The question comes up on almost every planting consultation: this all sounds great, but where do you actually get these plants? The big-box garden centers mostly can’t help you, which is why it keeps coming up. Their racks are stocked for national demand, which means the same petunias in Chattanooga as in Ohio, and the “native” section, when there’s one, is often a shelf of cultivars bred for looks rather than the species our insects and birds actually use.
Here’s where native plants actually come from around here.
Reflection Riding
The arboretum at the foot of Lookout Mountain runs a native plant nursery, and it’s the first stop we send people to. The stock is grown for this region, the staff know what they’re selling, and the plant sales are worth planning around. You’re also supporting the organization doing more than anyone locally to keep native landscapes on the map.
Wild Ones, Tennessee Valley chapter
Not a nursery, a community. The local chapter of this national native plant organization runs plant sales and swaps, and the members collectively know more about what thrives in Chattanooga conditions than any label will tell you. If you’re the kind of gardener who wants to learn the plants rather than just install them, this is your crowd.
Regional native growers
A handful of specialty growers in the region supply the natives that never reach retail shelves, including Overhill Gardens and Tennessee Naturescapes. Some sell primarily to the trade, some have retail days or take orders. Their stock is the real thing: straight species and regional ecotypes rather than patented cultivars.
Mail order for the hard-to-find
When a design calls for something no one within a hundred miles grows, mail order fills the gap. Izel Native Plants aggregates regional growers and ships plugs. Prairie Moon covers seed and bare root. Plugs and bare-root plants look humble next to a nursery three-gallon pot, but planted in fall they catch up fast, and the cost difference lets you plant densely, which is how ground actually gets covered.
What to look for wherever you shop
Learn to read the tag. A straight species will be listed with its botanical name, like Itea virginica. A cultivar adds a trade name in quotes after it. Cultivars aren’t villains, some perform beautifully, but heavily bred ones can lose the traits that make natives worth planting: the nectar, the berries, the leaf chemistry the insects need. When in doubt, closer to the species is the safer bet.
Timing matters as much as sourcing. Fall is Chattanooga’s best planting window, and it’s also when native nurseries run their big sales. Plan the shopping trip for September or October and you hit both.
Or let the sourcing be our problem
Part of what you hire a design-build company for is that the plant list stops being your scavenger hunt. We design around what can actually be sourced, we order ahead for projects so the plants are staged when the crew is, and when a design calls for that one specific climbing rose or a hundred plugs of a sedge nobody stocks, tracking it down is our job, not yours.
If you’d rather do the planting yourself, go with the sources above and go in fall. And if you’d rather point at a drawing and have it appear in your yard, that’s what we do all day.
Ready to put a plan behind the plant shopping? Schedule a design consultation here.
Written by the team at Monolith Landscape Design, Chattanooga TN. Residential landscape design, design-build, planting, hardscape, and irrigation across Chattanooga, Signal Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Hixson, Ooltewah, East Brainerd, Red Bank, and East Ridge.