I agree with Rootdigger as to studying plants on site where there are labels, and the links she has given are very good ones. However, in a class I recently took they recommended Lawrence Newcomb's WILDFLOWER GUIDE and the newer edition of WILDFLOWERS OF NC (Justice,Bell, Lindsey)...but the latter is not arranged in any order, so it is difficult to use, IMHO. We also used Dr. Jon Stucky's KEY TO FAMILES AND GENERA OF NATIVE AND NATURALIZED WINTER & SPRING FLOWERING HERBS, VINES, &SHRUBS OF THE RALEIGH AREA, which was fairly easy to use. Since Sqftgarden is in western NC, some of the TN books would also be good. Again, going to gardens where there are labels helped me more than the books did several years ago when I first seriously tried to learn names of these wonderful natives. After seeing them in the garden setting, then I walked around in the mountains and here in the Piedmont and tried to apply what I saw in those gardens and in the books. I am still trying to learn...I keep noticing things that I had not seen before. Oh, if you join NCNPS, you can also join one of the local groups. The Greensboro area group has its own website, and folks often post photos of things for ID.

Kizzyseeds, I'm sorry but I don't harvest the seeds of the woodland plants. I don't think that you will find that the Monarchs use goldenseal anyway. They blossom in spring and even the seeds are gone by the time Monarchs begin to show up around here. My place is just buzzing with them today. Lovely sight! I don't mean to discourage you from planting goldenseal but it does need pretty specific conditions to thrive. It needs a rich dry woods to grow. It doesn't even survive here if I move it down to the gardens. spiderwoman

A twig of a tree will be that size after just 4 yrs. They sound like small trees to me. My parents (*sigh*) have one that is probably 25 ft tall. Produces lots of little pears too. It doesn't cast much, if any of what I'd call shade. Last year I dug out a 15 ft tall Norway Maple here in my yard. It wasn't hard and in it's place is now a Catalpa. It's almost the same size and I only paid $20 for it. A Chinquapin Oak (Quercus muehlenbergii) planted as a small tree, can grow 2 to 4 ft a year. It sounds like your husband is trying to convince himself to keep the pears...the neighbors have them, nurseries sell them (which always reminds me of my parents and their question if somebody else had something and I wanted it, if they jumped off a bridge, would I?) shade, trees take too long to grow etc etc. You can also argue that some day those trees are going to be a lot bigger than they are right now and will be harder to take down. Unless they do what they're known to do and just fall apart at 20 yrs of age. At 8 or 10 ft. your husband and a chainsaw can take care of them easily. And of course this is all just my opinion...;)

John Diekelmann's Natural Landscaping with Native Plant Communities has great lists organized by type of forest. The presence of a few oaks could give you a justification to go with the oak-hickory forest community, which is a fascinating group of plants (since the oak-hickory forest covered such a large area, the species that grew/grow in it change from place to place, but certain plants are widespread throughout -- Maianthemum canadense comes to mind). A Sierra Club field guide I have goes even further to divide oak-hickory forest into upper slope (drier, sunnier), mid-slope, and low slope (wetter, shadier) communities. The wild black cherry (Prunus serotina) is identified in one of my books as a common pioneer of post-agricultural land. I don't think it is a major component of any of the mature forests, but it plays a crucial role in the transition from plowed fields (which most of non-Pine Barrens New Jersey was at one time or another) back to forest. The maples, especially red maple, may be indicators of a maple-beech forest, which tends to be moister than an oak-hickory forest. (Of course these designations are generalities -- there are maples in oak-hickory forests and oaks in maple-beech forests, etc., as Elaine was saying -- the scientists need to simplify reality to do their work, but reality is always much more complicated.) Make sure the maples are natives. Acer plantanoides (Norway maple) is an invasive non-native that sends thousands of seeds out every year, and will soon turn a lovely wooded area into a densely shaded monoculture where nothing will grow in the parched soil (from which the zillions of surface feeder roots have extracted every bit of moisture). If your 50% maples are Norway maples, I would ignore them in deciding what kind of forest community to use as your guide. One last thought before I overstay my welcome: one of the best ways to find out what natives are appropriate for your woodland is to find woodlands in your area (state parks, bird sanctuaries, preservation land, bike trails) that have similar characteristics to your property -- how dry/wet is it, how much sun does it get, etc. Bring a field guide or two (make sure the guides identify natives vs. non-natives, or 'aliens') and start figuring out what natives are growing there. This will not only give you ideas about what to plant, but also where to plant (this one likes being on the edge of the trail -- it needs some sun; this one only appears when the trail dips into a lower area -- it like wet legs; this one always seems to cluster around the base of trees; etc.) and what plants look good (i.e., natural) together. It may get you thinking about types of plants and other garden features you hadn't thought about, like club mosses, fallen logs or the look of a vine climbing a tree trunk. Perhaps most importantly, these walks will help you acquire 'forest think', which Elaine described and most of the landscaping books discuss: upper canopy, lower canopy, shrub layer, herbaceous layer. (Rick Darke's The Woodland Garden has some excellent discussion of the 'big picture' aesthetics of woodland gardens, although he doesn't fully take the approach of picking a forest type and planting within that community.) ok, I'll stop (can you tell I love talking about this stuff?) Best of luck, -- wd