Yardsmart: Local native perennials for your garden

Imagine a plant you don't have to water. It loves the soil in your yard and rarely, if ever, needs fertilizer. Even the coldest winter or hottest summer won't faze it. And, best of all, it's so beautiful that butterflies flock to its flowers in droves.

When a plant does all this in your garden, it has naturalized. That means it becomes self-sustaining because it's as happy as a wildflower. So just like the wild ones, it grows on its own year after year, becoming larger overall. If it's really happy, it may even shed seed that naturally sprouts into volunteers. If all our plants naturalized this well, we'd have little to do in the garden.

Such is the case when you choose a locally native perennial. These are big, healthy wildflowers, many indigenous to the prairies and woodland edges in your state. They are nature's greatest gifts to gardens, standing proud and tall when finicky exotics fade under less-than-ideal conditions. Of the many perennials out there, there are a handful that make the biggest, brightest flowers for the least care and resources. They are quintessentially green choices.

From these species, various cultivars have been produced, expanding the original color and reducing size to fit any garden or palette. Make these super-naturals your first choice in the garden and you'll discover the pure joy of a plant that belongs, a plant that is adapted by nature, and a plant that asks very little from you.

Purple Coneflower — Echinacea purpurea. This is the prairie coneflower, the large pink daisy that stands waist-high in the Midwest. Its flowers are so named for the great cone-shaped seedpod that rises out of the center as it matures.

Black Eyed Susan — Rudbeckia hirta. This wildflower is named for its bright golden petal daisies bearing a dark brown "eye" at the center. Tough and resilient, new varieties expand the color to a host of autumn oranges and reds.

Joe Pye Weed — Eupatorium maculatum. This very large bushy perennial borders on the size of a shrub. Great clusters of magenta-pink blossoms rise at the tips of each shoot to branch out into bold color. A certain butterfly magnet, it is far under-planted.