Where to buy native plants (GTA)?

Don't limit your choices to only native plants. There are excellent hybrid perennials and annuals that attract pollinators. Hybrid and native varieties of joe-pye weed, black-eyed susans, echinacea are wonderful plants. I completely agree that what I call "cosmetic" plants are useless in the environment, those include fruit trees that are hybridized to produce no fruit (for those who dislike the "mess" of fallen fruit). Yards that are a monoculture (lawns, for example) are of no use to wildlife or pollinators, so to attrach birds, bees, butterflies, etc you need to create a home for them -- and that means, a messy yard!

There are lots of great internet resources, like the Canadian Wildlife Federation http://cwf-fcf.org/en/do-something/chal ... google.ca/.

Good luck!

Repost or ask admin to move this to the Home and Garden forum. It's much more active and you'll get more replies.

mods, please move to Home and Garden, thanks!

I know a number of local gardening groups sell seed and/or plants from from time to time. Also the nursery staff at High Park are very knowledgeable about this and have greenhouses full of native plants.

Jimbobs wrote: ↑I know a number of local gardening groups sell seed and/or plants from from time to time. Also the nursery staff at High Park are very knowledgeable about this and have greenhouses full of native plants.

do they sell plants there as well? i work in the area and never thought about it

Blazin_Sunfire wrote: ↑do they sell plants there as well? i work in the area and never thought about it

I believe they do have open houses from time to time as well as give away some plants if you ask nicely. Another place I heard about is Mountain Grove Seed Company. They are based near Kingston but also operate online.

Most nurseries have native plants. Just have to know which are native and which aren't.

If you reserve a section of your lawn to revert to natural meadow conditions, a variety of native plants specifically suited to your area will naturally grow. If you take the time to weed out any invasive or undesirable species, you can have your own continuously regenerating free source of native plants.

I think getting seeds may be easier than buying plants, I did some searches over the last few months and came up with plenty of options

googling
native plants ontario
plants attracting monarch
plants attracting bees, hummingbirds, butterflies and on and on will get you results, then you can narrow it down to what you like, what looks pretty and so on.

An option may be (although not sure if it is permitted) going to a local forest and digging few small plants you like, then again what's in our forest may or may not be native.

In our yard we still have a section with grass which is environmently unfrirendly, but the rest of the yard was beaming with life, various flowering plants, veggies, everything was being composted, it was a joy to look at the birds, butterflies, bees (although these were sometimes getting annoying), and on top of it everyone was saying how beautiful my our yard is, and it is. We are moving to a new house in the near future and down the road I plan on making it not only georgeus but also more enviromentaly friendly with more native plants than we had in our old house. The key is variety.