Passport to Texas

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Fall is a fantastic time to renew your landscape, but be careful what you plant.

A lot of times we’ll go into the businesses [garden center], and we see a plant that’s labeled ‘well-adapted’. Well, a lot of those well-adapted plants are actually highly invasive in our Texas
environment. There’s a movement afoot to do something about it – to cut down on their use.

Mark Klym oversees the Wildscape program at Texas Parks and Wildlife. He says well-adapted, yet invasive species create problems.

Those plants include things like privet, red-tipped photinia, ligustrum, pyrocantha.

While these species may show up in bird books as ideal plants to use in bird attracting garden…

Be careful with them. They are highly invasive; all across the US people are complaining about them in the landscape because they create a monoculture out there, and eliminate a lot of our native plants. And without our native plants, we could lose a lot of our native wildlife.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife website has a native plant database where you can find plants for your landscape that will benefit wildlife.

Just because it does look great in a landscape, and you do see a couple of birds sitting on them – I got one of my favorite pictures of a Costas Hummingbird sitting in privet down in Rockport – but, that doesn’t mean that’s a good plant for us to use in our garden.

That’s our show for today… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

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