Provide Food for Wildlife

Everyone needs to eat! Planting native plants or hanging feeders in safe places are two easy ways to make your habitat the latest and greatest five-star restaurant for wildlife of all shapes and sizes.

Native forbs, shrubs and trees provide the foliage, nectar, pollen, berries, seeds and nuts that many species of wildlife require to survive and thrive.

Natives are well adapted to survive in a particular geographic area according to the climate, soils, rainfall and availability of pollinators and seed dispersers. And because they are indigenous to a specific region, native plants usually require little maintenance and are welcomed by wildlife, serving an important role in the local ecosystem.

In times when natural food sources are not as available, it is important to also provide bird feeders, hummingbird feeders, squirrel feeders and butterfly feeders to add to the native food sources for resident and migrating wildlife.
 

Native Plant Resources:

The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's Native Plant Information Network allows you to search for native plant info by traits or names.

To help make shopping for native plants easier, NWF has partnered with garden centers in select locations across the U.S. to carry a special line of American Beauties Native Plants®. Look for retailers in your area and check out our four ready-to-plant landscape plans.

Top 10 Native Plants in Your Region

There are hundreds of plants native to the many different ecoregions of the United States, which might make it hard to know where to start when it comes to deciding what plants might work in your yard. To help, we've put together the top 10 common native plants by region.

Click on your state to find out which plants made our list:

Alaska | Midwest | Pacific Northwest | Northeast | Rocky Mountains | Southeast | Southwest

AL | AK | AZ | AR | CA | CO | CT | DE | FL | GA | ID | IL | IN | IA | KS | KY | LA | ME | MD | MA | MI | MN | MS | MO | MT | NE | NV | NH | NJ | NM | NY | NC | ND | OH | OK | OR | PA | RI | SC | SD | TN | TX | UT | VT | VA | WA | WV | WI | WY

Note: We have not provided a native plant list for Hawai'i because the plant diversity changes from island to island.