In addition to all their other great attributes, growing native plants in the home landscape can increase a gardener’s appreciation and understanding of the natural world around us. Although taken out of their natural context in which they have complex relationships with native flora and fauna, native plants in a garden provide gardeners an opportunity to observe up close their remarkable adaptive traits and their relationships with pollinators. Just as native plants are well adapted to the climate, elevation, latitude, and other challenging factors for Wyoming gardeners, native pollinators (bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, flies, beetles, and more) are perfectly built for the environment and the plants of Wyoming. Pollinators move pollen grains from one flower to another, making fertilization, seed production, and seed dispersal possible. Without pollinators, we would face a world without many flowers—and without many of the foods that sustain us.

All plants are native to somewhere, so it’s important to define what native means in this context. Limiting the definition to ‘within-Wyoming’ would eliminate many desirable plants that approach Wyoming’s borders and do well in Wyoming gardens. Such a definition might also imply that any plant that grows in Wyoming will be a perfect plant in every garden across the state—a statement we know to be untrue. Wyoming geography encompasses a wide range of climates; a plant native to the wetter mountains in northwest Wyoming may do poorly on the dry, windswept plains of the southeast (where a native Colorado plant may do well). For the purposes of this publication, we use a wider geographic region encompassing much of western North America as our source of native plants, but we have also noted those that are native to our state.