(relaxed music) >>It's so much fun to look at our gardens and landscape in new ways, and one of the big parts of the areas around our houses is usually our lawn, and my friends here in Harrisonburg had a real issue with this very sunny spot on a very steep slope because it just wasn't safe to mow.

It felt very dangerous.

One of the other things that's growing here in the front yard is a nice looking oak tree that's beginning to get some size to it, and while you think that might be a problem to give them a lot of shade, the way this lawn sits and looks west, it's gonna be full sun, so very, very hot, sunny all summer long.

So, working with a landscaper, my friends reimagined this piece of lawn into a native sunny plant garden, and they have added a wonderful array of native plants to try to control the slope, keep from mowing, and keep the maintenance to a minimum.

So, one of the plants here is the native lyre-leaf sage.

It's got a nice bloom on it right now and this is a plant that's gonna be very attractive to our native pollinators, like insects, bees, butterflies, and moths.

And then finishing up is the creeping phlox.

This is a native plant to Virginia that is now in cultivation in many colors, giving you a wonderful pop of pink, white, candy stripe, or purple in your early spring garden.

Other plants in the garden include carexes.

These are very soft looking grasses that you don't need to mow and as the garden continues to mature, they will fill in.

There's also monarda, which is another great pollinator plant, low-grow sumac, which is going to be a great ground cover, and while the garden is mulched now, as these plants begin to fill in, there won't be any need for mulch later on, so the planting is going to get lower and lower and lower in maintenance as time goes on, so my friends won't have to mow, which felt very dangerous.

They won't have to use any fertilizers or water because the native plants are used to our Virginia ecosystems.

So, as you look at your lawn, you don't have to have this kind of slope problem to think about adding native plants, but just think about how much you'll enjoy not having to mow as much when you've filled it in with all kinds of plants that will support the native pollinators and birds in your yard.

Happy gardening.