Plants for your Nature Inspired Garden: How to Find

Today, I will show you how to identify plants for your nature inspired garden.

Last post, I showed you how to use Land Cover Viewer to find out the name of the types of natural areas near you. We will take that information and use it to find plants for your landscape.

We will do this with another website, Nature Serve Explorer.

Nature Serve Explorer

Nature Serve Explorer’s website tagline bills it as an Online Encyclopedia of Life. It claims to be an “authoritative source for information on more than 70,000 plants, animals, and ecosystems of the United States and Canada.”

It is located at explorer.natureserve.org

We will be using this website to do three things.

1. Find the Natural area we found last time and it’s more specific plant associations.
2. Select a plant association that closely matches the natural area we are drawing inspiration from.
3. Get a list of plants that we can use in our nature inspired landscape.

Find our Natural Area

There are some pretty detailed instructions to use this, so again I have put the instructions on how to use it in video form. You can enlarge the screen by clicking the Full Screen button in the bottom right of the video. Here it is:

Selecting Plants for Your Nature Inspired Garden

This last video shows how to select the plant association to use. It also shows how to find plants that make up the plant association and how to use it to select plants for your Nature Inspired garden.

Hopefully you found these videos helpful.

You now have a method to identify a natural area and find many of the different plants that are found in it. Using this information you can create a plant list to include in your nature inspired garden.