You Love Your Native Garden. But Will Buyers Love It Too?

“For homeowners who have ‘rewilded’ their gardens into mini nature preserves, a moment of truth arrives when they prepare to sell.

 

Laura McCaffrey, a real estate agent in the Washington D.C. metro area, was confused last June when she first saw her client Evan Morier’s garden beds. They were full of densely planted native pollinators like anise hyssop, black-eyed Susans and echinacea.

 

Two years earlier, she’d helped Mr. Morier buy the three-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style home in Silver Spring, Md., with a big, flat backyard that was perfect for a swing set. But he’d replaced much of the lawn with trees like American persimmon, sweetbay magnolia and redbud, shrubs like ninebark and spicebush, and up to 100 species of perennials and grasses with high wildlife value.

 

“I spent so much time just standing out there staring at plants and bugs and birds that had found this habitat that I had restored in my backyard,” Mr. Morier said.

 

Now he was readying his house for sale, and Ms. McCaffrey thought the garden looked weedy and unkempt. “I’ve just never seen a native garden before, or whatever you call it,” she said. “So to me it was a little overwhelming. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna be a problem.’ If it was my own house, I would have ripped it all out and grassed it over.”

 

Native-plant gardeners committed to rewilding their yards fear this moment.

 

Many wonder if their real estate agent will push them to replace wildlife-friendly columbine, bee balm and milkweed with water-guzzling sod, black mulch and boxwoods that aren’t beneficial for the local fauna. In one recent sale in Montclair, N.J., a native-plant gardener was shocked to see that her broker had photoshopped a green lawn in place of her wild garden on a sales brochure.

 

But even if brokers are unfamiliar with native wildflower lawns and backyard habitats, gardeners are pushing back against staging their properties in traditional ways — and they’re still making sales at or above market rates.

 

Mr. Morier was concerned that there were a lot of houses coming on the market in his area. He wanted to sell his house quickly, so he agreed to bring in professional landscapers to edge his flower beds and replace leaf litter with wood mulch for the sale. He insisted on doing the weeding himself to make sure that volunteer native plants like aromatic asters and violets would remain.

 

He said he didn’t mind giving the home “a little more mass appeal” by making his garden conform to local standards.

 

Some ecological gardeners share their home listings with local and regional native-plant groups in an effort to attract a like-minded buyer who will value the property and perhaps preserve it. Mr. Morier thought his best bet was to listen to his real estate agent’s gentle advice.

 

But he was also thinking about what would happen after the sale. Would his sustainable garden be sustained by the new owner?

 

“I came to terms with the fact that my garden would have a better chance surviving if someone who enjoyed it and thought it looked attractive bought the place and saw a lot of value in it,” he said.

 

Mr. Morier accepted an offer that was $20,000 over list price before the first open house. The buyers said the garden was a selling point and asked for a list of plants before they moved in. Mr. Morier provided it, along with a month-by-month guide to maintaining the garden.

 

Ms. McCaffrey came to appreciate Mr. Morier’s garden — she now calls it “gorgeous” — and his dedication to the environment. “This was an education to me,” she said, “that he was so passionate about it.”

 

Even if a lawn conversion might be confusing to some brokers or buyers, Vanessa Pollock, a real estate agent in North Jersey, expects this will soon change. Her children, in their teens and early 20s, have recently been lecturing her about the evils of lawn culture and asking her to turn her front yard into a meadow to help offset species extinction, flood risks and rising temperatures.

 

Ms. Pollack works in a highly competitive sellers’ market, and though neatly clipped lawns are still the norm in her area, sustainable gardens have featured in some impressive recent sales.

 

Take the six-bedroom, three-bath house that Ms. Pollack recently sold in South Orange, N.J. The half-acre property featured a free-form native-plant meadow in the front yard and a deep backyard with mature shade trees and a fenced vegetable garden with 10 beds. The owner, Adriana Compagnoni, was a local beekeeper who insisted on leaving the leaves on the ground to nurture the soil and protect moths, butterflies, bees and fireflies as she prepared for her sale.

 

“I was really intentional to market the house to highlight the different seasons of the gardens and the trees, and to showcase all the different flowers and highlight that it was organic,” Ms. Pollock said.

 

She said the house had multiple offers in one weekend and sold for $1.75 million, $500,000 over the list price, in March of 2025.

 

The new owner, Arielle Stanford, is a devoted native-plant gardener who said the mature shrubs and trees on the pesticide-free property were a huge draw. And though she has ripped up the meadow on the front lawn, she says she’s rescued the precious plants and is planning to return them to the ground after she completes some hard-scaping and invasive weed removal to create a more orderly yard.

 

In the spring of 2024, Vincent Amato sold his three-bedroom, three-bath home in Maplewood, N.J., for $1.15 million after seven days on the market listed at $879,000.

 

The house was built in 1868 and didn’t have much closet space. But it had an acre of land where Mr. Amato, an actor and sculptor, had spent eight years creating a native-plant sanctuary that he called “the Meadow in the Woods.” He sought out rare local ecotypes and learned the Lenape names for his plants. He allowed many perennials to grow to soaring heights not often seen in suburban gardens.

 

“I don’t believe that you really own the land,” said Mr. Amato. “ I do it for the nature, so there is a little rectangle that thrives.”

 

In a nod to convention, he kept his front lawn neat and lined the sidewalk with trimmed American hazelnut shrubs. Before the open house, he mowed and mulched paths for walking through his mini-forest and meadow, and displayed a hand-painted guide to the garden along with large photos of ladybugs mating on his milkweed and a monarch perched on wood asters.

 

The new owners, Hayley and Samantha Watson, have kept the laminated version of the garden map Mr. Amato left them, along with a copy of Doug Tallamy’s book, “Bringing Nature Home” — a sort of bible of the backyard ecology movement.

 

But they’ve also made some changes. “The amount of land this close to the city — we couldn’t believe it,” Hayley Watson said. “We’re adapting it to fit our lifestyle.”

 

The Watsons cleared part of the rewilded grounds to make way for a swath of lawn where their two sons could play soccer. And they nestled a swing set behind the barn that Mr. Amato used as his art studio.

 

They also bought a riding lawn mower to trim their new grass.

 

Meanwhile, Mr. Amato is already busy creating a another habitat at his new home in Connecticut. “This is a different soil, so it’s a different adventure,” he said. “I like it.”” [1]

 

1. You Love Your Native Garden. But Will Buyers Love It Too? Graham, Jessie.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 10, 2026.