Certain popular garden plants are invasive, yet legal to sell. But some businesses opt not to

Anna Ohler stands under a wooden pergola full of hanging baskets for sale, when she sees one that shouldn’t be there.

“Actually take this one out,” she says, pulling the basket down. “This has creeping Jenny in it.”

Ohler co-owns Bright Lane Gardens, a plant nursery in Lake Ann. And creeping Jenny is a plant the nursery has committed to not sell.

“There’s a special way to dispose of it. Because if I were to just dump this [basket] in the woods, [the creeping jenny] would literally take off,” Ohler says.

Creeping Jenny is a green vine that looks nice and spreads fast, but it’s also invasive. Despite that, it’s still sold and distributed in Michigan.

It’s also popular for hanging baskets, spilling over the sides. Bright Lane Gardens’ supplier accidentally added the plant to their order during a busy spring season. Ohler decided not to send it back when it was delivered.

“We bought it fair and square. We accepted it.," Ohler says. "We’ll take the loss on it and we’ll dispose of it appropriately. But that’s not one that we’ll sell."

Many popular decorative plants are not native to Michigan, like hydrangeas, daffodils and Japanese maples. But those species don’t really cause harm to the environment.

Invasive species spread like crazy — beyond just the bounds of the garden — and do cause harm to the environment. And a lot of the time, the qualities that make these plants problematic also make them attractive to gardeners.

Take creeping Jenny, for example: It’s used as ground cover because it spreads quickly, creating thick green mats. It’s hardy, and can produce bright flowers.

Shelly Stusick is with the Northwest Michigan Invasive Species Network.

“When we think, ‘Oh, they have perfect leaves, nothing's eating my plants.’ Yeah, because they didn't co-evolve with our native fauna and pollinators, so they don't really recognize [invasive plants] as food in the same way that they do our native plants,” Stusick said.

Stusick says many popular invasive garden plants degrade habitat. They can choke out native plants and the pollinators and animals that rely on them.

Despite that, many of these plants are legal to buy and sell.

“I think there's a conception for business owners, and just the general community, that if a plant was invasive, the state would regulate it,” Stusick said. “They just assume that would happen — and that would happen immediately.”

But that’s not always the case.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development are both largely responsible for regulating invasive species. But they say the regulation process is long, and it's difficult to keep up with every invasive species.

So the Northwest Michigan Invasive Species Network has worked on solving the problem another way, through a program called Go Beyond Beauty.

“For Go Beyond Beauty, we have our top 14 invasive ornamental plant species,” said Stusick, who coordinates the program. “These are the species that are still kind of actively for sale that participants of the Go Beyond Beauty program have committed to not use or sell.”

In return, Stusick says, participants receive recognition online and in their stores or gardens.

There’s been a lot of demand, she says. Go Beyond Beauty started in four northwest Michigan counties and is now expanding statewide to other Cooperative Invasive Species Management Areas, or CISMAs.

Bright Lane Gardens is part of the program.

When she and her husband first opened their business five seasons ago, she says they unknowingly sold a few invasive plants. Now, they have an entire hoop house dedicated just to native garden plants.

But she says selling them can be challenging.

“As you can see, there’s only one thing that has a flower on it,” Ohler says as she picks up a plant with yellow blooms. “And that is this coreopsis over here.”

She says it’s one of a handful of native plants they sell that blooms this early in the season. Other native plants don’t flower until later in the summer, and they aren’t grown in a heated hoop house that causes them to bloom artificially early.

Flowerless plants can be a tough sell for customers looking for plants with big, showy blossoms as soon as gardening picks up in the spring.

“From a native plant perspective, it's harder to sell these,” Ohler says as she gestures to other native plants. “All you can see as a little bit of green above the soil, [so] it's hard to understand what they'll look like as mature plants.”

To solve that problem, Bright Lane Gardens has created educational Youtube videos, a blog and store signage to show what the mature native plants will look like — and what ecological benefits they could have.

Ohler says it’s made a difference. Bright Lane has carried coreopsis – that plant with the early yellow flowers – for a few years. But it wasn’t a hot seller until recently.

“Once we told people it was native and talked about some of the benefits that it could have for the soil, for the environment, for the birds and the insects — they sold like hotcakes,” Ohler said. “This is our last one left.”

People, as she puts it, “go crazy” over native plants. And as the word gets out about their benefits, she says she only expects that demand to grow.