Native Plant Box – 3-Account Campaign Map
Green Thumb Gardens
Will Gibson
Jake Taylor
Cross-account interaction
The thing that keeps pulling me back is the push for more resilient ecosystems. That need has never been in more demand than it is right now.
So Im back. And this time I plan to show all the cobwebs. The trials and tribulations. Not just the cookie cutter version of what we do.
Over the next 20 to 30 days myself, my business partner Jake Taylor and our native plant nursery Green Thumb Gardens are going to be posting across all three of our accounts. Each of us is going to bring a different angle to the same story. We are going to walk through the problems we keep seeing in this space, the solution we spent a long time building, and a movement we genuinely want you to be part of.
If you want the full picture follow all three of us. @GreenThumbGardens @JakeTaylor. There is going to be content across all three accounts that does not repeat so you will want to check in on all of them as we go.
Weve been working behind the scenes on some really cool things we think can help bring nature into every home. More on that very soon.
Want to learn more about our Native Plant Box? Visit our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
Over the next 30 days all three of our accounts are going to walk you through the problems we see in this space, what we built to address them, and where we think this can go. Follow @WillGibson and @JakeTaylor alongside this account. Each of us is covering different ground.
This is the Native Plant Box.
Most people who want to do something good for their yard run into the same wall. They pick out plants that look nice with no real plan. Nothing is designed to work together. Plants end up in the wrong spots. Some do not make it through the first season. After a year or two most people give up.
And what they go back to is turf. Which looks fine but does almost nothing for the pollinators and wildlife that depend on native plants to survive. A standard lawn supports almost no meaningful insect life. No food. No shelter. Just coverage.
We built the Native Plant Box because the gap between wanting to help and knowing how to actually do it was too big and nobody was closing it.
This zero waste product contains everything you need to create healthy habitats in your own yard. Check back in. There is a lot more to come this month.
Want to learn more? Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
No guessing which plants to buy. No standing in a nursery hoping you picked the right ones for your region. No figuring out spacing or placement. No hiring a landscape designer. You follow the plan that comes in the box, plant the 15 plants included with it, and end up with something that actually functions as a habitat.
Weve watched people try to do this on their own for years. The plants they buy were not selected to work together. There is no design. Things end up in the wrong places. Half of what they bought was not even native to their region. A season goes by and it looks rough and they do not know why. That is not a green thumb problem. That is an information and access problem.
That is what we built this to solve.
Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
Will and the GTG account have been laying out the bigger picture this week. I am going to be getting into the details of what we built and why we built it the way we did. Follow all three accounts if you want the full story. @WillGibson @GreenThumbGardens.
This is the Native Plant Box.
The first problem we sat down to figure out was how to offer varying design concepts without printing a separate layout for every one. We are eventually going to have over 30 design concepts and holding individual inventory for each one was never going to work.
The grid system printed on the box is how we solved it. One box, any design. You follow the layout, place the 15 plants that come with it in their designated spots and you are done. No worrying about which plant goes where. No figuring out spacing. No wondering if what you bought is right for your conditions.
Most people who try to build a native garden on their own hit that wall pretty fast. They buy what looks good at the garden center and bring it home with no real plan. That combination of wrong plants and no design is usually where it falls apart.
These are professionally designed native plant layouts that you can install yourself without paying for design or installation services. That combination does not really exist anywhere else right now.
Want to learn more? Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
The green industry develops new plant varieties for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is intellectual property. A breeder who develops a new cultivated variety can apply for a plant patent. That patent gives them exclusive propagation rights and a commercial advantage. So there is real financial incentive to develop new variations and bring them to market at scale.
The problem is how those selections are made and what gets prioritized.
Cultivars are often selected from mutations within a native species. Unusual flower color. Compact mounding form. Extended bloom time. Those traits get isolated, propagated in mass, and sold as improvements. But the traits that made that species valuable to local insects in the first place were not selected for. They were just carried along if they happened to survive the process. And often they do not survive fully intact.
There is also a structural issue with mounding cultivars specifically. A compact mounding plant is not inherently bad. Mixed into a diverse planting it can play a role. But the natural behavior of many native species is to spread. To move through a space over time. To fill gaps. To build the kind of layered community where groundcovers knit together below taller perennials and the whole system starts to function like a habitat rather than a garden bed.
When every species in a planting has been selected to stay put the community cannot build that way. You end up with a collection of individual plants rather than a system.
