u/FranticHare

Here’s a photo of a wildflower, growing on some skinny little island the Atlantic’s been gnawing at for years and hasn’t finished off yet. The petals were so easy to miss I’d have walked right past it if the color hadn’t stopped me. Plant identification is not my forte. I am still puzzling over why a flower that’s supposed to be pink looked blue that morning. Could be I got it wrong to begin with. Or maybe it was only borrowing its color off the ocean.

(Southern beeblossom, Oenothera simulans)

This was the year I took against butterfly weed, that darling of every native plant catalog, on no better grounds than that it looked like a bedazzled poodle yapping in the flower bed. Nobody likes poodles. I want to be clear that I did not hate the plant. It only felt like hating while it was happening. It was fatigue, plain and simple. Butterfly weed had gone the way certain hymns go when they are sung too often at too many funerals. It had stopped being a plant and become a decal on a Subaru, put there by people who wanted the neighbors to know they were the right sort. I no longer saw the plant. I saw the bumper sticker.

I had raised many seedlings of the stuff from seed and gave every one away. But I still had the mature plants, well rooted and unashamed, blooming square across from the hanging chair where I liked to sit in the evening and stew. I would sit there and look at those orange clusters with a feeling that did not belong in a garden. Even the bees, I noticed with some satisfaction, gave them only the laziest attention, which I considered a point in my favor.

Several times I set out to dig them up and was turned back, as if the yard itself had opinions on the matter. It was too hot, or too wet, or my hori-hori knife had wandered off to wherever tools go when they don’t want to do the job, or the damn crows sat overhead hollering that I ought to be feeding them instead of fooling with weeds. Once I got my nerve up all the way and marched out there with intent, only to discover that a fox had taken my garden bed for his personal privy and left the evidence of it directly in my path. I retreated. The butterfly weed stood its ground, unmurdered, and I was certain it smirked.

The heat climbed and the orange wizened, and the flowers gave way to pods shaped like okra. Soon milkweed bugs covered the pods tight and blazing, and I remembered the jolt of the first time I ever came upon them years back. The orange and black stripes writhing together made the pod into a little world. It was an encounter with hidden space, which I would have sworn a second before was not there. A gate swung open, and what stood on the other side of it was myself as a grubby child, back when looking at a thing was all I wanted from it, before I’d been taught to explain a thing to death, or nail down whose it was, or figure what it was good for, or grade it against some other pointless things. For a second I could not find the edges of myself, and time layered itself upside down, blending and dispersing the old plain wonder that had been long gone. The dealings between the plant and the insects continued to breathe, ticking out something like time in their small soundless motions, and through that crack I watched the place where the vividness of life had gone, close enough to want back, too far to reach.

This summer I did not rip out the butterfly weed. The seed pods split opened last night, revealing its original ferocity. The noise fell away, the bumper stickers vanished, the online discourse disappeared, and I was just left with the quiet physics of a seed catching the wind.

The Virginia Creeper in my backyard behaves itself. It goes up the shed like a well-raised child in the Boy Scouts, never once threatening to litter the yard, and for years I mistook this good behavior for the whole truth of the plant. I had heard it called a thug by people who ought to know, and I felt a little cheated in the way you feel cheated by a dog too lazy to bite anyone.

Then I saw its cousins on the Outer Banks, and I understood what I had been keeping in my backyard was a house pet.

That day the needlelike highway near Oregon Inlet was impassable due to the flood from the previous week. The coastal plants, however, remained unfazed by the deluge. Wax myrtle, sea oats, marsh elder, all stood tall, and around them slithered Virginia Creeper. Out there the vine had no shed, no shade, nothing to lean on but naked sand. It flattened itself into a mat wide as a parking lot and held the dune together by sheer force and cackled at thunderstorms. There was nothing decorative about it. It did not care to be admired. It simply wanted to glide on.

I have never had an inclination for treating native plants like a gardening catalog or a suburban sanctuary project. Ecotype purism, “Tallamy said,” cheerful blossoms, pollinator postcards, cherry-picked narratives. The whole native plant movement started sounding like a TV church and I don’t want churches in my life. I want the brute, indifferent machinery of nature, the terrifying, gorgeous appetite of an ecosystem that doesn't care about us at all, yet somehow mirrors the exact ache of being alive.

