Growing more
Turn one native into several: from seed, or from the plant you have.
Last updated October 2026
Native plants can be hard to find in shops, and one plant can become many. Ways to grow more gathers fifteen techniques, from sowing seed to splitting a clump, each with when to do it and what usually goes wrong.
Two ways to start
- From seed you collect: sow it as it is, give it a cold damp winter first (gardeners call that “stratification”), nick a hard seed coat, or press tiny seed onto the surface.
- From the plant you already have: split a clump, root a cutting, bend a branch down to root, or pot up the babies on its runners.
What to do now
The top of the page shows the techniques in season right now, from your device’s date and your half of the world. Seasons, not dates: a late spring is still spring.
A technique’s page
- What you actually do, step by step.
- Knowing the moment: the sign that it’s time.
- Where it usually goes wrong.
- Plants here that use it, and the published guides it was checked against.
From a plant, or from your spot
Every plant’s page has How to grow more: the methods that work for that plant, and when. And a saved spot’s season plan picks the plants you’ve logged that are old enough to share, and tells you which technique to use this season. See Saved spots.
Collect seed only from plants you own or have permission to take from, and never dig a plant from the wild.
Goes well with
Learn more
- How to grow native plants, species by species — Native Plant Network (U.S. Forest Service)
- Propagation techniques explained — Royal Horticultural Society
Recent changes
The latest updates to this part of the app, in the same plain notes that go out with each update.
Version 0.38
October 9, 2026- A season plan for every saved spot. It picks the plants you've had long enough to share, says what to do now — collect ripe seed, divide a clump — and puts the ones wildlife needs most first, linked to the how-to.
- the season plan can also suggest natives to add, for the animals photographed within 5 km of your spot this season. It asks iNaturalist when you tap to look, then remembers the answer for a month.
- your Saved spots open with the three most useful things to grow more of this season, across all of them.
- the season plan now names its sources — the RHS, the USDA Woody Plant Seed Manual and Audubon — and each technique page links to further reading. Seed tasks on plants birds eat from say to leave some standing.
- trees and shrubs get seed reminders only once they reach the age their species first bears seed, from the USDA Woody Plant Seed Manual, and in the months its fruit ripens. White oak waits 20 years.
- every technique page was checked against published guides and corrected where they disagree — cold stratification takes one to six months, and semi-ripe cuttings go in a pot within half a day.
Version 0.36
October 2, 2026- the satoyama flora joins the catalogue — wild cherry, keyaki, bush clover, susuki grass. Enoki hackberry is the one tree Japan's national butterfly can raise its young on.
- American bittersweet, virgin's bower and sensitive fern join the catalogue. Bittersweet's orange capsules split to scarlet seed in October and feed waxwings through February, when nothing else is left.