(bright music) >>Big-picture conservation needs to always start at the base level with your plants.

If you have the right habitat with your plants, then you can bring in insects, animals like birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals.

One of the ways you can start is with a simple pollinator garden, and we're here at Staunton, Virginia in Montgomery Hall Park where they are trying to provide the right plants to conserve the insects and build habitat as part of an ecosystem.

One of the plants featured in this garden is hoary mountain mint, a very easy plant to find and grow in your garden.

You can even plant it directly in your lawn or with fescue grass, and it will compete against that very well, growing into a nice, mounded plant that will expand over time, providing the habitat for the insects.

The plant grows very nicely with these nice, green leaves.

This is where it gets its hoary name, the hoary white, and then has these nice, light purple flowers where the insects will land for their pollination.

It's a very easy plant to find and grow.

And in this garden, we also have some other nice natives, including wild basil, yarrow, the Rudbeckias, or black-eyed brown-eyed Susan complex, and whorled rosinweed, another nice, yellow flower that blooms a little later in the summer.

As you start to look and think about what you'd like to conserve, think about the plants that will build your ecosystem.

You can then get the seeds locally or the plants from a native nursery.

Local nurseries and native plant nurseries really have changed over the last few decades and constantly think about the ethics of where they source their material.

If you're concerned at all, just ask your local nursery provider where they get their seeds and plants, and they will explain how they use best practices.

That is just standard operating procedure now in most native plant nurseries.

Also, sometimes you can find a friend who might have some plants or seeds to share.

Just make sure before you take anything from someone else's property that you get permission for the seeds or for the plants.

So as you think about what you'd like to conserve in your garden, whether it's birds, reptiles, amphibians, or insects, think about what plants you can add to provide the ecosystem that they need to grow and thrive.