Kicking off the New Year with Northern New Jersey Native Garden

Native Gardening Series | Part 1

A new year is the perfect time to rethink your landscape and start building a garden that’s beautiful, resilient, and ecologically valuable. For gardeners in Northern New Jersey, native plants offer a powerful way to support pollinators, birds, and local ecosystems while reducing maintenance, watering, and chemical inputs.

But where do you begin?

Start with Your Ecoregion

An ecoregion defines an area where climate, soils, landforms, and native plant communities all developed together over time. Understanding your ecoregion helps you choose plants that are not just native to your state, but naturally adapted to your specific landscape. When plants match their ecoregion, they establish more easily, require less maintenance, and form stronger relationships with local insects, birds, and wildlife. Designing within your ecoregion creates gardens that are more resilient, more ecologically valuable, and better aligned with the natural systems that already exist around you.

Before choosing plants, it’s essential to understand your ecoregion. Northern New Jersey spans several ecological zones within the Eastern Temperate Forest, including Piedmont, Ridge & Valley, and Highlands regions. Knowing your ecoregion helps ensure the plants you choose are truly adapted to your site, not just “native to New Jersey” in a broad sense.

Tools to Identify Your Ecoregion & Native Species

These trusted resources help you ground your garden planning in science and ecology:

• Homegrown National Park – Ecoregion Finder
  Enter your ZIP code to identify your EPA ecoregion and explore keystone native plants that support the greatest number of insects and birds.

• bplant.org
  Search native plants by ecoregion, not political boundaries — a critical step for ecological landscape design and habitat restoration.

• BONAP (Biota of North America Program)
  Use county-level plant distribution maps to confirm whether a species is truly native to Northern New Jersey and your specific region.

Together, these tools help you move beyond generic plant lists and build a garden rooted in local ecology, biodiversity, and long-term sustainability.

What’s Next?

Now that you know where you are ecologically, the next step is refining your plant list based on garden goals and design needs — like bloom color, mature size, sun exposure, and hardiness.

Starting the year with native plants isn’t just a gardening resolution — it’s an investment in healthier landscapes, stronger ecosystems, and a more abundant Northern New Jersey.