Nearly every eco-savvy gardener knows that native plants are best for attracting native animal species. We plant milkweed for the monarchs and thistles for the finches. With native plants themselves in increasingly short supply in their wild habitats, and increasing evidence that pollinators are in trouble (e.g., Potts et al 2010 in Trends in Ecology & Evolution), the more natives we can plant for the pollinators, the better.
​
But a scientific research paper published in the Journal of Applied Ecology last year (Salisbury et al. 2015) is challenging the assumption that natives are always the way to go.