This is one of the reasons we are selective about what we grow and what goes in our boxes.
Want to learn more about the Native Plant Box? Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
Someone decides they want a native garden. They go to a nursery in late spring or early summer. They walk the benches and buy what looks good that day. What is in bloom. What catches their eye. They bring it home and plant it and it looks decent for a few weeks.
And then it does not look like what they had in their head.
Because what was blooming in June at the nursery was not selected to work with anything else. There was no thought given to what blooms before it or after it. Nothing knitting the ground together underneath it. No sedges. No grasses. Just a handful of showier perennials sitting in mulch with gaps between them.
The sedges and grasses are where most people fall short and they are also the thing most people never think to buy because they are not flashy. But they are what gives a native planting its structure. They hold the ground between the perennials. They move in the wind in a way that reads as natural. They provide texture and coverage through the seasons when the flowering plants are dormant. Without them you do not have a planting. You have a collection of individual plants.
And if you are not thinking about groundcovers the same thing happens at the base of the whole planting. You get bare soil and mulch and eventually weeds because nothing is covering the ground the way a real plant community would.
This is a design problem not a plant problem. And it is why we put a professionally designed layout in every box.
Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
When you source plants from a wide population set you are preserving genetic diversity within that species. The plants grown from seed collected across a large geographic range carry more variation. Different drought tolerances. Different disease resistances. Different timing on bloom and seed set. That variation is what makes a population resilient over time. It is how a species adapts.
A lot of nurseries work in the opposite direction. They identify the expression of a species they like best. The most consistent size. The most reliable bloom. The straightest stem. And they propagate that expression over and over. What you end up with is a population of plants that are essentially identical. The genetic breadth gets narrowed to almost a single expression. That might work fine for a few seasons in a garden but it is not how populations survive in the long run.
You also see this play out in pot size. Cultivars are often grown out in larger container sizes because the genetics support it. A gallon pot sounds like more plant and in some cases it is. But a true native species grown in a gallon container is usually at least a year and a half to two years old. By that point the roots of a genuine native have typically exhausted that pot. You are buying a stressed plant that has been circling its own container.
And then there is the selection problem at the retail level. A lot of nurseries carry the same ten or fifteen reliable sellers. Even if those are true natives they represent a narrow slice of what is actually available and ecologically valuable. When people cannot find what they need they fill the gaps with whatever is on the bench. Non-natives. Cultivars. Things that look close enough. And that is how you end up with a planting that looks native but does not function like one.
This is a big part of why sourcing matters as much as species selection. Both have to be right.
Want to learn more? Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
These are not separate problems. They are connected.
The industry that supplies most home gardeners is built around what moves off the bench. What photographs well. What the average shopper will pick up without asking questions. That system is not designed to produce functioning habitat. It was never intended to. It produces plants that look good in a pot and sells them to people who have no clear path from that pot to something ecologically meaningful in their yard.
That gap is what we have spent years working around as a nursery. We grow from wide population sources. We select for ecological function not just aesthetics. We carry species that do not show up on most top ten lists because they are less showy but do more real work in a planting.
And we built the Native Plant Box to take all of that knowledge and put it directly in the hands of someone who just wants to do something good with their yard. No design fees. No sorting through a bench of cultivars hoping you picked the right thing. No figuring out what goes where or how the planting is supposed to hold together over time.
That is the week one picture. Next week we show you what we built.
Follow @WillGibson and @JakeTaylor for the full story across all three accounts.
Want to learn more? Check out our Kickstarter at https://dtekc.com/n-box/
The Native Plant Box is on Kickstarter right now. I want to tell you what it is as plainly as I can.
It is a box. Inside it you get 15 native plants selected to work together, biodegradable pots that go directly in the ground, and a professionally designed layout that tells you exactly where everything goes. You follow the plan. You plant the plants. You end up with something that actually functions as habitat.
No design fees. No guessing at the garden center. No figuring out spacing or wondering if what you bought is right for your conditions. The decisions have already been made. You just do the install.
We built this because the gap between wanting to help and knowing how to actually do it was too big. Nobody was closing it. We decided to.
If you have been following along this week you know the problems we have been talking about. This is what we built in response to those problems.
Back it. Share it. Tell someone who has a yard and gives a damn.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
I have been part of this from the beginning so I do not have the outsider perspective on it. But I can tell you what it looked like from the inside.
