1. The City of Takoma Park needs to provide its definition of “native trees” to the public.

It’s just administrative best management practice, in our view, given that “native tree” appears in the tree ordinance, City Council resolution on the urban forest (2020-15), the Approved Tree Species List, city website, etc.

Here are two examples of clear and practical native plant definitions developed for jurisdictions in this area.

State of Maryland
(recent legislation enacting a Native Plants Program, SB 836, pg. 2)

“Native plant” means a plant that occurs naturally in the State and surrounding region, ecosystem, and habitat, without direct or indirect human actions. This includes plants that were present before colonial settlement or are listed as native to the State on the Maryland Plant Atlas website.

 2. Arlington County
(Forestry plan, pg. 160-1)

Per the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, a native plant is: “A plant that is a part of the balance of nature that has developed over hundreds or thousands of years in a particular region or ecosystem. Only plants found in this country before European settlement are considered to be native to the United States.”

… For the purposes of specifying plants within Arlington County, the following definitions/categories of native plants shall be utilized:

a. Regionally native: Plants that are native (using the primary definition above) to the Piedmont and/or Coastal plain of the Mid-Atlantic states of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Regionally native is the sum of regionally native and locally native vegetation specified on the plans for each plant type.

b. Locally native: Plants that are native to the Piedmont and/or Coastal Plain area of Northern Virginia and the immediate Capital area, generally circumscribed by the area within Arlington County; Washington, D.C.; the City of Alexandria; the following Virginia counties: Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun; and the Maryland counties of Montgomery and Prince George’s. Plants must have genetic provenance in the jurisdictions noted for regionally native plants.

2. The City of Takoma Park’s definition needs to be as clear and practical as the examples above.

Here’s what we like about the two definitions in these respects.

• The geographic range of “native” is described through political boundaries that we all know:  Both definitions are based on ecosystems but use state and county names to define the geographic area encompassed by “native.” That makes the definition accessible to everyone, not simply ecologists or wildlife biologists.  It’s analogous to a GPS map app translating longitude and latitude into street addresses – very practical for most of us.

• The Maryland definition is linked to an online searchable database of Maryland native plants:  The Maryland definition makes use of one of our great state resources, the Maryland Plant Atlas. By typing in the name of a plant, the user quickly learns whether it is native to Maryland.  The Maryland program will also develop a website listing commercial native plants. Again, the emphasis is on making the definition understandable and easy to use by the intended audience.

3. The above two definitions validate confining “native” to local ecosystems.

The Maryland legislature and the Arlington County forestry planning team devoted considerable resources to developing these definitions. As a small municipality, we should piggyback on their efforts in working out our city’s definition. The county plan is particularly useful in this respect because, like the City of Takoma Park (2020-15, pg. 2), Arlington has an explicit goal to protect biodiversity.

Both the Maryland and Arlington County definitions confine “native” to a very local area:

• Several counties (“locally native”):  The Arlington County plan states (pg. 163) that 70% of urban trees planted must be “locally native,” defined as native to the greater metropolitan Washington D.C. area.

• State:  The Maryland definition confines “native” basically to Maryland but with an admittedly ambiguous inclusion of “surrounding regions.”

• Restricted Mid-Atlantic zone: “Regionally native” in the Arlington plan refers to a mid-Atlantic zone that stretches south from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, and west from the Atlantic up to the start of the Appalachians.