subject: Landscaping With Native Plants [print this page] Palm trees don't do well in northern Minnesota. It's not that palm trees are particularly delicate, but they are tropical plants. When they are growing under the right conditions, they're pretty hardy, as a matter of fact; but you still wouldn't daydream about your ideal North Country home and picture palm fronds fluttering in the mid-winter breeze.
Palm trees are perfect for Palm Beach landscaping, however. Dozens of species of palms thrive in the warm, humid tropical zone of Southern Florida, along with a vast variety of flowers, fruits, and trees. In fact, Palm Beach gardeners have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting what they want in their gardens.
Planting native is important to your gardening success. When you want your lawn, garden, and yard to reflect your personal aesthetic without also requiring a huge investment in time, finding and planting your favorites among those plants that grow naturally in your area is the solution. You'll do less maintenance and save money when you look carefully at what is happy to grow in your space.
It does take a bit of reeducation to look at gardening and landscaping only with native plants. Usually, we browse in nurseries and garden shops and select what we like. When we take those plants home, we are forced to conform to soil and watering needs for that plant in order to help it thrive. That's why gardening has gained a reputation as being time-consuming and difficult. If you're doing it backwards, you're bound to become a slave to your plants. If you love the work, then you're not going to care. But if you want to enjoy beautiful landscaping without devoting hours every day, begin to research what's growing wildly around you. Sometimes what we think of as weeds (because they're so adapted they grow prolifically) can actually become an integral part of our design.
In a Palm Beach landscaping design, you can rely on hundreds of lush, colorful plants that bloom and flourish abundantly. But a gardener in the dry West can't plant the same things and expect them to be happy. Where a person living in New Mexico might have to indulge his passion for orchids by growing them indoors, the Florida homeowner can look forward to seeing them outside the window. Cacti that love the dry, scorching heat of deserts and are not the same kind that prosper in wetter areas.
Wherever you live, take some time to learn to love the beauty offered by native plants. Your garden will require less maintenance but still provide months of visual satisfaction.
