A few years ago, Maya Cipri brought home a school project about monarch butterflies.
The 9-year-old Ellettsville student spent part of first grade intrigued by a classic school project on monarch butterflies.
“We got to have real life caterpillars in our classroom, and we got to watch them grow every day, and then on the last day of school, we let them go,” she said.
The project sparked a fascination with pollinators.
Soon, Maya and her family began planting milkweed and other native species around their property.
What started as a small pollinator garden quickly changed how they thought about landscaping.
“When you support the plants that feed the insects that feed the birds, it's like a domino effect, and then you can’t stop thinking about it,” said Maya’s mother, Corinna Cosentino.
Cosentino said transitioning to native plants has been a learning process.
“There are some non-native species that are too precious to give up in their garden,” she said. “I have my grandmother's peonies that I don't want to ditch, so it's a hard transition, but there's so many people, especially in Bloomington, that are knowledgeable and willing to help.”
The family's native plant gardens are only a few years old.
A few miles away, another gardener has spent decades building a landscape around native plants.
“It's just an absolute joy for me to come out to this garden and weed a little bit and just enjoy the flowers, all the pollinators that are coming and using them,” said Ellen Jacquart, a member of the Indiana Native Plant Society.
Jacquart has been experimenting with native species around her home for 35 years.
She said those plants don't just attract wildlife, they can also solve practical problems.
A dry creek bed next to her house once washed away part of a concrete patio after a heavy rain.
“This is a river after a big rain, and you can see we had a huge rain where this was a river last week, and it hasn't dislodged anything,” she said. “The roots of these plants really do the work of holding the soil in place.”
Supporters say native plants provide food and habitat for wildlife in ways many ornamental species cannot.
“The importance of native plants in native gardens is not just to have the flowers that bloom easily or the easy growth patterns or those things, but it's also to be able to provide an environment for insects, for birds, for other wildlife,” said William Cowan, president of the South Central Chapter of the Indiana Native Plant Society.
One of the biggest beneficiaries are birds.
“Over 96 percent of our birds eat caterpillars or use caterpillars for baby bird food,” said Bill Daniels, a volunteer co-leader of Sycamore Land Trust’s native plant nursery.
Those caterpillars depend on native plants.
And more Hoosiers appear to be taking notice.
At Sycamore Land Trust's native plant nursery, volunteers spend much of the year growing plants from seed.
The nursery recently sold roughly 4,500 plants during its annual sale.
“A lot of people are also noticing if they just have a gardening hobby, that native plants actually are easier to grow in your garden, just because evolutionarily they've grown here,” said Ben Sebastian, a land steward with Sycamore Land Trust.
The nursery has become a gathering place for people interested in conservation and gardening.
“The community-based aspect of the nursery, that's probably my favorite part, having a space like this for people to come and just be able to talk about plants,” Sebastian said.
Interest in native plants has grown dramatically over the last decade.
“When I first started with Purdue Extension a little over 10 years ago, native gardens were more of a special interest,” said Karen Mitchell, Purdue University's consumer horticulture extension specialist. “It was sometimes difficult to even find the native species that you would want.”
Now, even big box stores are selling native plants.
Mitchell said the shift is driven by a growing awareness of how individual yards affect the larger environment.
“The grass was a lot more straightforward, but people now, I think, are willing to take those risks and want to see more insects, and don't want to have to spray herbicides multiple times a year to maintain that perfect lawn,” she said.
For family gardeners, that awareness has changed how they look at the landscape around them.
“In just two years that we've focused on native plants, we certainly don't have exclusively native plants, but the amount of bird species has doubled,” Cosentino said.
And Maya hopes more people will follow suit.
“People could start getting more into planting native plants so then it helps our world and helps our ecosystems just thrive and grow,” she said.
