It was during a Covid-era Louisiana Master Naturalists of Greater Baton Rouge webinar that Janine Kharey was inspired to dig deeper into her passion for native plants. This led her to national nonprofit Wild Ones, which maintains chapters across the country, each focused on their own hyper-local ecosystem and the plants that have evolved to grow and thrive within them. “I decided to start a chapter here in Baton Rouge in March of 2022, and by August of that year, we had enough people join that we were able to charter,” Kharey says.

For the past three years, Kharey, who now serves as the group’s president, and the rest of the Wild Ones Greater Baton Rouge chapter have been working to establish a native seed program to aid in the cultivation and proliferation of the flora meant for our ecoregion, which is defined as the Mississippi Valley Loess Plains.

“Our entire ecosystem has evolved to work together,” Kharey explains. “These plants have adapted to handle our soil without it being changed, and they have also evolved to handle things like our erratic weather. You don’t need to bend over backwards to keep them alive—and that is beneficial to you and me and also to our resources.”

The native seed program, and the seed library at the core of the initiative, has evolved and expanded alongside Wild Ones members, as they have worked to identify plants, collect seeds and then propagate those varieties. Now, Kharey and her team are working to offer the native plants they have worked so hard to cultivate at retailers, making them readily available to the local public. Currently, the plants Kharey and others in the Wild Ones group have had a hand in are available at Beaver’s Abundance Native Plant Nursery in Prairieville.

“All of us are still learning, and we’re learning together,” Kharey says. “Our attitude is always, ‘let’s discover together.’”