© 2024
Local NPR for the Cape, Coast & Islands 90.1 91.1 94.3
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Native Plants for New England Gardens

Viet Vang / unsplash

Mid-March is when many in southern New England would usually get their gardens started. With the weather we’ve been having, that may seem a distant dream right now. That just leaves us extra time for planning.

A new book has plenty of ideas about how – and why – to incorporate native plants into our landscapes. It’s called Native Plants for New England Gardensand the co-author is Dan Jaffe, propagator and stock bed grower at the New England Wildflower Society's Garden in the Woods.

Jaffe tells Living Lab Radio that one of the best reasons for planting native plants is that they survive without a lot of care.

“Any of that weird stuff that New England has a way of throwing at us tends to be something that they’ve dealt with before, so they tend to be a lot lower maintenance,” he said.

From the interview, here are a few trees that Jaffe loves:

  • Sourwood: glossy leaves, late summer flower.
  • Tulip tree: fast-growing, great for pollinators. Gets big.
  • Red maple, sugar maple, and yellow birch for fall color.

Stay Connected
Elsa Partan is a producer and newscaster with CAI. She first came to the station in 2002 as an intern and fell in love with radio. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. From 2006 to 2009, she covered the state of Wyoming for the NPR member station Wyoming Public Media in Laramie. She was a newspaper reporter at The Mashpee Enterprise from 2010 to 2013. She lives in Falmouth with her husband and two daughters.