Native plants, state by state.

How these guides are put together

A plant is offered for a state only when two things are true at once: the state falls inside one of the regions that species is genuinely native to, and the state's hardiness zones overlap the range the species can survive. Both come from the plant database behind this site, and neither is inferred from the other. That pairing is what keeps a Gulf Coast species out of a Minnesota list and a boreal species out of a Texas one.

Region and zone together are a coarse filter, though, and they are honest about being coarse. They will tell you that a species belongs somewhere in your state. They will not tell you whether it belongs on your slope, in your soil, or in your county, and in states that span several ecoregions, that gap is wide. Every state guide says where the internal lines fall and what changes across them.

Why the state list is short

This site used to publish a page for every combination of state and plant goal. It was a bad idea carried out efficiently: the pages were assembled rather than written, and a reader arriving at one learned very little that a reader in the next state over would not have read in nearly the same words.

Those pages are gone. What replaces them is slower: a written guide per state, researched and sourced. That is why the list below fills in a few states at a time rather than arriving complete. A state appears here when its guide has been written. If it is not on the list yet, it has not been written yet, and we would rather say so than publish a placeholder.

Checking a plant against your own ground

Two habits will serve you better than any national list, this one included.

Visit a remnant. State nature preserves, prairie remnants, and natural areas are reference libraries for what actually grows in your conditions, and most states maintain them within driving distance of their population centers.

Ask locally before you buy. State native plant societies run chapters that know their counties, hold plant sales stocked with locally-adapted material, and can tell you when a species that is technically native to your state is native to a part of it three hundred miles away.

Sources

Native status and range are checked against the USDA PLANTS Database and the Biota of North America Program's county-level atlas. Hardiness zones follow the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Ecoregion descriptions follow the EPA's Level III ecoregion framework. State-specific claims in each guide carry their own sources at the foot of that guide.