The design problem was the first thing we sat with for a long time. How do you offer enough variety to be useful without making the logistics impossible? The grid system on the box is the answer we landed on. One physical product, dozens of layout options. The plants slot into the grid. The design changes. The box does not.
The plant sourcing took longer. We were not willing to fill boxes with whatever was available on the bench. The plants had to be true natives, sourced from wide population sets, selected for ecological function and not just aesthetics. That standard takes longer to maintain than pulling from a catalog.
The biodegradable pots are something I pushed for specifically. You plant the whole thing. Pot and all. The roots push through as they establish. No transplant shock. No plastic to throw away. It is a small detail that matters a lot over time if you are thinking about scale.
None of this is complicated in concept. The difficulty is in holding the standard at every step and not cutting corners when it would be easier to.
Will and the team did that. I watched it happen.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
15 native plants. Selected together. Designed to function as a system from the first season.
The selection is not random. Every species in the box earns its place based on ecological role. Pollinator support across a long bloom window. Ground layer coverage that suppresses weeds and holds soil. Structural plants that anchor the design through every season including the ones when nothing is in flower.
Biodegradable pots. You plant the whole thing directly into the ground. The pot breaks down. The roots establish without interruption. Zero plastic waste in the process.
A printed design layout. The grid tells you exactly where each plant goes. Spacing is already figured out. Placement decisions have already been made by people who have been designing native plant landscapes for years. You follow the layout.
That is it. Everything you need to put a functioning native habitat in your yard is in the box. Nothing you do not need is in there.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
I have watched people buy good plants and put them in the ground with no plan and wonder why it looks wrong after a year. The plants were fine. The design was missing.
A design plan is not complicated. It is just decisions made in the right order before anything goes in the ground. Which species anchor the planting. Which ones fill the middle layer. What holds the ground at the base. Where the bloom sequence starts in spring and where it carries through to fall. How the whole thing looks in December when nothing is flowering.
Those decisions take years of experience to make well. Or they take following a layout that was made by someone who has that experience.
That is what the design plan in the box is. It is the years of decisions compressed into a single printed layout. You do not need to have figured any of it out. You follow the plan.
That combination of right plants and a real design is what changes the outcome. One without the other usually falls apart.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
The question we kept hearing was whether a smaller pot size would put the plants at a disadvantage. People are used to buying natives in gallon containers and assuming bigger means better established.
What I have seen is the opposite in most cases. A true native in a smaller biodegradable pot that goes directly into the ground with no root disturbance establishes faster than a gallon container plant that has been sitting in plastic long enough to start circling its own roots. The transplant moment is the most stressful thing a plant goes through. Eliminating that stress matters.
Clay soil specifically. I have been watching installs in heavy clay and the root development on the biodegradable pot plants is consistently strong by the end of the first season. They push through. They find the pore spaces. They do what natives do when you stop interrupting them.
The pot disappears. The plant stays. That is the whole point.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
It is not about what photographs well. It is not about what sells reliably at the garden center. It is not about bloom color or plant height or any single trait in isolation.
Every species in the box is evaluated on what it does in a functioning plant community. Does it support specialist pollinators or just generalists? Does it provide larval host plant value? Does it contribute to the ground layer or does it leave bare soil around the base? Does it hold interest through multiple seasons or does it disappear after its bloom window closes?
A plant that does one thing well but nothing else is less valuable in a designed habitat than a plant that does several things across the whole season. That trade-off is built into every species decision.
We also evaluate for what the plants do together. The sequence of bloom. The layering of heights. The coverage at the ground. No species in the box was selected in isolation. They were selected as a system.
That is the standard. It takes longer. It produces better outcomes.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/
You open the box. The layout is printed right on it. You read through the plan once. You pick your spot.
You mark out the footprint. The grid tells you where the anchor plants go first. You dig. You set the biodegradable pot directly in the hole. You do not pull the plant out of anything. The pot goes in the ground whole.
You work through the layout. Each plant has a designated spot. You are not making decisions in the moment. The decisions were already made. You are just following the plan.
A few hours later you are done. What you are looking at is not finished. It is going to look sparse in year one. That is normal and it is fine. Natives establish slowly above ground and fast below it. By year two it fills in. By year three it starts to function the way it was designed to.
You did not need a landscape designer. You did not need a horticulture degree. You needed a plan and the right plants. The box had both.
https://dtekc.com/n-box/