Go Wildscaping

Did you know April is Native Plant Month? (No foolin’!)

To celebrate, Homegrown National Park (HNP) launched the 1 Plant Challenge. If you’re not familiar with HNP, it’s a movement to create the largest conservation area ever attempted in the United States.

Did you know over 44 million acres of land are dedicated to lawn? If Americans wildscaped half of our lawns, we’d have a conservation area larger than the following National Parks, combined:

• Adirondacks
• Yellowstone
• Yosemite
• Grand Tetons
• Canyonlands
• Mount Rainier
• North Cascades
• Badlands
• Olympic
• Sequoia
• Grand Canyon
• Denali
• Great Smoky Mountains

Wow, that’s a huge area! By focusing your efforts on a small local area, we can make a dramatic change to our entire ecosystem.

If you’re interested in joining the Homegrown National Park movement, consider adding yourself to HNP’s map and documenting your personal planting challenge there. (Note: individuals names are not shown on the map, although you can show the names of businesses and other organizations.) I challenged myself to plant 100 square feet with native plants between now and July 31, 2024. If you don’t think that sounds like much, consider that the thousands of people who’ve signed up so far are 77% of the way towards our collective goal to replant almost 97,000 acres! And this movement is just getting started on an awesome upward spiral.

Today, I planted a pair of penstemon plants (Penstemon digitalis) that I bought from the Chattahoochee Nature Center’s annual native plant sale.

Here’s a close-up of the plants:

And here’s a wider view of their new home:

2 square feet down, 98 more to go!