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Introduction
This is a book about the plants indigenous or native to the heartland of North America. No place else on earth has such an extreme continental climate, yet it is a place filled with plants of every size and in every hue. This book aims to inspire readers to plant native plants while learning how and where to grow them successfully. There is no perfect plant so understanding the strengths and limitations of each species is a critical component. I also aim to explain why it is important to utilize native plants in a landscape wherever possible.

Humans have manipulated the landscapes of the Midwest since arriving in the region. The first English-speaking settlers described a forest that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. The prairies were celebrated as a sea of grass, so vast it stretched to the horizon in many places. Much of the forest was portrayed as open woodland, with a parklike appearance of scrub and gnarly trees interspersed with grass. We like to think of these early descriptions as depicting a pristine place, but we know that the bison, elk, and other creatures along with Native Americans and their use of fire created that landscape.

When settlers arrived, the region was already changing as the great glacial ice had melted not that long ago (in the big scheme of things). Northern forest trees were retreating northward and southern species advancing as the climate changed. Grasslands had periodically advanced eastward and northward through periods of heat and drought, the habitat they required maintained by natural and man-made fires that burned through entire landscapes. Plants filled every niche, segregated by their adaptations to all the various conditions from wet to dry, muck to sand, sun to shade, and hot to cool microclimates.
Today the Midwest is one of the most human-manipulated landscapes: the seas of prairies are now a vast expanse of farmland while the forest has been fragmented into smaller tracts. Once open woodlands and savannas are now dense forests. The region’s great herbivores, bison and elk, no longer roam, while wildfires no longer burn. Some native animals like white-tailed deer and some imported plants like bush honeysuckles and reed canary grass have gone awry, usurping indigenous plants in remnant wildlands. With the forces that shaped the original landscape now gone, the remaining natural areas must be managed almost like gardens to protect their inhabitants.

The indigenous plants are important because they sustain all of life in this landscape. Could you live solely off native plants? Many species, mainly insects, through millennia of adaptations and evolution, are viscerally linked to a specific plant. Two butterflies are a good example of these links: zebra swallowtail can only survive where its host, the pawpaw, grows, the Karner blue where the wild lupine grows. We know a healthy environment for humans includes a diversity of life around us. Aldo Leopold’s saying still holds true: “The first part of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.” By including native plants in our landscape, we are helping to save this diversity, especially important in the manipulated and fragmented Midwest.

The typical suburban landscape includes a home, expansive (and rarely used) lawn, foundation plantings, plus token shade and evergreen trees with various adornments of ornamental plantings. In many cases, the shade trees are native but most of the smaller trees, shrubs, and groundcovers including turf are not. In 1976 Hal Bruce wrote: “Americans simply do not utilize their wildflower resources. Yet there is still time to begin.” After almost 40 years since his book was published, we have begun, but we can do even better.