Native Gardening In The South: The Joy of Gardening with Indigenous Plants in the Southeastern U.S.

They say “Third time’s a charm”, and I do hope that is the case with this third edition of Native Gardening in the South. So many new discoveries and game-changing events have occurred since this book first came out in 1992, and I really felt compelled to produce a 3rd Edition based on this fact alone. I also wanted to do a more thorough job of presenting the information. I’m not exactly sure of the number of plant species treated in this edition, but I’d guess it’s somewhere north of 500 -- substantially more than the 1st Edition’s 160. In fact, every part of this 3rd Edition has been heavily beefed up. Here we are 19 years after the publication of the 2nd Edition of this book, and so much has changed in such a short time. Foremost has been the resurgence of interest in gardening with indigenous plants, wrought almost single-handedly by University of Delaware entomology professor Doug Tallamy and the publication of his two native-gardening-based books, Bringing Nature Home (2007) followed by Nature’s Best Hope (2020). Both of these books were based on experimental results that revealed the tight mutual connections and survival strategies existing between native plants and wildlife – both of which are presently declining as humanity continues to look after its own interests. So, Doug and his students are now proving what longtime native plant and wildlife advocates have been speculating for many years prior. This speculation about the importance of native plants began in the southeastern U.S. with Caroline Dormon and Elizabeth Lawrence in the early twentieth century, and continued on in drips and drabs into the beginning of the twenty-first century. In my own life, this constitutes the Third Wave of native gardening interest here in eastern North America. And now with the aid of the digital revolution and social media, certainly the biggest wave. Today, people are actually planting wild plants all over the place, as opposed to merely appreciating them and learning about them in their wild habitats, and merely looking on from the sidelines at the tiny percentage of those who were growing, designing, and planting wild plants. Today, it looks like we’ve finally got some traction. View Less