Well come back everyone to the epic gardening podcast. You know we've talked about native

plants a bit here on the show as well as like what you know what even qualifies as a native

plant. We have Ari Novi back on the show he's the president and CEO of the San Diego Botanic

Garden and I have to imagine that you guys do work and catalog quite a bit of San Diego

natives. We have one of the more biodiverse regions out there. Yeah we love the San Diego

and regional native flora. Your right San Diego has the most plants of any county in

the whole country with about 2000 plant species but we do we do it all though. We certainly

focus on our local flora because we're the ones where the Botanic Gardens here we have

that you know that knowledge and experience but we also love growing plants from around

the world you know provided that they're not invasive you know and also that they're appropriate

for our climate and so we do focus a lot on the five Mediterranean regions of the world

of which southern California is one because those are you know plants that are going to grow

pretty well in our garden but we love the native plants and we like to encourage people

you know who want to to work with native materials in their home landscapes as well because

it can be very rewarding. Yeah yeah that's something we had a guest on a little bit ago talking

about natives and I have this curb strip in front of my house which is actually quite large it's

like eight feet wide by 70 feet or something absurd like that there's the only thing left there

is one palm tree that I don't think I can reasonably remove so my idea is to do that whole curb

strip with with natives and I guess I'm curious like there are some obvious benefits to natives but

if you wouldn't mind kind of sharing some of those for people who are getting interested in this

yeah definitely so you know native is a you know I think it's important to acknowledge that it's

a human term right I mean plants don't think of themselves as native or non-native but you know

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