Native Plants of the Texas High Plains for Your Garden
Plants native to the High Plains are already built for our soil, heat, wind, and water. They are the easiest, most rewarding choices for a Lubbock garden.
The plants that grow wild across the Llano Estacado have spent thousands of years adapting to exactly the conditions that frustrate gardeners here: little rain, big temperature swings, alkaline soil, and constant wind. Bring those native plants into your yard and you get beauty and habitat with a fraction of the fuss. Natives are, quite simply, the easiest plants to grow well in Lubbock.
Why plant natives
Once established, native plants need little supplemental water, no coddling, and almost no fertilizer, because they are matched to our soil and climate. They also support the local web of life in a way exotic ornamentals cannot, feeding native bees, butterflies, and birds that evolved alongside them. The result is a garden that is lower maintenance, more resilient through drought, and far more alive.
Native wildflowers
For color, High Plains wildflowers are hard to beat. Blanketflower (gaillardia) blooms in fiery red and gold all summer. Purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, Maximilian sunflower, and winecup bring long seasons of bloom, and prairie verbena carpets the ground in purple. Many reseed themselves, gradually filling in and naturalizing so the planting gets fuller and easier over time.
Native grasses
The short and mixed-grass prairie is the signature landscape of this region, and its grasses make superb, low-water ornamentals. Little bluestem offers blue-green summer color and coppery fall tones, sideoats grama is the Texas state grass and a fine-textured beauty, and buffalograss and blue grama can form a tough, low-water native lawn. Grasses anchor a native planting and give it year-round structure.
Shrubs and trees
For larger structure, native and regionally adapted woody plants do the job: fragrant sumac, Apache plume, cenizo, and desert willow among shrubs and small trees, and tougher natives for shade. These provide cover and food for wildlife and the framework a garden needs. Several appear in our shade tree guide as well.
Gardening for pollinators
A native planting is a pollinator garden almost by default. Combine a few spring, summer, and fall bloomers so something is always flowering, add native grasses for shelter and as host plants, skip the pesticides, and leave some seed heads and stems standing through winter. You will be rewarded with butterflies, native bees, and birds, and the garden will largely take care of itself.
Getting started with natives
Start with a handful of proven performers, plant in fall or spring, and water through the first season while roots establish. Native plant sales, regional nurseries, and the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension are good local sources and guidance, and our roundup of where to buy plants in Lubbock can point you in the right direction. Combine natives with the principles in our xeriscaping guide for a yard that is both water-wise and full of life.