How we choose your plants

Most native-plant lookups give one list per ZIP code or region, so two homes a mile apart get the same answer. We check each plant against your exact address, and it has to pass every test:

Native to your county

California runs from redwood forest to open desert, so “California native” isn’t enough.

Recorded growing wild near you

A herbarium specimen must show it growing wild close by, or farther off in the same ecoregion at a similar elevation. Garden plantings don’t count.

Suited to your site

Your elevation, soil, rainfall and temperature must fit what the plant tolerates in the wild.

Sold by nurseries

We list only plants that California’s native-plant nurseries carry.

A Palm Springs list leads with mesquite and has no oaks. A Sacramento list has valley oak and no redwoods.

Near the coast, we also leave milkweed off the list. The Xerces Society asks people not to plant it there, because it can keep monarchs from wintering normally.

Our county ranges began as AI research, cross-checked between independent models. We then tested them against floras, herbarium specimens and field surveys, and removed what the evidence didn’t support.

Every plant gets a wildlife value from 1 to 100, and each section of your list runs from highest to lowest. A typical California native scores about 50. Half the score compares a plant with every native in our catalog, and half with plants of its own type, because an oak and a bunchgrass do different jobs.

Caterpillars

Counts most. Songbirds raise their young on caterpillars, so we count the native moths and butterflies recorded on the plant’s genus.

Shelter

Cover and nest sites for birds, nesting for native bees, and places for insects to spend the winter.

Pollinators

The range of insects that visit its flowers, plus nectar for hummingbirds.

Fruit & seeds

Acorns, nuts, berries and seeds for birds.

Soil

Holding slopes, fixing nitrogen and covering bare ground.

Specialist bees

Native bees that depend on the plant for pollen.

Off-season blooms

Flowers and fruit in the lean months, from late summer through winter.

A plant also earns credit for feeding the caterpillars of a butterfly that is federally protected or proposed for protection, such as the monarch.

Read the score as a guide: two plants a few points apart are about equal.

• We make a shortlist, not a landscape design. It doesn’t replace a landscape designer, an arborist or fire-safety planning.
• We’re carefully filtered and actively corrected, not perfect. If a plant looks wrong for your site, every plant in your report has a link to tell us.
• The score sees only what has been recorded. Well-studied plants have more records, and it can’t see what already grows around you.
• Desert and high-Sierra reports have had less testing than the rest of California. Where almost nothing qualifies, we say so rather than force a list.

Your land

EPA ecoregions, U.S. Census county boundaries, USDA NRCS soil surveys, USGS elevation, water and watershed data, public Terrain Tiles on AWS (Tilezen; USGS 3DEP, SRTM and others), PRISM climate normals, the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, NOAA climate normals, CAL FIRE fire hazard zones and Mapbox imagery.

Native ranges and plant facts

Jepson eFlora, Calflora, CNPS Calscape, BONAP, USDA PLANTS, NatureServe, GBIF and the Consortium of California Herbaria.

Wildlife

Shropshire & Tallamy 2025, Jarrod Fowler’s Pollen Specialist Bees of the Western United States, GloBI, National Wildlife Federation keystone plants, the Xerces Society, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the USFS Fire Effects Information System and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Nurseries and photos

CNPS Calscape and its nursery directory. Photos come from iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons under their Creative Commons licenses, with the photographer credited on each image.

Caterpillar food-plant records: Shropshire & Tallamy (2025), ZooKeys, Open Database License. Our California extract is offered under the same licence: the moths and butterflies and their host genera, the counts by genus and how the counts are made.