Blue Thumb: Planting for clean water

This rain garden in Burnsville, Minnesota, uses native plants to manage stormwater.

Photo by Kurt Leuthold © Barr Engineering

Its officially spring, and that means its time to start thinking green. If youre considering doing any planting this season, the Blue Thumb programs online plant selector is a wonderful resource to help you choose the perfect plants for your site.

The Blue Thumb program aims to encourage homeowners to use native plant gardening, rain gardens, and shoreline stabilization to reduce runoff from their home landscape in an effort improve water quality. The programs website has quite a bit of information for homeowners, including a how-to rain garden installation manual, information on grants and cost-sharing programs, a calendar of workshops, and a locator for stores selling native plants. But one of the sites best features is the plant selector.

This free tool allows you to enter information about your specific site and what you are looking for, and then it selects appropriate plants, based on the information you provided. You can enter as much or as little of the following criteria as you like:

• Purpose (native garden, rain garden, shoreline stabilization)
• Type (grass, flower, tree/shrub)
• Environment (soil moisture level and sun exposure)
• Bloom color and time

Plants are listed alphabetically by common name, and clicking on a species name will display basic characteristics, photos, and helpful notes and suggestions.

Happy planning and planting!