's almost like the the dessert is having the having the wildlife come back.

And honestly, if you guys are interested in figuring out what all the things that come into your garden are, I can recommend the I naturalist app is really good for that.

And I believe you can actually collect on that too. I have this thing about like collecting the things I see. I don't know why it's attracted to me. And then that Merlin bird app from Cornell.

Yeah, that's awesome. But I naturalist I think is pretty much everything plant and animal. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Any any like I know that we just went over the native popular ones, but are there any ones that you think are underserved for? Like, why is that so low? That should be a little bit higher.

Yeah, I think some of the ones that are underserved are those that people do kind of think of, oh gosh, when I was growing up, that was a weed. And they don't realize that they're still beautiful.

And so things in kind of the carrot family. And it's there are native like so I'll give you an example. It's called golden Alexandra. And it is in the carrot family, but it's a native plant and it actually supports swallow tail butterflies.

And also a number of other types of, you know, different wildlife. So it's really it's really those are like kind of the ones that people just don't know about, you know, and I think that's what we're trying to do is educate them on kind of these unique.

Beautiful plants that they don't really know it kind of looks a little bit like a golden queen and lace if you think of that way.

Yeah, I've noticed that it seems like most of the plants in the carrot family, swallow tails, like to send a degree, right? Exactly. Yeah. And this is, but this is native. A lot of, you know, the carrots aren't always they're actually not native.

Right. Right. The native way to get the small tails into your garden. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. Well, tomorrow guys, we're talking about the sort of them higher level impact, I suppose, of native gardens at scale. I know that.

When we talk about lawns on this podcast, we talk about gardens. I like to talk about the impact of individuals scaled across large spaces, you know, and like each of us in our own backyards doing something for for ourselves, but also for for the planet. So stay tuned. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.

Port of mouth is our absolute best friend here at Epic Gardening. So if there's someone that you know that you think might enjoy this podcast, go ahead and share it with them. And if you don't mind, go ahead and rate and review the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening to the podcast, it really helps more than you think. Thank you so much. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.

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