About Bedfellow

Why make Bedfellow?

Hey, I'm Max. This year, my wife and I decided to take our gardens back after years of neglect. After much education and planning, we found that we really wanted to follow the native plant ethos when growing our garden. My wife, especially, took to it.

When looking over her shoulder, browsing the many resources to find plants native to your area, I noticed that what they had in authority, they lacked in tooling. They were built by people who knew plants, more than anything.

I don't know plants; I know software. So I felt like I could build a tool to help plan our garden, one that lets you figure out bloom cycles, light requirements, and especially finding those that are great to eat or decorate with. Using the volumes of public information to validate and fill out the data (you can see exactly where it comes from), I am hoping that Bedfellow is a helpful tool for us and others to plan their perfect garden that blooms all season long.

It's still a young app, but it's getting significantly better by the day. It's already helping us fill out our gardening plans and I hope it'll help you, too!

Why native plants?

When you go to a garden center, you'll find many beautiful plants to decorate your outdoor spaces. Vivid tropicals and exotics are common, meant to attract the eye, but those plants may be out of sync with your ecosystem. They may support wonderful birds and butterflies, but they don't support your birds and butterflies.

Native plants keep you engaged with your ecosystem. Because they're from your area, they grow more naturally, but they also support the local wildlife as food, places to nest, and nectar to forage.

In our ecosystem, different living beings need each other. You can support beautiful birds and little caterpillars with just some care. A few highlights from the catalog:

• Butterfly Weed and its fellow milkweeds are the only plants monarch caterpillars can eat — no milkweed, no monarchs.
• Cardinal Flower holds out scarlet tubes shaped for the long bills of ruby-throated hummingbirds.
• A single White Oak can host hundreds of kinds of caterpillars — the protein that feeds baby chickadees and other songbirds.

Native plants are also far more likely to play nicely. They are made for your environment, so they are far less likely to spread wildly and become a lasting problem.

Get in touch

Questions, suggestions, or just want to say hi? Email me at max@bedfellow.org.