All hail native perennials! They are, after all, the easiest way to create a garden that comes back year after year, growing fuller, more colorful and more beautiful with each passing season, right?

No gardener worth their salt wants to start all their hard work from scratch every spring, and why should they? If you can build a garden that gradually finds its rhythm, with established plants returning reliably, filling out their spaces and creating a landscape that feels more natural and abundant over time, it's a no-brainer to make native plants your mode of attack!

Perennials are especially wonderful plants to build that kind of garden around; if you go native, they can deal with local conditions, making them relatively easy to grow once established. They also offer something beyond good looks, providing food and habitat for bees, butterflies, birds and other wildlife.

7 Native Perennials for a Garden That Looks Better Each Year

From cheerful summer blooms to delicate grasses, birth month perennials to lush woodland foliage, these seven natives bring a lovely mix of color, texture and seasonal interest.

Plant them in the right conditions, give them time to establish, and they'll reward you with a garden that gets better with every growing season. You can't say better than that, right?

1. Coneflowers

Coneflowers are one of those plants that make a garden feel instantly more welcoming. Their daisy-like flowers are drought-tolerant and able to withstand an awful lot of neglect, which shifts them firmly into the almost too-good-to-be-true category of native perennials.

For a particularly beautiful display, go for the Magnus Purple Coneflower from Nature Hills; it promises big bold blooms that never droop, and its flowers attract useful pollinators, while the seedheads provide a valuable food source for birds later in the season, not to mention lots of structure and interest through the colder months.

2. Coreopsis

If you love a garden filled with sunny color, coreopsis is a wonderful native perennial to consider. Its cheery flowers look delicate, but these little bloomers are tough and incredibly drought-tolerant... even if you're garden gets to that point in the summer when it resembles a frying pan.

I especially love the Moonbeam (available at Nature Hills), which produces masses of buttery-yellow flowers over a long summer flowering season. Its understated colour makes it particularly useful for combining with stronger shades of purple, pink and orange.

3. Pink Cloud Muhly Grass

Not every plant in a beautiful native perennial garden needs to produce traditional flowers; sometimes, it's the texture, movement and changing seasonal appearance of a plant that make it special. And pink muhly grass? Well, this pretty cloud-like ornamental brings all three to the table, and then some.

Bag yourself some from Nature Hills and plant it in a sunny position with well-drained soil. Once established, you'll find that it is relatively drought-tolerant and doesn't require much fuss (so long as you avoid overly wet or poorly drained locations, particularly during winter).

4. Ostrich Fern

A beautiful garden needs more than flowers, and an ostrich fern is an especially lovely choice if you dream of adding a lush woodland feel to your yard thanks to its feather-like fronds.

Unlike the sun-loving flowers elsewhere on this list, ostrich fern (which you can buy at Nature Hills) prefers a cooler, shadier position with consistently moist soil. In fact, like most ferns, it is usually at its happiest beneath trees or along the edges of shaded garden beds, so long as it has enough moisture.

5. Bee Balm

Bee balm is always an excellent addition to a garden, as its shaggy flowers are packed full of color and nectar, making them very popular with hummingbirds (and therefore a great way to try and lure your birth month hummingbird into play).

For a native planting, Monarda fistulosa, commonly known as wild bergamot, promises lavender-pink flowers with a fantastic aroma. If you prefer a more dramatic splash of color, the Jacob Cline variety is all about those bright red blooms, while the Spotted Bee Balm does exsctly what it says on the tin.

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6. Black-Eyed Susan

Few perennials bring as much cheerful late-summer color as black-eyed Susan. Its golden-yellow petals are basically sunshine in floral form, and they are brilliant for filling out borders in hotter, drier conditions... not to mention blooming for months on end.

It grows best in full sun, tolerates a range of soil conditions and is all but catnip to pollinators. Well worth splashing out on something like the Glitters Like Gold Black - Eyed Susan from Nature Hills so you can sit back and watch it do its thing.

7. Anise Hyssop

Anise hyssop is one of those gorgeous lavender dupes that offers something lovely in almost every respect. It has attractive aromatic foliage, tall flower spikes, a wonderful ability to attract pollinators, and some USDA Zones may find that this one keeps on going until the end of October (especially if you deadhead spent flowers).

Try planting anise hyssop alongside coneflowers, coreopsis and black-eyed Susans (all of which appear on this list, handily!) for a colorful and super pollinator-friendly border with plenty of height and texture.

One of the greatest pleasures of growing native perennials is watching a garden develop over time. Just take care to choose plants that suit your garden's conditions rather than trying to make every plant grow in the same environment if you go down this route.

It's also worth combining plants with different flowering seasons, not to mention leaving some seedheads standing for winter interest. Over time, you'll find that your garden doesn't just look better for it; you'll also find that it needs less intervention and begins to take on a character of its own as familiar flowers return each spring, pollinators visit throughout summer, and new combinations of color and texture emerge.

Are native perennials basically a miracle plant, then? Well, no... but they're as close to one as you're ever likely to get! Anything with a 'plant, sit back, relax' vibe to it is always going to prove a winner over time.