I tried to say this to someone once. He said the vine was just a weed on a beach and walked away to take pictures of the sunset. I did not argue, and kept on looking at this glorious creeper that marched across the rolling dunes with fifes and drums, completely rewriting the rules of what a living thing needed to do to thrive.

My agenda that day was to get to one of those little humps of tidal marsh that don’t trouble the mapmakers enough to earn a name. I hired a local kid, the kind who has spent more of his life balanced on water than planted on land, and who looks at a grown woman wanting to see a marsh island the way you’d look at a seagull that had asked to be shown the landfill. The kid spoke with a brogue accent passed down by his grandfather, who was a bit of a character. The first thing the old man would inform tourists was that he didn’t do “emails.” He wanted cash, counted into his hand. He saw no reason a computer ought to be involved in getting a person from one island to another. I liked him for it. I imagine some would find the whole arrangement problematic — no confirmation email, no card reader, no Yelp reviews, nothing but a man’s word and a boy’s hands on the wheel. Those visitors probably went off in search of some other outfit that would treat them better. That suited me fine. It meant the boat was ours alone that evening, with no Yankees aboard to fill up the air with the sound of their own incessant talking. There were only the quiet boy, and the motor.

“Take me to one of those weird little floating salad bowls covered with pelicans.”
“Oh yeah. I know where.”

And off we went into the sound at a homicidal speed. No life vest, no seatbelt. Between me and Providence was a crude storage box I was straddling, both hands clamped to the edge of it so as not to be pitched into the water like an unwanted fish. “You should stand on it,” the boy said, not even troubling to look at me. I could not tell if he meant it or if he was simply curious what a woman my age would look like falling into brackish water at that speed. “You can see better standing up.” See what? I did not ask, because a marsh island had emerged and already answered for itself, unleashing a black, screeching cloud of seabirds that came at us like every ugly thing in the world had been let out at once.

And that is the violence of tidal marshes. The cordgrass and the salt hay and that mean black needlerush make more life than the world knows what to do with, pumping it out steady and obstinate against the tumultuous waves as an ornery grandmother snapping peas she didn’t even want. Then the tide comes through, tearing up chunks of that black peat and root and rot, and hauls it all out through the inlets.

Out on the water, them ragged mats of marsh trash carry on floating like they think they’re fancy islands. They gather up all sorts of small marine things until they’re a dinner table set for anybody hungry enough to land on it. The birds come down worn out from flying, glad of a filthy raft to rest their bones on and ride wherever the current’s fixed to take them. It’s a tight little arrangement. The land feeds the sea, and the sea turns around and feeds it back up to the sky.

I ache to be caught up in such a loop myself, one that doesn’t waste a thing and doesn’t forgive a thing either. But I have gotten this business of living turned around backwards, watching the wholeness continue without me, chasing waterbirds that belong to nature’s arrangement in a way I never will, and there’s no tide coming to scour me out of this dreadful exile.

The orange sun began to dip. The pelicans settled and detached their eyes from the boat. There was no man-made sound around us, only the water working at itself and the marsh grass talking low in the wind, and I could not bear the cruelty. It was a terrible thing, to be caught up like that in the grip of a marsh too indifferent to know it had ahold of me at all, driving me toward such madness of longing.

“Ready to go?” the kid asked, and without waiting on my answer he turned the boat, this time so much more gently.

(Ocracoke Inlet, NC)

Beach croton (Croton punctatus) is one of those plants that feels like it was designed by a quiet islander who really understood the ocean.

The leaves wear a coat of silvery hair, and it isn’t there for beauty though a fool might mistake it for such. It is armor, plain and mean, turning back a sun hot enough to blister the arrogance out of me. The salt wind comes off the water, and the croton just stands there and takes it.

The roots go down deep and wide, gripping sand that can’t make up its mind to settle. Beach Croton is the first thing brave or ignorant enough to set up residence in that shifting waste, and it holds the ground together, so that lesser plants can come along later and take the credit.

It is native to North Carolina, but don’t mistake that for hospitality. It’s got requirements. Sun, sand, salt. It will not compromise on a single one of them. It has made itself a kingdom out of conditions that would kill off anything with less conviction, and it wears that silver hide like it’s daring the whole coastline to say something about it.

