Karma Gardening is here to help you grow native plants.

I got into gardening the way many people do — out of necessity. We bought a property with heaps of deferred landscaping and faced the bewildering task of deciding what to keep, what to pull, and what to grow.

At first, I wasn’t passionate about gardening. I just wanted our home to be a place where we could relax and not be overwhelmed by constant lawn care, runaway overgrowth, and the destructive erosion of the lifeless, sun-scorched slope buried beneath layers of mulch piled up over years.

Over the next thirteen years, caring for our property, with many failures along the way, we learned that growing native plants is easier and restores the habitat that wildlife and our food-web depends on.

But there’s a problem. While native plants have entered the consciousness of the gardening industry, the number of gardeners and landscapers cultivating natives remains too small to make a real difference in restoring wildlife habitats.

Why? Native plant gardening is stuck in its early-adopter phase. Because the available native plant information is complex and geared toward advanced gardeners, few are motivated to invest the time, money, and effort required to wade through a complex web of disjointed information to add native plants into their gardening plan.

Until now, native plant data was hidden behind scientific jargon, indecipherable codes, and hard-to-navigate user interfaces, which requires triangulating multiple sources. What’s more, native plant nurseries and seed companies, operating under real economic constraints, can only grow a limited selection of popular native species and cultivars.

If nurseries are the sole source of consumer-focused native plant information, consumers will inevitably grow monocultures susceptible to collapse and that don’t have the biodiversity to sustain healthy ecosystems.

To bring native plant gardening and landscaping into the mainstream, and to yield all of the ecological benefits, comprehensive information about native plants has to be quick to find and easy to digest for casual gardeners.

This website is a step toward making information about growing native plants accessible to consumers and professionals. It’s what I wish we’d had when we started our gardening journey over a decade ago.

Thank you for visiting karmagardening.com. I’m just getting started! There’s much more work to do, so please drop me a note with any feedback.

Let’s grow together!

Greg