The climate‐smart gardening database: Native and near‐native garden plants for the northeastern United States

Gardeners and landscapers seeking to select native plants that will support ecosystems and wildlife are challenged by both the lack of availability of many native species as well as the lack of standardized information about suitable native plants. Adding to these challenges is the rapid pace of climate change, which influences which plants are likely to persist in any given location.

To address these problems, we created state lists of commercially available, climate persistent native and near‐native plants in one or more of 15 states in the northeastern region of the United States. To generate a list of native and near‐native species, we surveyed 339 nursery inventories in the region to identify native plants available commercially. We supplemented this with species recorded as commercially available in the Ecoregional Revegetation Application (ERA) tool across our states of interest.

We appended preferred growth conditions (hardiness zones, light, moisture, soil type, and propagation methods), aesthetic traits (growth habit, bloom period, colour, interest of foliage, showiness, height and if it acts aggressively in gardens) and ecological benefits (documented benefit to birds/mammals/insects/reptiles/amphibians, and pollinators hosted) of each species from horticultural resources. We defined species as native to a state if it is documented as growing without human intervention in that state. We defined a species as near‐native to a state if it was not native to that given state but was native to an adjacent state with a shared level III ecoregion.

To identify climate‐smart species, we compared each species' hardiness zone range to the current (2023) and projected mid‐century (2040–2069) hardiness zones represented in each state under RCP 8.5. Climate‐smart species are those which could persist under current and future hardiness zones in a given state. The resulting dataset includes 855 unique species. The number of climate‐smart native and near‐native species within each list ranges from 539 (Rhode Island) to 729 species (Pennsylvania).

Practical implication : These lists can be used by home gardeners, landscape professionals, nursery managers and ecologists to further support climate resiliency through the native plant industry in the region.