By Amy Mackintosh reporting for Native Plant News Spring 2025
Interest in native plants is clearly growing, according to volunteers at the NC Native Plant Society booth at the nursery and landscape industry’s Green & Growin’ Marketplace.
The NCNPS booth attracted a steady stream of visitors for two days at one of the region’s largest nursery and landscape industry trade shows. Municipal landscapers chatted about their city’s mandates for natives in public plantings and developers talked about installing pollinator gardens in their new communities. The booth featured a dried plant arrangement by Dan Walker and was staffed by Triad, Margaret Reid (Triangle), and Southern Piedmont chapter members Amy Mackintosh, Dale Batchelor, Julie d’Ablaing, Carrie DeJaco, Adam Webb, and Diane Laslie.
This year, NCNPS was a Silver Sponsor of the Green & Growin’ Marketplace, which gave us greater recognition including a quarter-page ad in the Showbook and the opportunity to sponsor the Women in the Green Industry presentation and lunch. Green & Growin’ is a major trade show of the North Carolina Nursery & Landscape Association for the green industry in the southeast, with over 2000 participants last year.
Amy Mackintosh is a co-chair of the Margaret Reid chapter (Triangle region) of the NCNPS, a retired landscape architect, and owner/steward of the Margaret Reid Wild Flower Garden in Raleigh.