By the way........ I have noticed that "invasive" does not mean the same thing as "native." The distinction here is that anything that crowds out NATIVE plants in Oklahoma is not a good thing. Native plants here are what sustain the environment here--the wildlife/birds/butterflies/bees who have inhabited our neighborhood. Any plant/flower/tree that crowds out our natives, affects our entire ecosystem. I think I always thought of invasive as plants or flowers or trees that took over a yard/area. And so that's why I was careful of them (especially mints and buckthorns!), but now I have become aware of the more important danger--which is that some things crowd out our native vegetation. So every time I order a new plant or flower or shrub or tree, I check with the Oklahoma Native Plant Society. There are many invasive species which are non-native. And there are natives which may be invasive. Makes sense to me.

Don't forget all the wonderful gifts from Japan (Japanese Honeysuckle, Kudzu,etc). Their climate is so similar to ours, that many things thrive...and w/o anything to maintain control...invade.

I will agree with what your post seems to say. While native, some plants don't make good garden plants because they err, well shall we say overcompensate?

I'd include red cedars on that list, silver maples, elms, buffalo gourds, for some natives that I can think about off top of my head.

They're not bad for the environment (except cedar maybe), but they are bad neighbors at the least.

Yes, tap into your native plants resources. I belong to the Arkansas chapter myself.

My yard contains arrowwood viburnum, sweet bay magnolia, american fringe tree, beauty berry, native honeysuckle (lonicera canadensis), coneflowers, mealy sage, coreopsis, helianthus, cardinal flower lobelia, lobelia sylphitica, amsonia, marsh mallow/hibiscus, poppy mallows, rudbeckias, well I could go on and on. They provide nice color, bird fodder, nectar for pollinator insects, etc. As a general rule, they're also well fitted to my environment and thrive mostly without care. Certainly not intensive care like rhododendrons would require in my area (one of those..hard to make thrive plants for the area).

I'm not an absolute purist, I have some highlight plants that are not native, but well suited and will never spread into the environment (african crinum lilies, himalayan clumping bamboo/fargesia rufa).

I am utterly surrounded by privet and wage daily war with it (and it's winning due to the influx of berries from birds and neighbors that keep PLANTING that stuff), japanese honeysuckle. I cut down the bradford pear, but that genie is out of the bottle. I've eliminated the multiflora roses from the fenceline.

I guess Tahlequah's climate must help control Mimosa. We have a few. But they certainly don't appear to be crowding anything out. I had one sprout in a garden in front of our house. Having great memories of the mimosa my parents had, in NJ, I left it. It's now quite large and affords a soft shade, which is very welcome. It's been there for about 6 years now, and I find a volunteer or two every year. But they are easily eliminated. I've spotted a couple volunteers, about 1/2 mile down the road, where someone used to have a Mimosa tree. But they never seem to get past four or five feet tall before they are cut down. Wherever we don't have pasture, we have woods. The Mimosa can't compete in the shade of the woods. And, I believe grazing animals must favor them. So, they don't invade the pastures.

We had a big honeysuckle problem when we first moved here. But goats like honeysuckle.

We have 14.4 acres of mostly native plants and have worked hard to remove invasive plants from it. In our earlier years, I spent literally all day every day in the winter season working in our woodland acres to remove invasive plants, particularly non-native ones. We'll never get rid of all the cedars, for example, but most winters I removed hundreds and hundreds of young ones that had just sprouted during the most recent growing season. Still, there's no way to cut down the 60'+ tall ones that grow as thick as grass on our back acre. If you cut one down it just leans over and rests on the one beside it because they are too close together for a cut tree to fall to the ground, making it dangerous to do any further work back there, and there's no way to get a backhoe or other large equipment back to that back acre to clear it without damaging a lot of the desirable trees that lie between the civilized part of our landscape where the house is and that back acre filled with huge old cedars. I keep hoping a little tornado will rip through that acre, somehow missing our house and our neighbor's homes, and take out that acre of thick, old-growth cedars but it probably is not going to happen.

