What makes a plant native? Texas gardeners should be careful with landscaping choices.

As our family gathered recently, I was thinking back to my days as a teenager in College Station.

My dad Omer and his brother John were both PhD botanists from the University of Nebraska. John taught plant taxonomy and my dad taught range management and ecology.

Plants they had learned as college-age botanists in the cold Midwest were entirely different from what they saw and knew in Brazos County just 120 miles in from the Texas Gulf Coast. In fact, my dad had done his PhD research in the Rocky Mountains and then had founded the Biology Department at Sul Ross University (then Sul Ross State Teachers College) in Alpine.

Those guys were plant people. True “native plant” people. All I heard over the holiday dinner tables were scientific names of plants. They rarely talked about what my six cousins or I were doing in school, TAMU football or anything political. It was all native plants.

Limited success with Texas transplants

So, that’s what I bring to this conversation. A background steeped in the native plants of Texas. I was adopted as an infant and raised as an only child. I don’t think I was spoiled, but I suppose if you’d asked any of those six cousins they might have had their own opinions.

But whatever the case, I adored my dad and I spent years of my life tracking across Texas with him as he conducted his herbicide research for Texas A&M trying to help sheep and goat raisers eliminate plants that were toxic to their livestock.

From the time I was 10 to 15, I spent weeks with my dad each summer in Cuero, Kerrville, Mountain Home, Marfa, Alpine, Valentine, Sterling City, Van Horn, Mentone (county seat of the least-populated county in America), Big Spring, Sonora, Johnson City, Uvalde, Leakey, San Augustine … I know I’m leaving some out. We saw a lot.

Everywhere we went I asked my dad questions about the plants I saw growing there and why they were specific to that part of Texas. The wise words he gave me, and the ones I hope you’ll remember above all others I try to share are, “A plant is only truly ‘native’ to the place where you find it growing in nature.”

When I’d ask Dad about digging plants and taking them home to my backyard garden he would caution me (a) about plundering plants carelessly from the hillsides and (b) that those plants would be facing entirely different conditions when I got them back home to College Station. Sure enough, many of those that I did transplant struggled with the heavy soils, greater rainfalls and much higher humidity of South Central Texas.

Also be on the lookout for ‘adapted’ plants

Why is all this important? Because there are those who will make a big selling point that plants that are “native” to Texas therefore ought to be more widely planted in our landscapes. That’s when I step in with a warning: Think of how different things are in Beaumont, where it rains 60 or 70 inches each year compared to El Paso where they may only get 6 or 7 inches in the same year (and it may come in two or three rainstorms). Plants that are native in Beaumont aren’t going to be thrilled in arid El Paso. Fact is, they probably won’t even survive. And the xeriphytes from West Texas will usually decay within months given the wet conditions of Southeast Texas.

This is where another word rises to the top of our list of key operatives: “Adapted.” You want to choose plants that are happy to have a chance to grow and flourish in your surroundings. It doesn’t really matter where they call “home” if they’re willing to grow without causing problems.

Of the seven large shade trees that are most commonly recommended for large parts of Texas, six are indeed native to North Central Texas. Four are oaks: Shumard red, Chinquapin, bur and live oaks. Also, cedar elm and pecans, as well as our one non-native tree, Chinese pistachio.

We don’t have a lot of great native shrubs here in North Central Texas. Yaupon and possumhaw hollies are two good ones, but there really aren’t many more. American beautyberry from South Central Texas does fairly well (except in the cold of February 2021) and rusty blackhaw viburnum is a lovely large native shrub if you have enough room. Texas sage is from Southwest Texas, but it often freezes here. Wax myrtle is from Southeast Texas, but it’s intolerant of our dry, alkaline soils and low humidity.

Beyond those, however, most of our shrubs come from other parts of the world. Many are from Southeast Asia, including all the variations and hybrids of Chinese hollies. Out of that clan alone we pick up dwarf Chinese holly, Burford and dwarf Burford, Carissa, Willowleaf (Needlepoint), Nellie R. Stevens and other hollies. Nandinas are from Japan, as are many azaleas. Crape myrtles, for the most part, are native to China. Many of our better junipers are native to Southeast Asia as well.

I can close it all out with words of an old prof from Texas A&M. He was tough and he was gruff, but he was also correct when he taught us to look at the growing conditions where a plant was originally found. Then, if we can replicate those conditions, we will be successful in growing that plant ourselves. “You don’t learn how to grow plants. You learn how plants grow.”

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570 AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 p.m. and on WBAP 820 AM Sunday mornings 8-10 a.m. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.