Do native plantings affect property values? Sure they do—in a positive way. Let’s put to rest the insidious myths that say otherwise.
We were planting asters when the first potential home buyers started streaming up the driveway next door. They waved, we waved, we planted more asters.
It was hard but rewarding work. The air was still dry and the ground was mostly unforgiving, but we had our slices-through-anything shovel and we were determined. A major media outlet was coming to photograph my sister’s garden the next day, and though it was already beautiful, we wanted to add even more patches of fall color for both the bees and the camera.
As we pulled some weeds in the middle bed, a real estate agent walked to her car, shouting good wishes along the way: “I wish I had a green thumb like you so I could do this too! It’s beautiful!”
Yes, the garden of my sister and her husband, Jeff and Janet Crouch, is beautiful; there’s no doubt about that. But it was certainly validating to hear yet another housing industry professional say it. The next-door neighbor’s home is beautiful too, gorgeously designed inside, with a screened deck ensconced by forest in the back. Who wouldn’t want to live on this quiet, nature-filled cul de sac?
Within days of putting her house on the market, Janet’s neighbor received multiple offers that were above the list price. It wasn’t surprising to us, but that kind of positive outcome is one that lawn-obsessed HOAs seem to actively ignore. In communities across the country, these retrograde entities have insisted for years that native plantings like my sister’s would decrease the property values of the houses around them. The myth is recycled and perpetuated in every anti-garden complaint I’ve seen, without a single shred of evidence.
To the contrary, native plants are a major selling point, especially at a time when increasingly unpredictable weather conditions call for gardens that can mitigate flooding, survive drought, and remain resilient under local conditions. In Maryland, where rainscaping and pollinator gardens receive wholehearted support from the state and many municipalities, home buyers are looking for alternatives to the turf-laden dead zones that surround so many homes.
The Crouch garden is an oasis for butterflies, birds, moths, rabbits, and many others.
“When you just see bare flat turf and nothing to create a transition between yard or pavement and home, it just doesn’t show as well,” Kristi Neidhardt, a top-selling real estate agent in Anne Arundel County, told me when I interviewed her for an article in All Animals magazine. Pollinator gardens, on the other hand, make people’s eyes light up. “It’s just such a tremendous asset,” Neidhardt said, “not a deterrent.”
If anything, it’s unscrupulous HOAs that are creating a deterrent to sales, sabotaging themselves through unneighborly—and often extreme—behavior. When attorney Jeff Kahntroff started working with homeowners at Skipper Law in 2017, more buyers were attracted to HOA properties, he says. “People were largely of the opinion that ‘I want an HOA because I don’t want a pink or purple house next door to me,’” recalls Kahntroff, who represented my sister in her battle to save her garden from the clutches of an overreaching HOA in Columbia, Md. “Now it’s gotten to the point where the pendulum has swung—where having an HOA, I would argue, has decreased property values because people don’t want to be a part of them.”
It doesn’t have to be that way. Some more enlightened HOAs are attuned to the interests of their residents and attentive to the greater good. But arbitrary decision-making and a dearth of fair processes are all too common. Unlike local governments, HOAs are not democracies, and as I wrote in a recent article in The American Gardener, they often leave little recourse for residents trapped by threats of fines and liens. A few brave souls have been fighting back, and my sister’s case led the way, even inspiring the passage of a state law that requires HOAs to allow wildlife-friendly gardens and prohibits them from mandating turfgrass.
Let’s put to rest the myth that native plants “decrease property values” and see it for what it is: a sham argument concocted by imagination-lacking lawn tyrants who refuse to accept a changing world. We aren’t in 1950s Kansas or Maryland or Arizona or Florida or California anymore. We are in a modern-day crisis of climate change, habitat loss, and extinction of epic proportions. Anyone who doesn’t see that and act accordingly is on the wrong side of history.
RELATED ARTICLES
“Butterflies: 1, Bullies: 0,” Humane Gardener
“Outwitting Weed Laws,” American Gardener magazine
“Dispelling Myths about Wildlife Gardens and Native Plants,” All Animals magazine
“Janet Crouch: A Crusader in Greening Your Homeowners Association,” Washington Gardener magazine
Photos: Nancy Lawson/Humane Gardener