Grace, I love your post. Here in my neighborhood, no. Not only is there no native interest, there are few people who actually garden at all. Many neighbors who have grass from lot line to lot line and mow and that's it. It's an older neighborhood and some developers are buying property and knocking it down and building new homes. The town evidently has relaxed whatever zoning laws they had because these homes have a big footprint on small lots and there's barely a yard or a place to put a shrub or two.

I've been gardening organically since 1980 and became aware of the native question in the early 2000s. I was redoing my landscape starting in 2004 maybe and I was already trying at that time to put natives in. Unfortunately I didn't have as much success with that as I would have liked. I installed a lot of viburnums which ended up having one issue after another and I ended up taking all of them out but one. I planted tiarella and virginia bluebells etc and dreamed of all the patches of flowers I'd have and I still have the original Virginia bluebells that never increased at all. The Tiarella all just stopped showing up in the spring. I planted 2 native trees - a dogwood that is gone and I forget what happened to that. Two Amelanchiers whose foliage was eaten by caterpillars every season until they were a shadow of their original self and they came out. I still have Itea, Clethra, Aronia, Ninebarks, Calycanthus, and Oakleaf Hydrangea. Lots of native perennials.

I was enthusiastic and thought it was a great idea, but my experiences did shift my expectations and my garden choices and I focused more on what would grow well in my garden. I would still read any articles or discussion on natives, but I've been discouraged by the attitude of a lot of people who are native proponents toward anyone who doesn't see things the same way they do. They seem to want to bully people into planting all natives. I think they are driving more people away than anything else.

I just saw a discussion on another site last week, where a gardener was complaining about a neighbor who cut down an older apple tree. He was furious. The nerve of the neighbor to cut it down, it was a gorgeous apple tree, there was no justification for it, it affected the privacy of 3 neighbors and that was selfish and short sighted. Then he went on to say that in some communities, there are laws that you can't cut down mature trees and some where you HAVE to plant a native species when you replace a tree. When I attempted to explore what might be the perspective of the neighbor who cut the tree down, he said, well if you lived here you would feel differently and no one on the block wants to be friends with them now. I am still shaking my head.

I have had some similar conversations with native enthusiasts which have definitely sent me in the opposite direction of anyone discussing natives. My garden is pretty well established at this point. I still use no pesticides or herbicides and have plenty of wildlife in my garden. Rabbits and birds and chipmunks and hummingbirds and despite a large stand of Asclepias, not a lot of Monarchs. A lot of people now are spraying for mosquitoes and I'm not sure if that is causing a problem. But, I'm not actively trying to add any more natives at this point.