Native Plants for a Gulf Coast Yard

The single most effective conservation action available to a homeowner on this coast is choosing what to plant. It costs no more than the alternative and the difference shows up within a season.

Why native matters more than it sounds

Most people assume any flowering plant feeds pollinators and any berry feeds birds. Mostly untrue.

Native insects are frequently specialists. They evolved alongside particular plants and can only feed on those plants or close relatives. A garden of introduced ornamentals can be full of flowers and support almost no insect life.

This matters for birds because nearly all songbirds feed their nestlings insects rather than seeds or berries. A single clutch of chickadees requires several thousand caterpillars. Those caterpillars come from native plants or they don't exist.

The chain is short: no native plants, no caterpillars, no nesting birds. A yard can be green, tidy and biologically empty.

What to plant here

Trees. Live oak, southern magnolia, red maple, bald cypress in wet ground, longleaf pine where there's room. Oaks support more insect species than any other tree genus in North America by a wide margin — if you plant one thing, plant an oak.

Understory trees. Eastern redbud, flowering dogwood, American holly, yaupon holly, southern wax myrtle.

Shrubs. American beautyberry — heavy purple fruit in autumn that birds strip quickly. Native azaleas. Virginia sweetspire. Buttonbush in wet spots.

Perennials. Black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower, blazing star, goldenrod, native asters, coreopsis. Milkweed for monarchs, and specifically native milkweed rather than the tropical species sold widely, which can disrupt migration timing.

Grasses. Muhly grass, little bluestem, switchgrass. Structure through winter and seed for sparrows.

What to remove

Chinese privet. The most damaging invasive in coastal Alabama woodland. If you have it, it is producing berries that birds are carrying into every patch of woods nearby, including this preserve.

Chinese tallow, or popcorn tree. Attractive autumn colour, aggressive spread, colonises wetland margins.

Nandina, or heavenly bamboo. Widely sold, invasive here, and the berries contain cyanogenic compounds that have been implicated in bird deaths where large quantities are eaten.

Cogongrass, if you find it. Federally listed as a noxious weed.

Practical approach

Replace gradually. You don't need to redo a garden at once. Replace each plant that dies with a native one and the composition shifts within a few years.

Start with the biggest thing. One native canopy tree does more than a bed of native perennials.

Layer it. Canopy, understory, shrub, ground. Structural variety supports more species than any single layer, however well planted.

Leave some mess. Leaf litter is where many insects overwinter. A yard raked completely bare each autumn removes next year's insect population, and with it next year's birds.

Leave dead wood where it isn't a hazard. Standing dead trees house woodpeckers, owls and bats.

Reduce lawn. Turf grass is the largest irrigated crop in the country and supports almost nothing.

About the water, too

Native plants have deeper root systems than turf and ornamentals. That means better infiltration, less runoff, less irrigation and no fertiliser requirement.

On a shoreline watershed, that connects directly to water quality in the bay. What doesn't run off your property doesn't arrive downstream.

Where to get them

Native plant nurseries and native plant society sales are the reliable sources — general nurseries stock what sells, which is not the same list.

Do not dig plants from the wild, including from preserves. It removes them from where they were working and they usually die anyway.