In Texas there are hundreds of plants to choose from for use in home and commercial landscapes. Trying to find just the right plant for a specific location can be challenging. Ensuring that your selection is also well adapted to the environment makes this decision even harder.
The Earth-Kind Plant Selector, part of the Texas Urban Landscape Guide can be an extremely useful tool for this difficult task. This searchable database provides users with the opportunity to select plant materials based on factors such as height, width, flower color, sun or shade, bloom period, leaf character, as well as several other matching criteria.
Each plant in the database is rated for heat tolerance, drought tolerance, pest tolerance, soil requirement and fertility requirement based on region. The Earth-Kind Index value (which ranges from 1 – 10) is a measurement based on all 5 of these resource efficiency categories. The higher the number, the more resource efficient a plant is in that region. Plants with an Earth-Kind Index value of 8 or higher are considered to be extremely resource efficient and are generally heat tolerant, drought tolerant, pest tolerant, with minimal soil or fertility requirements for the selected region.