I found Japanese honeysuckle about 10 acres away from the house and removed it (over and over again) in the mid-2000s. The horrific drought of 2011 finished it off for me. Greenbrier is a huge challenge as it roams and rambles freely through our woodland and constantly invades our flower beds and gardens. We'll never be rid of it, but I dig down about 15" in our garden to hand-dig and remove as much of the greenbrier as I can. It takes forever to dig down deeply into the red clay that lies beneath the improved garden soil, but I spend the time doing it so I can reach the big tubers that nourish the greenbrier. I spent years and years digging out the nut sedge in the same way---digging deeply enough to get the nutlets. I fight invasive plants like ragweed and Johnson grass constantly too, merely hoping to keep them from taking over areas filled with more desirable native grasses and forbs.

I don't grow only natives, but I keep the non-natives confined to the fenced garden and the area immediately adjacent to it. Natives constantly pop up in my garden (including an American beautyberry bush that popped up in the fenceline) and I leave them there when I can. We have dozens, if not hundreds, of American beautyberry bushes growing as understory plants in our woodland and I love them, but I never would have chosen to plant one on purpose in the fenceline that separates the garden from the driveway. I suppose the birds planted that one for me. I haven't had a problem with anything I've planted getting out of hand and invading an area outside the garden. Probably this is because our frequent prolonged droughts kill off any non-natives that start getting a big head and thinking they can survive indefinitely in Oklahoma.

I'll always have a mimosa because of the reasons I mentioned in a different thread. Mine is planted right beside my garden and has been there for about a decade or maybe a little longer. I was worried it would drop seeds and produce gazillions of seedlings. Well, it hasn't. Maybe it is because my garden is heavily mulched or maybe some insect or small animals eats all the seeds after they fall to the ground, but in all the years we've had this tree, a total of three seedlings have appeared, and all three died in the extraordinary rainfall and flooding of 2015-1016. I was disappointed by that because I was going to dig them up and plant them outisde the garden somewhere. The largest one was only a little over a foot tall. I've never seen a mimosa pop up in the wildland around us, so I guess the birds aren't planting those seeds anywhere either. Up at the north end of our rural road, in a neighborhood of homes probably built in the 1970s, there are several homes with gigantic mimosa trees that are much larger than ours. The trees look like they're probably at least 30 years old, and all of them already were large, well-established trees when we bought our land here in 1997. I've never seen any volunteer mimosa from those trees pop up in the bar ditches or pastures near that neighborhood which does surprise me too as I figured they'd reseed vigorously. I watched those trees carefully for 6 or 8 years before I planted my own mimosa because I wanted to see if they were producing invasive seedlings. They weren't and they still aren't. Again, it may be our roasting hot summers and lack of rainfall most years that keep mimosas from reproducing freely here.

There is some privet here in southern OK---I noticed some yesterday (not on our property), but we get so many large, fast-moving winter wildfires that sometimes large stands of it get burned out in a wildfire and don't return. Many property owners here do prescribed burning of their acreage every year to help keep invasive plants from taking over their fields and woodlands, but too many times these fires escape control and burn hundreds or thousands of acres belonging to other people. That is frustrating, especially when the fires destroy homes and other structures, rancher's hay bales they have set aside for winter food for their cattle, etc.

