native plants

I went to hear a talk about devoting one's yard to native plants. The supporting organization is this one: http://grownativemass.org/ There is a lot of information there. There will be some back yard destruction when the downed tree is removed, so it seems like the ideal time to take this up. It won't be easy to get started, though. While there are maps of "ecoregions" and so forth, her point was that each yard is really a micro-ecosystem, and one should use the plants best suited by evolution for one's own space. Not by the people who market cultivars, for example. As much as people drool over seed catalogues, I don't see exactly how to match it up with our yard. I've lived here almost 30 years, yet I don't know much about our soil, etc. A lot of learning will need to take place before I can even figure out what to plant.
The organization is strongly opposed to leaf blowers. I almost jumped up and down and cheered, but I was in the overflow room and she probably wouldn't have heard me anyway. Much of Lexington is so tightly wired into commercial lawn-care conventions of grass seed/poison/fertilizer/noisy machines blowing that I don't think anything around me will change much, but it was very encouraging to see so many people at the talk. No grassy plant is actually native to our area, but she acknowledged that people might want to have at least a little lawn space. She also likes bugs, because they feed birds.