By Teri Silver

Fall is a good time for planting flowers and greenery because native perennials develop stronger root structures as the weather gets colder. Fortunately, Kentucky is home to many native trees, flowers, herbs, and grasses, that you can add to your garden in the fall. There’s nothing like enjoying nature in the bluegrass state.

When choosing native plants for your landscape or garden, implement integrated pest management strategies to keep your yard and garden from being chewed up by bugs. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is an eco-friendly approach to preventing pests in the garden with as little pesticide as possible.  

Kentucky’s native plants include trees, shrubs, and groundcovers, but native perennial flowers do more to add color to your homestead. Here are a few to consider when planting this fall. The following natives, planted in fall, are a great way to add specific colors and more natives to your flower beds.   

By Julian Campbell

Conservation is a primary interest of KNPS, as stated in the mission statement and elsewhere, but what are its precise goals for “education, preservation, and protection of Kentucky’s native plants and ecological systems”? Are we just going to accept goals developed by government, or will we seek a more cooperative discussion? Without clear goals, how can we assess progress?

Natural Heritage Programs were developed for each state government about 50 years ago through partnerships with The Nature Conservancy. There is a need to revive this system through stronger grass-roots interactions, inviting all people committed to our native flora and fauna. There is now greater potential for more effective flow of new information through networks of observers. The NHP (as managed by Nature Preserves in Kentucky) was initially envisaged as an integrated system of databases, linking records at whole site level (prioritized lands and waters for conservation), habitat level (including degraded types for restoration), and species level (especially those rare natives deserving recovery). There was also an elaborate system for maintaining stewardship records, but never widely adopted. Priorities for action have become relatively clear at site and species levels in most of our 120 counties. However, the habitat level generally needs a lot more work to define types in an understandable manner, to design restoration of degraded types, and to keep track of progress.

KNPS could become the botanical glue that builds (or mends) the network we need in Kentucky. It is particularly important to seek more interaction among the few scattered professional botanists, restorationists and horticulturalists interested in promoting natives. There has not been enough bonding between such varied groups of ‘plants-people’ in the state. It is of course difficult for KNPS to work across the whole state, but we could start at more amenable regional or local scales.