Anyone with a native plant garden has asked themselves this question a time or two before: what is messing with your native plant garden? Maybe you’ve come home to your red columbine flowers and foliage trimmed down to a nub. Or your switchgrass has been plucked straight from the ground and left neatly beside the hole it was once carefully planted into. The mind often wanders to the usual suspects — deer or rabbits. But there are other, less expected visitors that can wreak havoc in the garden.
After our Fall 2025 plant sale, we planted a surplus Sun Seekers Plant Pack here at the BiodiversityWorks office. We shared the same fears about the safety of our young plugs that many of you do — and, being a bunch of wildlife biologists, we devised a plan to catch any plant-munchers or garden-tamperers in the act.
From September 2025 until February 2026, we kept a trail camera aimed at the plugs, posised to catch video of any interlopers in our native plant garden. Our plantings featured a mix of pearly everlasting, stiff aster, sickle-leaved golden aster, silverrod, and downy goldenrod. Capturing video wouldn’t necessarily save our plugs from harm. But it could provide a glimpse into that age-old question.
What is messing with your native plants?
