The Midwest Native Plant Primer

Bring your garden to life—and life to your garden! Do you want a garden that makes a real difference? Choose plants native to our Midwest region. The rewards will benefit you, your yard, and the environment—from reducing maintenance tasks to attracting earth-friendly pollinators such as native birds, butterflies, and bees. Native plant expert Alan Branhagen makes adding these superstar plants easier than ever before, with proven advice that every home gardener can follow. This incomparable sourcebook includes 225 recommended native ferns, grasses, wildflowers, perennials, vines, shrubs, and trees. It’s everything you need to know to create a beautiful and beneficial garden. This must-have handbook is for gardeners in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Bring your garden to life—and life to your garden Do you want a garden that makes a real difference? Choose plants native to our Northeast region. The rewards will benefit you, your yard, and the environment—from reducing maintenance tasks to attracting earth-friendly pollinators such as native birds, butterflies, and bees. Native plant expert Uli Lorimer of the Native Plant Trust makes adding these superstar plants easier than ever before, with proven advice that every home gardener can follow. This incomparable sourcebook includes 235 recommended native trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, wildflowers, grasses, sedges, and annuals. It’s everything you need to know to create a beautiful and beneficial garden. This must-have handbook is for gardeners in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Simple question-and-answer format explains methods of planning, preparation and planting native plants and wildflowers that thrive naturally in the Lower Midwest and require less watering and preserve the ecosystem. 64 photos, 125 illustrations. 336 p.

This new and updated edition of Landscaping with Native Plants of Minnesota combines the practicality of a field guide with all the basic information homeowners need to create an effective landscape design. The plant profiles section includes comprehensive descriptions of approximately 150 flowers, trees, shrubs, vines, evergreens, grasses, and ferns that grew in Minnesota before European settlement, as well as complete information on planting, maintenance, and landscape uses for each plant. The book also includes complete information on how to garden successfully in Minnesota’s harsh climate and how to install and maintain an attractive, low-maintenance home landscape suitable for any lifestyle.

It’s a rare midwesterner who doesn’t grow something, whether potted plants on a porch, caged tomato vines, a blooming border, or a solitary rose. And it’s an even rarer midwestern gardener who isn’t sometimes flummoxed by extremes of weather, pesky insects and persistent diseases, or simple questions about what to plant where. For nearly four decades, Jan Riggenbach has given these gardeners answers, as well as a weekly dose of gentle humor and wise counsel, in her widely syndicated newspaper column, Midwest Gardening. Your Midwest Garden draws on these columns to offer readers in America’s heartland all the gardening information they want and need, along with plenty they might not even suspect they’re missing. Annuals and perennials, shrubs and vines, fruits and vegetables, wildflowers, bulbs, and herbs: As readable as it is useful, this book reviews the familiar, reconsiders old favorites, and introduces dozens of surprising and seldom-grown plants ideal for Midwest gardens and landscapes. Illustrated with color photos from the author’s garden, it provides tips on plant placement and care, starting seeds and making compost, matching specimens and sites, combating insects and diseases, simplifying garden chores, designing for winter beauty, and myriad other ways of enriching and enjoying your Midwest garden.

In today’s South, where fine gardening is a tradition, many homeowners and professional gardeners are discovering a vast “new” palette of plant materials—native plants. They are realizing that these native wildflowers, trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines, and grasses are far better suited, and therefore easier to grow and maintain, than most of the imported plants that populate traditional landscapes. In this book, the authors offer an exciting vision of the many possibilities and advantages of “going native.” Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 gorgeous color photographs, this book is both an introduction to more than 200 of the most familiar and easiest-to-find native plants of the South and a basic primer on how to use them effectively.

Native Plants of the Midwest, by regional plant expert Alan Branhagan, features the best native plants in the heartland and offers clear and concise guidance on how to use them in the garden. Plant profiles for more than 500 species of trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, ground covers, bulbs, and annuals contain the common and botanical names, growing information, tips on using the plant in a landscape, and advice on related plants. You’ll learn how to select the right plant and how to design with native plants. Helpful lists of plants for specific purposes are shared throughout. This comprehensive book is for native plant enthusiasts and home gardeners in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, northern Arkansas, and eastern Kansas.