Coming up with a plan for your streamside can help you envision how your plantings will look once established. There are a wide variety of great resources out there to help you get started.
For more plant ideas, check out our table or our ever-growing Native Plant Database (PDF).
Invasive weeds tend to create monocultures by displacing desirable vegetation, and often provide less shade, runoff filtering capacity, and stabilizing root mass than the native plants they replace. Lincoln SWCD can help you identify, remove, and prevent future infestation of invasive plants on your property, as well as help you choose ideal native plants to revegetate your streamside zone.
For example, closest to the high water line of your streambank, prioritize the fastest growing and tallest plants, which will provide shade and minimize the reestablishment of invasives such as reed canary grass. Check out our Noxious Weed Control & Prevention program for more information.
In the same way that we rely on different food sources to keep us healthy, adding a variety of native plants (evergreen and deciduous trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns, and groundcovers) to your riparian buffer supports food web diversity and habitat availability for terrestrial insects, birds, wildlife, and fish. For example, leaf litter from native species such as the big leaf maple is a high-quality food source for aquatic insects such as stoneflies, which in turn are a food source for salmon and trout.
With so many choices of plants to choose from, it can quickly get complicated and costly to add plants to your streamside. Ideally, you'll want to keep as much of the existing native vegetation as possible, but you may need to make sure that certain existing plants don't outcompete any new plantings. This means that you may need to provide some extra care (like trimming existing plants back) to ensure that your new plantings are able to obtain the resources they need for survival (water, light, and nutrients). When adding new plants to your streambank, we recommend narrowing your scope to a diverse range of 10 different species (i.e., a mix of groundcover, shrubs, conifers, and deciduous trees rather than all of 1 category) and building from there.
The idea of companion planting is to select 3 to 5 species that, planted together, create a symbiotic relationship that increases the resiliency of each individual. This idea is exemplified in traditional Native American planting of the Three Sisters (corn, squash, and beans). Together, the corn, squash, and beans work to provide a lattice, ground cover for moisture retention, and nitrogen to feed the growing plants.
This concept is the same in our natural environments. When revegetating an area, plant species that provide multiple levels of height, growth pattern (slow/fast, solitary/sprawling), and potential benefits to the soil, water, and wildlife.
After selecting 3 to 5 species for an area, it's time to get them in the ground. Planting 2 to 3 of the selected species together in a cluster is an efficient way to naturalize a space. During this process, use the size of your plants as an indicator for how close to plant together. Larger species such as trees must be farther apart from one another. However, a tree with a shrub or fern in close proximity benefits from soil stabilization and ground cover for water retention. Alternate species in your clusters as you plant to achieve diverse coverage.
Some examples of successful companion plantings include:
