Does the following sound familiar? You go to the garden center to pick up some plants for your garden. The plant with big flashy flowers calls to you. You put it in your cart. Then you discover that it comes in several different colors! You put one of each color in your cart. You take them home to plant not really knowing where they will go…but you loved them and will find a place for them somewhere.

New York City is essentially a giant ecologic scar with hard, impermeable surfaces stretching out over hundreds of square miles. Natural green spaces are relegated to a few places here and there, and trees poking out of sidewalks struggle to survive. Can an Idea like Homegrown National Park™ even work in a place where habitat fragmentation is so extreme?

Plant selection is more than just gardening; it’s restoration. Over the course of a few centuries, we have changed the topography and soil chemistry of every corner of this country through agriculture, industry, and urban development. We have altered the places where native species were once able to establish themselves successfully, and our local ecosystems have suffered as a result.

Coneflower, Milkweed, and Beebalm make up almost 30% of the native plant market. You can find them in almost any garden center on the east coast, and we’re sold and told to plant them every year. But if these native plants are so important, durable, and easy to grow, why don’t we see them in the wild? In truth, these types of plants used to dominate the landscape, but after decades and centuries of altered topography and over development, their habitats have all but disappeared. In the sink-or-swim world of natural selection, native plants have fallen into two camps: specialized and generalized communities.