Authored by: Anna Fialkoff
Choosing native plants for your landscape can be a fun and creative process. When you consider plants in simple groupings, or guilds, it becomes a lot easier to design a landscape with appealing texture, color and wildlife value throughout the seasons. Native plant guilds draw on inspiration from natural plant communities in habitats like coastal plains, forests, wetlands, meadows, shrublands or mountain tops. Focusing on companionship, seasonality, layering, behavior and environmental considerations of native species can help demystify the process of selecting the right native plant species for ecological design in your own yard, park, community space or business landscape.
Finding inspiration: dynamic natural communities
A forest is a great first example to start with when looking for inspiration for a native plant guild. Forest trees are not singular specimens but are interdependent players in dynamic natural communities. Each layered tier in the forest has a particular ecological function.
The tree canopy casts critical shade, moderates moisture and temperature, drops leaf litter to help build living soil, and provides sustenance for a diversity of life on roots, trunks, branches and leaves.
Understory trees and shrubs perform some of the same landscape functions as canopy trees, and their flowers and fruits also supply sustenance for pollinators and birds throughout the growing season. The herbaceous ground layer helps retain soil moisture and prevents erosion of the precious humus built up through years of fallen leaves, sticks and logs.
Even open landscapes without as many trees, such as meadows or prairies, contain layers above and below ground to fill in every open niche. In these settings, the groundcovers fill out the understory of taller, and leggier wildflowers and grasses. Shallow-rooted plants weave through and stabilize the upper layers of soil while deeper-rooted plants bring up water and nutrients from lower soil horizons.
The original guild
Humans have long mimicked these natural systems of multifunctional vegetative layers to harness productivity and ease their efforts. Perhaps the most familiar guild is the Three Sisters. Composed of just corn, beans and squash, this trio planted on a mound of soil, was developed by the Iroquois and other Indigenous peoples. The corn creates a tall pole for the nitrogen-fixing beans to use as a trellis. The squash’s broad leaves sprawl along the ground and shade the soil below. The elegant simplicity in this system is not easy to replicate, but can provide insight into how to create groupings of native plants in ecological design.
Native plant guilds
Although not always made up of edible species, native plantings also function best, in both design and ecological terms, when they grow in combinations of at least three species–forming a beautiful patchwork of foliage textures and blooms that offer interest throughout the growing season to both humans and pollinators.
A native plant guild can be thought of as an assemblage of plants that have similar cultural requirements, with each plant serving a specific role in building soil, creating shade, providing structure or covering the earth, much like in a forest, meadow, shrubland community or Three Sisters garden. A guild can include trees of differing heights, understory shrubs and ground-layer plants, or represent just a particular layer or type of planting, such as a selection of ground covers or a multispecies hedgerow.
Building a native plant guild
Here are some helpful guidelines for choosing the best combinations of plants to build a functional, self-sustaining and resilient guild:
- Assess your site conditions.
Native plants best thrive when sited in their ideal light, soil and moisture conditions. Analyze those elements first and choose plants accordingly, rather than trying to change the site to suit your desired plants’ needs. It might be helpful to create a master list of plants for the conditions you have, and then to whittle down the list to a smaller palette of plants as you go through the following guidelines.
Beach plums, as suckering shrubs or small charming trees, can be planted along sunny sidewalks, roads or driveways. They provide tasty fruits and are larval host plants for over 400 moth and butterfly species.
- Find inspiration from natural plant communities.
Get out and visit arboretums, gardens and natural habitats that have similar conditions to your site. Visit at various times of year and observe what plants you see when and what plants take up the most space in the different layers. Consider how the individual plants might be interacting with each other and their environment, as well as how they might be managed by people or natural forces.
By taking cues from where particular species grow in natural habitats, we can situate those plants in analogous settings in our built landscapes. For example, beach plums (Prunus maritima) typically grow on coastal sand plains, where they tolerate sunny, hot and dry conditions and even salt spray. They’re also able to flourish in urban and roadside plantings, where conditions are often similar to maritime landscapes.
Goldenrods (Solidago spp.) are larval host plants for over 100 moth and butterfly species and supply native bees with much needed late season nectar and pollen.
- Choose keystone trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants.
The most life-supporting plants, called “keystone plants,” in the words of Douglas Tallamy (author of Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope), are trees and shrubs like native oaks, willows, cherries, poplars, birches and maples. These woody plants feed hundreds of insect species, which in turn, are a critical food source for reproducing songbirds. Selecting these plants first will give plantings a major boost in fostering biodiversity.
