With today's busy lifestyles, people have less time to give special treatments to their plants. For them, natives are ideal. Many are small to medium sized and require little if any pruning. Plant, water while establishing, lightly fertilize, then leave them alone. Although we have this rich palette of easy-care native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, we seldom see them grown in the landscape.
Some natives are slow growing, thus are less apt to be grown commercially.
In some cases we are perplexed as to how to get the seeds to germinate. A prime example is wild cinnamon bark, Canella winterana . Native to South Florida and the West Indies, it is a beautiful tree producing small red-purple flowers and bright red, velvety soft fruits. It is difficult to propagate vegetatively, and its seeds are slow to germinate. Ten to twenty percent germination rate is about all we have expected.