Native plants are regaining a foothold in Oregon’s urban areas
written by Daniel O’Neil
Spring is awakening, and Ryan Kennedy’s native plant nursery, ReWild, is busy with imperceptible growth. Here just east of Astoria, Kennedy zigzags from project to project like a hummingbird. He’s repotting Pacific wax myrtle, watering Oregon grape, prepping land for his expanding operations and patiently nurturing species like Sitka spruce and salal that make the coast the coast.
Kennedy grows native plants for residential and commercial clients: home gardeners, local landscapers and, some day, municipalities. Having started ReWild in 2024, he has benefitted from a burgeoning interest in native plant species and a growing awareness, statewide, of their irreplaceable role on the landscape.
The benefits of native plants in urban areas range as widely as their list of taxonomic names. While providing habitat for native animal species and maintaining a thriving ecosystem, native plant communities also offer humans abundant advantages, including a sense of place.
“We have to remember that we’re not just here by ourselves independently,” Kennedy said while surrounded by young plants in his greenhouse. “We are members of an ecosystem, participants in an ecosystem. And I think native plants help remind us that we’re part of a bigger system.”
Despite urbanization, native plants are once again finding their place in and on the Oregon landscape. But not without challenges. Old trends, an underappreciation of natives’ contribution to communities both wild and human, and insufficient funding, for example, all hinder the advance of native plants and their benefits. But as native plant advocates across the state blend sweat into soil or pull bureaucratic levers, Oregonians are witnessing a strikingly familiar re-emergence—Oregon is beginning to look like itself again.
Until the early 1800s, all vegetation in Oregon was “native.” It was what grew here naturally, its diversity and distribution determined by factors like geography, soils and climate. Yet, according to research published by the State of Oregon, Oregon’s ecoregions have lost anywhere from 50 to 98 percent of their former prairies, grasslands and bottomland hardwood forests, replaced by agriculture, urbanization and exotic plant invasions.
Today, the definition of “native” plants remains up for debate. Some consider plants native only if they naturally existed within a 5-mile radius of a particular parcel of land. Others extend the range to an ecoregion such as the Oregon Coast, Willamette Valley or the High Desert. From here, some apply the term “native” to plants endemic to the Pacific Northwest.
While the definition of native plants varies with outlook or intentions, it is also subject to a changing climate that is rewriting the list of locally suitable species. As climate zones migrate north, plant species from northern California and Nevada begin to make more sense in Oregon. Homeowners and professionals are already reacting—Kennedy, for one, is raising plenty of redwood and madrone to withstand the warming North Coast climate over their long lives.
Native plants serve a variety of purposes across Oregon today. For instance, restoration projects for salmon habitat rely on the local species that have always formed part of the fish’s freshwater habitat. Municipalities employ native grasses and shrubs to create bioswales for stormwater management, and they plant native trees for enduring shade, beauty and wildlife habitat. Homeowners plant natives to attract and support declining populations of native pollinators and songbirds, and to save water because natives are naturally adapted to their local climate and soils.
Non-native plants, however, dominate the market and the landscape. They often originate in climates where, unlike in Oregon, it rains in summer, and they typically don’t serve the bugs, birds, lichens and other array of plant and animal life that forms Oregon’s ecosystems. Sure, non-native “ornamentals” provide reliable bursts of color, and due to the economics of the nursery industry, they are readily available nationwide. But they don’t give back to their environment, and they don’t look like Oregon.
“A lot of what we’ve learned in landscape architecture comes from the old, English, Oxford-style royal botanical gardens, the horticultural-ists who did their species selection based on artistic and aesthetic principles and less based on ecological performance,” said Mike Oxendine, a Board Certified Master Arborist and executive director of OUR Community Forestry, a Medford-based nonprofit dedicated to enhancing urban forests. “So you end up with lipstick on the landscape. And what we need is ecological restoration now more than ever.”
A colleague of Oxendine’s in Southwest Oregon, Dave Bish, is co-owner of Plant Oregon, a plant nursery his family has run since 1990. Plant Oregon sells to anyone from homeowners and landscapers to watershed councils and municipalities.
“The biggest thing is planting things that are going to help the native insects, birds, all the critters, all the animals we’ve lost,” Bish said. “It’s at least a step in the right direction to start reintroducing some of those into our urban spaces, just trying to coexist with those critters a little better and give things a better chance.”
For Bish, planting ornamental trees in a region that once supported some of the world’s most extensive forestland misses the mark, in large part because those species do not grow to become big, shade-and habitat-providing trees like oaks. “What’s getting planted are just little cookie cutter trees that never amount to anything,” he said. “We’ve got a giant highway 150 feet wide, and we’re planting a little tree that gets 15 feet tall on the side of it.”