When we first moved here, I drove my poor husband crazy with my insistence that he mow around the native wildflowers when cutting the grass. It took him a long, long time to get on board with the idea that even if the tall pasture grasses needed to be cut to reduce fire danger and keep some of the wildlife away from the couple of civilized acres nearest the house that the wildflowers needed to stay. Now he's pretty good about mowing around the wildflowers. I love watching the wildflowers over the years. They ebb and flow depending on what the weather does. Some years certain ones dominate the fields and reproduce like crazy, and then in a different sort of weather year they fade away and don't do well at all but some other species dominate in those years. We leave all the native grasses and forbs standing for as long as we can in winter time before we finally are forced by the winter wildfire season to mow for the sake of slowing down wildfire if it spreads onto our property. So far we haven't mowed down the pastures yet, and we really need to because fire season has begun in earnest now. We're having wildfires even on days when the wildfire risk is 'low' and heaven help us all on the days when it is elevated, high, very high or extreme. Today or tomorrow might be a good day to get that mowing done. Some cool season weeds (one person's weeds are another person's wildflowers) that have sprouted still are low to the ground so we could mow down all the dry, dormant vegetation without harming the young green growth of the shorter plants.

Long ago I decided to stop planting non-native shrubs and things around our house. Almost all the trees (except for the fruit trees we planted) that now shade our once-sunny yard are native oaks we dug up and transplanted from the woodland shortly after moving here. When persimmons, wild grapes, sumac, prickly pear or wild plums sprout in the yard, I leave them where they've chosen to grow. We have far too many possumhaw hollies in our yard because they sucker and form groves, but I leave them there so the birds have their berries in winter. We have wild sunflowers growing all over the place in summer and I won't cut them down either, no matter where they pop up. Our landscape never will win a landscaper's prize for beauty, but when I look out the window and see the birds and other wild things feasting on and living in the native plants, I'm glad we choose to let those native plants grow where they belong. If I plant something in our landscape on purpose, I chose a native plant as often as I can. Inside the fenced garden, though, I grow whatever I choose, native or not, and enjoy it. The natives have virtually free reign over 95% of our property, but the small percentage of our land that is within my fenced garden spots....that's mine. Still, despite my best efforts to exert some control within the fenced garden area, plenty of natives pop up in there and I often leave them there. I even let henbit stay inside the garden as long as it is blooming, and I leave it so it can feed the little flying creatures that visit the garden. Persimmons are taking over the northwest end of the back garden. That's life. Even if I dig them up and transplant them into the pasture outside the garden, more pop up the next year, so that's sort of a losing battle anyway. Someday my back garden likely will be reduced to being nothing more than a native persimmon grove growing withing a really nice, tall garden fence covered in orange-flowering trumpet creeper vine. It won't be full of elms and hackberries though because I remove those as soon as they pop up.

It is possible to have a blend of natives and non-natives, but you have to choose your non-natives carefully so that they don't turn into invasive monsters. I personally think Bradford pears are beautiful for that couple of weeks they are in bloom in Spring, but if I had my druthers, I'd go out and cut down all of them regardless. They're weak trees and don't last all that long and are occupying space where higher-quality, longer-lived native trees could be growing. I'd rather have a native plum growing in the yard than a Bradford pear.

How much trouble anyone has with invasive non-natives in this region can depend a great deal on natural rainfall rates and also can vary depending on what sort of soil one has. The lower the rainfall in any given year, the less I see non-natives spreading and running amok in our area, and we're generally on the short side of the rainfall equation. After two or three back-to-back drought years, a lot of the non-natives virtually disappear unless they're in a yard that's being irrigated. In 2011 and the couple of dry years that followed it, plenty of natives disappeared as well, but they have been faster to rebound here.

I'm not a native plant purist at all, but I try to let them stay wherever they appear unless there is a reason that I shouldn't. However, I do look at some people's high-maintenance lawns and landscapes and bemoan the fact (silently, to myself) that I don't see a single native plant left to feed the wildlife. While their yards and landscape might look very pleasing to the human eye, to me they are eyesores because there's nothing there to feed the wild things. Everyone seems to love having hummingbirds and butterflies around, for example, but then so many people don't plant anything that will feed them. That drives me nuts.

Dawn

Thanks much for your excellent feedback, everyone Will take a few minutes to get through your posts! Like you, I am not a purist, but am continuing with the reading and will be watchful for the nasty ones. . . yes, I signed up for the OK Native Plants Society,