Find Your Virginia Plant Community, Part 2!
Hopefully you now have a slightly better understanding of what a Virginia Native Plant Community is, and have started identifying some of your native plants in your local natural areas. (If not, be sure to start back with Part 1.)
(You can also find a video presentation recording that includes this information here.)
DCR Publication (I do not own this publication!)
If the link is not working, try searching for the title, as it is periodically updated.
Now, you are going to take that list of native plants that you’ve found, and open up the Natural Communities of Virginia publication (pictured above) we mentioned last week. We’re going to do a search. Choose a plant that seemed to be fairly common. For example, here in Virginia Beach, there is a ton of Quercus virginiana, Live Oak (also our City Tree), which I know from Flora of Virginia, is native here. Use CTRL + F (FIND) on your keyboard to pull up the “Find” box on the pdf (or you should be able to find it under the “Edit” tab). Type in your plant name and see if it finds anything for you. If not, try the next one on your list, and so on, until hopefully you’ve managed to at least find 1 or 2 (bonus if multiple plants from your list show up in the same community - that could be it!).
(Search Results)
Quercus virginiana comes up in 3 communities, all Maritime, which makes sense, because here in Tidewater, we are surrounded by water! Once you’ve chosen a possible community to explore, click on the Community title (ex. the blue text “Maritime Dune Scrub), read through the description, and click on the “Click here for more photos” to see whether it seems like a good match to your local communities. These below communities definitely look familiar to me, and for some of my clients that have a sandy coastal backyard, it makes sense that these could be a match of a good plant community for their property.
Be sure to also look at the map and see if there are representative areas near you. There are red dots all over Virginia Beach and the VA Eastern Shore right around me, so again, it’s looking like a good match.
My next step is to click the blue text “Download a spreadsheet of compositional summary statistics.”
This part can get a little tricky if you’re not super familiar with scientific names or what plants nurseries near you might carry, but you may be able to either find online or ask smaller local nurseries for lists of their inventory (I know many of ours have them available either on their website, or by request), or go there and ask. An extension agent or Master Gardener may also be able to give you an idea of the items that are easier to find.
I like to go the “Spreadsheet of Compositional Summary Statistics” and highlight the plants that I know I can potentially find available for sale (there is a lot of information on these sheets, and while I couldn’t begin to explain what it all means to you, I do know that generally, the higher these numbers, and the higher the plant is on the list, the more of that plant there were documented in that particular community location).
My next step is to take that list of plants and organize and review them to decide what I might use for my designed native plant community. Here they are, sorted out into trees, shrubs, vines, grasses and herbaceous perennials.
Maritime Dune Grassland Plant Palette
And make my final decisions on what to include, so it might look something like this (at a small client site, there may only be room for 1 large tree, a few shrubs, and a small palette of grasses and flowering perennials, but you can make this as robust as you like! Obviously, the more diversity, the closer the plant community is to a true native plant community, but that aesthetic can sometimes be difficult to maintain in a home garden):
Final Plant Community Palette
In the next blog, we will talk about how to take the plants you’ve selected for your native plant community, and put them into a cohesive design for your landscape!