In the agricultural model of permaculture, which stresses self-sufficiency and sustainability, the “function stacking” method looks to mirror nature by solving multiple problems with one solution. So, the right choice of which species to plant could provide four or five benefits for the ecosystem and another four or five for the local human community.
As an example, Kennedy cited the native-planted roadside stormwater management systems, or bioswales, in Kitsap County, Washington, where he’s from. Some have been converted to parks where people can walk around and learn from information panels about how watersheds work and how those wetland habitats are important for salmon habitat. “It’s looking at these plants not just as tools to solve a stormwater issue, but as tools to solve a stormwater issue while simultaneously enacting multiple habitat and ecosystem benefits,” he said.
For all of the benefits that native plants offer, plenty of barriers lie in the way. For one thing, many people still don’t appreciate natives’ inherent beauty or understand why they’re important. Friends of Trees, for example, an Oregon-based nonprofit that helps get trees planted in Portland and Eugene neighborhoods, offers as many native species as possible. But most participating homeowners still choose non-native plants when given a choice.
Commercial landowners and developers also still rely on non-native ornamentals, and landscape maintenance crews often lack knowledge of native plants. “Not everything is a square—that’s what we try to teach the maintenance guys,” Bish said. “You don’t have to cut every plant into one of those squares or a round ball. It just drives me crazy.”
Even landscape architects and planners overlook, and are not taught at school, the basics behind native plants. Richard Martinson, Ph.D., founded the High Desert Horticultural Center in Bend. For twenty-five years he was also president and co-owner of WinterCreek Restoration, a native plant landscape and nursery business focused on Central and Eastern Oregon. While earning his doctorate in horticulture a decade ago, Martinson conducted a survey of landscape architects, designers and planners across Oregon to gauge their knowledge base of ecoregional concepts and plant associations and how many of them implement these concepts.
Martinson found that about 10 percent of landscape architects in the state were aware of these classification systems for native plant associations, and only 10 percent of those ever used them. “So, essentially, 1 percent of landscape architects in the state applied any ecological or ecoregional concepts to their designs, which was really depressing to me,” he said. “It kind of indicates a lag in the industry.”
Another lag exists in the nursery industry itself. Prove-nance—i.e. where the seeds were collected, in which specific climate and geography—and quality of stock can create gaps in suitable inventory. Also, municipalities are required to plant trees of a certain size, much bigger than the trees used for habitat restoration or residential plantings. But trees of this caliper are often not available.
Capacity may be the greatest impediment to getting more native plants, especially trees, in the ground today. It takes two years to grow an ornamental red maple to market size, but it takes ten years to grow a native interior live oak to size, and the market is not yet proven in such species. The Willamette Valley is the nation’s largest commercial plant nursery, yet nearly all of those plants are non-natives because volume of sales dominates the industry’s economics. Red maples sell well from coast to coast and even internationally.
“The first thing is the tree has to be there,” Oxendine said. “If you go to a contractor and you say, ‘We want to plant thirty blue oaks on this project,’ and they can’t find them, they’re not going to plant them.”
Several state initiatives have recently begun to fill the need for more native plant stock. One of these is led by the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Urban Community Forestry Program, which in 2025 awarded Plant Oregon a grant to grow 4,000 climate-resilient trees to municipal size requirements. These trees, locally native species and plenty of climate-resis-tent oaks, will be available for entities like tribes, municipalities and schools in underserved communities around the state.
“It’s an exciting project and a good way to get a lot of stuff out there in the community where people might not have been able to afford it otherwise,” Bish, of Plant Oregon, said.
In 2021, the heat dome that cooked Oregon revealed the cooling powers of trees in urban landscapes. Areas like Portland’s outer eastside suffered far worse than the leafy West Hills because of a lack of tree canopy. So State Senator Khanh Pham, a Democrat representing District 23, organized a coalition of nonprofits, plant nurseries and political support to germinate the TREES (Trees Restoring Economic and Environmental Sustainability) Act, which was included in HB 3409 and signed into law in 2023.
Besides offering shade and green spaces for areas like outer East Portland, the bill directed $6.5 million to establish the Community Green Infrastructure program, which, among other things, in March 2025 awarded nearly $1 million to seven native plant seed banks and nurseries across the state, including Kennedy’s ReWild. This in turn guaranteed a market for those native trees.
“Even if we threw millions at the program today, the nurseries told us that the seed stock for such a program did not exist: We would have to grow our native plant seed banks, and grow native plants from seed for years to make this vision possible,” Sen. Pham said in a statement. “Now that work is underway, those seedlings are starting to sprout, and this creates good green jobs and helps to grow the market for native plants in Oregon, a wonderful co-benefit to uplift rural communities along the way to growing our urban forests.”
