Ozark Roots Native Plants

11/23/2024

Come on out to see me and a bunch of other great local shops! I’ve got a mix of perennials, my calendars and other gifts featuring my plant photography with me.

10/24/2024

The prairie looks pretty dead right now, but next year’s hopes are out there waving in the wind. Including, in order of appearance, big bluestem, buttonbush, little bluestem, Indiangrass and a forb I’m not confident enough to identify. Thanks to for letting me collect a few seeds from Chesney Prairie, a tallgrass remnant out near Siloam. You can’t go wrong with local seed sources — with permission and respect, of course.

10/20/2024

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Wild Ones - Ozark Chapter native plant sale yesterday! What a perfect way to top off the season. It was also the debut of the very first Ozark Roots merch: calendars!

These feature my own photography of native plants from years of hikes and explorations, with each image/collage being taken during the month it illustrates. It’s a fun way to see natives through the seasons while also supporting your favorite upstart native plant nursery — and they make an easy gift for another native plant enthusiast, too. If you’d like one, use this link!

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10/19/2024

Today’s the day! I hope to see you there. Big thanks to for making it happen.

10/16/2024

I haven’t had any asters to sell this year, but you can bet I’m kicking myself for that, and collecting aster seed for next year, because they’re a pollinator favorite and supremely indifferent to the autumn drought that’s currently withering the region. Who needs mums when we have asters? Just as much fall color, a native part of the ecosystem, and they come back year after year. I’m sure some of my fellow growers will be selling some this Saturday at . Please join us!

10/14/2024

I already featured post oak in a post this year, but it gets another in honor of becoming the official mascot of this renamed and rebranded nursery (thanks to .design.co for the logo!). This beautiful and resilient tree encapsulates the Ozark Roots mission: ecologically vital, drought-resistant and an important piece of this region’s adaptation to climate change.

Please come see me and other local native plant growers from 10 am to 2 pm this Saturday outside in Lowell for my last big sale of the year! I’ll have some post oaks along with a few dozen other types of perennials — it’s a little counterintuitive, but fall’s a great time to plant. And thank you for following along as I get this little business’s legs under it. It’s been a great first year of growing, and I am so excited to grow even bigger next year.

10/11/2024

My little milkweed seedlings in the greenhouse supported one single monarch caterpillar this year, and today was the big day. I couldn’t stay long enough to see it emerge this morning, but I love the little window of time when the chrysalis turns transparent and gives a peek at those orange wings. Maybe this new arrival was one of the butterflies I saw later in the day at Lake Springdale.

These monarchs are all a part of the last generation of the year, and they illustrate the importance of planting late bloomers: sunflowers, asters, goldenrods, purple coneflowers like these and others. Insects need these autumn flowers to make it through the winter and, in the case of these monarchs, to make a migration of hundreds of miles. It’s such a treat to add to their numbers just a little bit.

10/01/2024

09/17/2024

Native plants accomplish about a thousand different things, including supporting pollinators with their flowers and just plain looking nice and colorful in the garden. But one of their most important functions is as buffet for bugs, as demonstrated in my own yard with (1) the whimsically named snowberry clearwing moth caterpillar on some coral honeysuckle, (2) the monarch caterpillar on swamp milkweed and (3) a variegated fritillary on common violets. Caterpillars obviously turn into pollinators, which is great, but they’re also essential food for bigger animals like baby birds, which need hundreds of the things to grow up, and frogs (4). Many exotic species like ginkgo trees are worthless when it comes to supporting these food chains, or at least not as ideal as the plants that have co-evolved with our pollinators over millennia. It’s just another way that native plants are indispensable threads in the ecological web around us.