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Editorial Standards

The Plant Native holds its content to a journal-adjacent standard. Here is how we research, write, and check our work.

How we research a plant

Every plant profile on The Plant Native starts as a document that includes all cited research. All content uses primary information from four categories of sources:

Native ranges

The native ranges on our site are our own combination of three academic, trusted sources. We combine native range data from: NatureServe, Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants, and the USDA PLANTS Database. Here’s how we combine them, and how we decide a plant’s regions.

Host plant data

For caterpillar host plant counts, we use the Shropshire-Tallamy Lepidoptera host dataset. This host plant data counts at the genus level, not species, so we recognize range counts are rounding up for some individual plants in specific regions.

We do not pull numbers from random gardening blogs, even when those blogs are quoting the same dataset.

Editorial review and fact-checking

Every plant profile is edited by Emily Lessard, founder of The Plant Native, before publication. Each review pass looks at (in order):

  1. Scientific accuracy. Latin names, native range, and wildlife interactions are checked and verified against independent institutional sources. Every citation is then included at the bottom of every article.
  2. Voice and clarity. We are writing for beginner gardeners, not horticultural PhDs. Each piece of content should sound like a friend talking to you, alongside everything being scientifically accurate.
  3. Sources cited. Every claim that needs a source gets one. The source list appears at the bottom of every article and profile.

The sources we trust

We like giving credit where credit is due. And when it comes to plants, we have 300+ years of books, articles, and scholarly treatises to point back to. We look to institutions, databases, historical texts, and researchers to tell each plant and region’s story. Here are some repeated sources we consistently return to:

What we don’t use as a source

How and when we update content

The world of native plants has been shifting consistently for hundreds of years. Species get re-classified. Cultivar trial data is made public or rerun. One of the great things about publishing on the internet is that we can treat our content as living documents to constantly evolve and improve. Because we’re committed to constant change, we show our work along the way:

How we use AI

AI tools help us find things, organize things, add site features, and make things consistent. Here’s how we use it:

AI is used for:

Where AI stays out

Disclosure, advertising, and conflicts

The Plant Native was founder-funded from 2021 to spring 2026. In 2026, we added programmatic advertising through Raptive to fund a small team of contributing writers and pay for native plant research expertise. Our Work With Us page explains how advertising and partnerships work.

Author bylines and accountability

Every piece of content on The Plant Native has a named human author. The byline links to that writer’s bio on our team page.

How we map native ranges

A native range map tells you where this plant grew before colonists showed up. If you’re a fellow plant nerd, you know there are dozens of sources for this! Each has a different point of view, dataset, and method. We use a blend of three public sources for our range maps:

Why three? They all provide slightly different stories. USDA records every plant growing wild, including garden escapes. A California poppy that ended up by mistake in Illinois still shows up in its records. NatureServe and Kew give us a second and third opinion as to whether the plant belongs there.

When the sources disagree, we stop, look at all three, and a human being makes the call with other sources. If we’re not sure, we leave it off the map.

How we decide a plant’s regions

Our regional guides split the country into seven regions. Here are the states in each one:

Once we know the states where a plant is native, it belongs to a region when any of these is true:

One more check: at least one of those states has to come from NatureServe. A Kew record alone can’t put a plant in a region.

A plant with a wide range that just crosses into one state of a region stays out of that region. It still shows on the plant’s map, and in the zip code search for that state.

One quirk to know about: Oklahoma and Texas sit in our Southwest, so plenty of eastern plants that reach into eastern Oklahoma and Texas count as Southwest too. If you garden in the desert, check the map and your zip code before you plant.

Where range maps fail

Type your zip code on our plant profiles page. We match it to your county using free U.S. Census files, then show the plants recorded in your county or the county next door first, followed by plants native elsewhere in your state. We don’t track this data, and we don’t use it for anything other than returning plants to you.

Data credits

Our range maps and zip code search combine and adapt the data below. Any mistakes are ours. None of these organizations reviewed or endorses The Plant Native.

Find something wrong?

Let us know! Email hello@theplantnative.com with what you found. We’ll fix it, note the correction, and credit you if you’d like.

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