Federal cuts to state programs and USDA money withdrawn by DOGE pose threats to the continued funding of green infrastructure grant programs. This makes efforts like the CGI program, overseen by the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, all the more vital. Even the CGI funding is not secured beyond 2026, but its impact will continue for decades—and in the trees planted, for generations.
Cities like Portland are also responding to the lack of quality, specification-size native trees for its own planting programs. Portland Parks & Recreation handles much of the tree planting done across Portland, from private and commercial properties to city right-of-ways and public parks. While not all of the trees PPR plants are species native to the Pacific Northwest, for reasons of diversity and climate-resilience, its most planted tree, Oregon white oak, is, and natives are gaining respect by city planners. A new PPR program is designed to increase the availability of native trees for the city by contracting with Oregon nurseries.
“This is in an effort to help us have a better, more direct pathway with nurseries, to tell them exactly the species and the quantities that we’re going to need for the next four to five years, but to also really dial in the quality of the trees that we’re receiving as well,” said Mari Aviles, tree procurement coordinator for PPR. “There are a lot of nurseries interested in the work, so we’re excited to partner with them and to really help them understand what the demand is with urban tree planting initiatives.”
With the state and some of Oregon’s municipalities showing interest, Oregonians have an opportunity to help build momentum behind the native plant movement. In fact, the two, government and citizen, work best in tandem. Consider a neighborhood where some residents decide to plant pollinator gardens or native trees. The will is there, and that collective consciousness can motivate governments to act. Public dollars and support can then allow that community to take full advantage of native species and to plant intelligently together.
Fortunately, residents across the state are calling on native plants to solve some of the problems they’re witnessing in their gardens and beyond. As the climate warms and the dry season widens, home gardeners are noticing how their plants react.
“Gardeners are seeking out information about how to garden in these conditions, and native plants are a good way to have a beautiful garden without needing to irrigate as much as you would with some of the more traditional landscape plants,” said Heather Stoven, a horticulturist with Oregon State University Extension, who serves Yamhill County. “There’s also a lot more interest in pollinators and native bees. So as people are looking to have pollinator gardens or protect the bees, they’re looking to native plants for that as well.”
With an observable decline in populations of pollinators and songbirds, in rain when plants need it, and in wildlife habitat in general, native plants are not a passing trend among Oregonians. Martinson, of the High Desert Horticultural Center, recalls the early days of WinterCreek Nursery, when customers offered payment in the form of goods like chickens.
“It was definitely a fringe industry,” he said. “And then over the years people’s awareness of the environmental impacts of urban development have really increased awareness of pollinators, of biodiversity, of the impacts of pesticides and fertilizers and herbicides and everything that people use in conventional landscapes. People are trying to move past that. They’re starting to look at alternatives. And so over the last ten to fifteen years, it’s really boomed.”
With grassroots support and multiple reasons for government to lend a hand, native plants are living a renaissance in Oregon. As a result, the landscape we know today may never look the same, which would often be a good thing.
“If I were dropped into a newer development in Eugene right now, out of an airplane, I would have no idea what state I was in—it would primarily be these gigantic wide roads, huge houses, and then these small, manicured areas with lawns and ornamental shrubs and trees,” said Erik Burke, Friends of Trees’ Eugene-Springfield director. “There’s nothing that says Oregon in that. But if we got here and we saw Oregon white oak, incense cedar and madrone, people would say, ‘Oh, this is Western Oregon.’”
In this sense, native plants also carry the capacity to bring communities together as they honor and celebrate a sense of place, one thing that plants, animals and people of all stripes share in common.
To begin is quite simple: Plant and care for one native tree, and add some specific native shrubs, forbs and grasses to create a plant community. When neighbor after neighbor—including developers, governments, commercial landowners and property managers—makes this contribution, the local bees, butterflies, birds and myriad other creatures, including humans, reap the rewards of a thriving, intact ecosystem. And Oregon looks like Oregon again.
“We’ve lost the creative imagination to even visualize what this space looked like or could look like,” Kennedy said. “And I think being able to model what this habitat wants to look like is a great way to at least start moving in the direction of bringing more of that habitat back.”
For Kennedy, restoring the urban landscape to something more native is not about trying to turn today into 200 years ago. “We’re losing too much too fast, and these little things impact so much,” he said. Kennedy added that he has been encouraged by the amount of interest in local plants across Oregon.
“I think it’s really cool that we’re in this unique moment right now,” Kennedy said. “There’s this boom and interest that I don’t think has existed to this degree. Ultimately, it’s great for everyone if this can take hold and keep growing. And it lets me keep hanging out with plants.”