I don’t stumble on a plant like that every day. I earned it by walking, walking, and I walked away a little changed, and perhaps a little ashamed of every soft green thing i ever thought was tough.

(Ocracoke Island, NC)

Four years back I took up photographing brown pelicans, though the first picture I made wasn’t much to speak of — two dark lumps in the sky that might have passed for birds to a person willing to believe anything.

I wait the better part of a year for the one month on the coast to be near those ancient creatures, and I have learned there is no such thing as a wasted frame when the waiting is that long. A man does not get many chances to catch the world’s hinge swinging open. This pelican, frozen at the bottom of its dive like something flung down out of judgment, is the closest I have come, and I am shamelessly proud of it.

In 2025, coastal bird populations globally faced severe pressures from avian flu outbreaks. Brown pelicans, however, have proven to be indestructible again.

Spartina alterniflora

Providing vital shelter for marsh birds in Pamlico Sound, NC

Kosteletzkya pentacarpos

Indian blanket, largeleaf pennywort, smooth cordgrass, withstanding the brackish water.

Seaside goldenrod and sea oats

I saw a junk bug wearing a backpack of what used to be my mountain mint, dressed for success, obviously, and pleased about it. Its business this morning was aphid hunting, on the leaves of young cardinal flower that’s been refusing to grow up.
The photo is blurry, of course. A native gardener’s camera comes pre-equipped with a film of dirt across the lens, the result of many afternoons spent kneeling in places a camera has no business being. This is simply understood among us.

This is my very first Ironweed flower. I had stayed clear of ironweed altogether up until this spring, having convinced myself I didn’t have the right soil for it. The seedling had come to me by accident, hidden in the pot of some other plant I had bought for entirely different reasons, and it took many weeks before I understood what I was looking at was some sort of Vernonia.

The soil is still sorry dirt as far as I’m concerned, but the roots go on and find what they need regardless of my opinion of it, same as everybody’s always told me they would. I could be a right stubborn Doubting Thomas about such matters, wanting my hand in the wound before I’d call it a wound, but there have been more than a few plants now that have gone and overthrown the doubt I’d held against them. And I am learning, slow as anything, to read what the plant itself is telling me instead of the little tag some stranger stuck in the dirt beside it.

Brood X in 2021 allegedly caused significant damage to many trees in the region, and our neighborhood became a target for a predatory tree butcher trawling for work. I sent him away the first time. He came back and capitalized on my husband’s anxiety by implying that our ancient plum trees were doomed. The tree man’s name doesn’t matter. Call him Doofus, because that’s what he was, though at the time my husband took him for a kind of prophet. Nobody is perfect.

Doof eventually cut one of the plum trees down, claiming it was dying. To this day I’m convinced the removal was unnecessary. Doof insisted on taking the second plum too but I said no. He thought I was nuts. That was in 2022. The surviving plum is doing fine, except it no longer bears edible fruits now that it has lost its compatible pollinizer.

The incident stayed with me. It is difficult to watch a widowed tree. Every spring it blooms beautifully and sets fruit that was never truly fertilized. The tiny, hard plums drop almost immediately and roll across the ground like green olives. The tree is trying, oh it is trying, but unable to finish what it used to do so effortlessly. I don’t miss eating the plums all that much. Insects usually got to them before I could anyway. What I miss is the yearly ritual.

I’d nearly made peace with the loss, reading into the tree my own sense of fading relevance that comes with age.

Then, someone informed me that what I have here is a native tree: Prunus americana. Well, I thought, that is something. The tree is old and ragged and none of us knows how much longer it intends to go on. I remember Doof smugly saying “plum trees don’t live very long, ma’am.” He also said the tree wasn’t doing much anymore, and that it was untidy, which it is. It is gloriously, unrepentantly untidy, sending up gangly suckers. An eyesore, said he. I told him I prized the eyesore, and, with unnecessary theatricality, I patted the trunk that was thick and gray and scaly and throwing the kind of shade that tree frogs and common violets go looking for on purpose. Doof never spoke of the tree again. A man like that doesn’t return to a thing once he’s said his piece over it and been proven a fool.