Other significant herbaceous species include coneflowers, goldenrods and asters, which not only are larval host plants for butterflies and moths, but also serve as late season nectar and pollen sources for the 4,000 species of native bees in the Northeast region (USGS.gov). Every planting has a place for at least one of these keystone plants, and with the amount of versatility and diversity of species to choose from there is a keystone plant for every set of growing conditions and every site.
A multi-layered woodland garden. Photo by Heather McCargo.
- Fill spatial & temporal niches.
After choosing the keystone species to include, select plants for the remaining layers, including the canopy, eye level and ground level, that provide interest, cover and food sources for people and wildlife throughout the year.
Canopy and understory trees, such as maples, oaks and serviceberries, are important to select first so that the rest of the planting can be based around them. Trees are like the infrastructure supporting the rest of the system. Often, just 1-3 species of these larger plants is enough to add shade and a vertical element for the group.
Native shrubs create a lower woody plant layer that adds living structure for wildlife to find cover and food at any time of year. Native vines fill vertical space, often climbing up trees and shrubs, a trellis or the side of a building. Even 3 to 5 species of shrubs and vines will furnish the appropriate diversity in the mid-layer.
Ground covers lay the literal foundation for plantings, covering bare soil in a living mulch under trees, shrubs and taller herbaceous plants. Selecting 3 to 7 ground covers will create a woven tapestry or carpet.
Overall, guilds will work best with about 3 to fifteen species. Too few plants will not provide adequate habitat, structure or seasonal interest, and too many plants can muddy the design so it feels less coherent and cohesive. Finding that sweet spot in diversity of species can present one of the greatest challenges in the plant selection process since plant lovers often have a tough time choosing between friends.
Gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), a keystone plant supporting over 100 moth and butterfly species, shines in a pairing with purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis) in early fall.
- Group plants with similar growth rates & complementary habits.
When designing a guild, give careful consideration to choosing plants that coexist well together. Interplanting both self-sowing species and vegetative spreaders can help plantings establish more quickly and be more dynamic and resilient in the long term.
For instance, marsh marigold (Caltha palustris) or celandine poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) produce huge amounts of seed and self-sow into open soil. This reproductive strategy can be important for suppressing weeds, covering lots of ground quickly and establishing new plantings.
Species that have vigorous rhizomes and anchoring roots can hold soil in place while they spread to form colonies, but may take a few years to establish. Once they do, suckering shrubs like fragrant sumac (Rhus aromatica) or bush honeysuckle (Diervilla lonicera) can provide long term stabilization of steep slopes or hold their own against recently removed invasive species.
Additionally, combining plants with similar growth rates, soil moisture needs and light requirements will ensure that over time no particular species outcompetes the others. For example, marsh marigold would not last long in an upland setting with fragrant sumac since it requires damp soil. However, a celandine poppy with less preference for soil moisture would persist alongside the fragrant sumac as long as there is open ground for it to seed into.
Marsh marigold is an early bloomer and prolific self-sower in the damp edges of swamps, ponds and streams.
Learning more about native plants and guilds
Native plant guilds can be applied to various landscape settings, including residential gardens, farms, swales, roadside embankments and commercial areas. You can find sample collections of guilds and more information about individual species in Wild Seed Project’s guides on native trees, ground covers and shrubs at www.wildseedproject.net. Or, since there are endless possible combinations, you can create your own unique combinations for beautiful, dense, layered plantings that can help you foster biodiversity where you live.
Wavy hair grass (Deschampsia flexuosa), bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), showy aster (Eurybia spectabilis) and sweet fern (Comptonia peregrina) make a verdant combination along a coastal sand plain habitat or a garden with sandy/rocky soil and full to part sun.
Serviceberry makes an elegant and tough understory tree while furnishing spring flowers for pollinators and early summer fruits for songbirds.
Anna Fialkoff was most recently the Ecological Programs Manager at Wild Seed Project where she authored and managed the creation of the organization’s annual guide publication, worked with partner organizations on native demonstration designs and plantings, and taught educational programs on ecological gardening, native plant ecology and climate action. She was previously the Senior Horticulturist at Native Plant Trust’s botanical garden in Framingham, MA, called Garden in the Woods. Anna holds a BA in human ecology from College of the Atlantic and an MS in ecological design from The Conway School. She continues utilizing her passion for native plants and her skills in communication, horticulture and landscape design to connect people to the natural world and inspire them to start gardening for habitat and biodiversity.
*This article, which was originally printed in the July/August 2023 issue of Connecticut Gardener, is adapted from chapters from the Wild Seed Project guides: Native Trees, Native Ground Covers, and Native Shrubs for Northeast Landscapes.