Learning that this chaotic tree is a native species pulled me out of the stupor. Now I want it to complete its life cycle as intended. I have become more protective. Not out of duty, but out of pure curiosity. This messy thing has been doing something specific to this exact place for a very long time, and that exquisite specificity is what bewitches me.
I think I will plant a Chickasaw beside it. My health is failing and I may not be around to witness what the old tree makes of the new company, but I have come to understand that life was never about gratification, nor did it belong to me personally. I am merely a tiny cog in the vast botanical universe. And that realization has been quietly liberating. As I fade into the difficult chapter that is the end of life, a chapter whose details I happen to know so intimately, it comforts me to think that there was a tree whose life kept opening outward, and I once belonged to that unfolding.

I have two water features in my backyard. I’d neglected them for years, and the water was always murky. This year I introduced carex, juncus, and pickerelweed, and the water cleared almost instantly. I was astonished.

The thing is, the frogs and tadpoles didn’t seem to care either way. They come regardless. I do remember seeing them when my yard had zero native plants and was covered with the terrible invasives the previous homeowner planted. Yes, I started noticing a diverse assortment of creatures, but I suspect that’s because I’ve become an observant gardener, not because I conjured them into existence.

The distinction matters to me. Native gardening discourse is full of a certain kind of story. Someone rips out their lawn, plants “local ecotypes,” and suddenly frames themselves as having brought back the ecosystem, as if the frogs and fireflies were waiting for permission to exist. It’s a small-scale version of a much older narrative, the idea that land is broken until the right person arrives to fix it. That story shows up in conservation writing, in voluntourism, in the language of discovery. It’s rarely questioned because it flatters the person telling it.

I notice this framing because I don’t experience the world the way the people telling these stories usually do. As a person of color, I’m used to watching certain narratives get treated as neutral or universal when they’re really coming from a specific (and specifically privileged) vantage point. When I push back on the savior story, I’ve had it dismissed as me just being contrarian. That reaction is familiar to me. It turns a critique rooted in how I actually move through the world into a personality quirk, which is a convenient way to avoid sitting with the point.

Those creatures were always here. They didn’t appear because I “built a habitat.” My garden is merely an extension of the local environment, not a stage for my personal victory. I’m not giving nature a home that wasn’t already here. I refuse to forget that my lifestyle will always contribute to the environmental destruction, and it is important for me to remember not to get sucked into the fairy tale.

As for the reason why I bother planting natives? It’s because the traits of native plants are far more fascinating than those of dahlias and azaleas. That’s all.

Maybe it is a less satisfying story than the one where I saved something. But it matters to me.

Every year, my neighborhood’s pesticide frenzy takes its toll on my garden visitors, amphibians especially. They do recover eventually, but their absence in between is hard to sit with.

This morning, a toad came waddling through the little makeshift swamp I’d built. I burst into tears. I lost someone dear to me last year. Grief has made me porous. I cry at anything that moves me, which lately turns out to be a lot of things.

The seedbox flower was watching. “Catch my vanishing act,” it seemed to say. By sunset, it was gone.

This tree in the front yard died a few years ago and we had it cut down. We haven’t gotten around to remove the stump. I kind of like this stump.
My husband hasn’t fully embraced the idea of native plant gardening, and the front yard still remains 100% lawn. He is, however, attached to this tree stump like a child would, and he takes pictures of things that grow on it.
I mentioned to him that we could surround his beloved stump with plants to build a native garden, although I have no idea how. He is intrigued. This is an opportunity to convert the lawn into something wilder. I just don’t know what and how to plant around it without looking silly. The diameter of the stump is roughly 3 feet.
If you have creative ideas, please share. I am not into using cute stuff like bird baths, container pots, or figurines. I also dislike gardens that look like collections of showy flowers, if you know what I mean.
The yard is facing south, gets brutally hot in the afternoon without a sliver of shade. Humid. Clay soil. Northern Virginia.
Thank you in advance.

Carex lurida and juncus tenuis in rain

Gemini says it's just a phase... this year I fell out of love with shouty native flowers. Is this something native plant gardeners go through from time to time? I may or may not have been tempted to rip out the poster children to make room for grass and sedge.