GREENSBORO, N.C. — Under a new executive order, Gov. Roy Cooper is setting new goals to protect and restore the state’s natural resources. The City of Greensboro is taking it one step further by approving a new native plant policy to help with sustainability.

Robin Davis and her neighbors at Sunset Hills hired an outside company to come in to remove invasive plants in the neighborhood park.

“English ivy, we had tree of heaven, we had privet and deanna, and the list goes on,” Davis said. “To remove invasive plants that were taking over and crowding out natives that should be growing here to begin to leave the leaves in the park so that they can build the soil base and shelter the insects that need to drop out of the trees over winter,” Davis said.

They started a new forestry program replanting native plants in the park instead.

“Our native shrubs right now, unless they’re in the evergreen category, are still asleep. You’ll see just tiny little, little life coming out on these stems. So it is alive. It’s just still dormant,” Davis said.

Replanting the native plants is also a way to represent their neighborhood.

“To celebrate our hundredth birthday this year. It’s the centennial for Sunset Hills. And our our goal is to have homeowners plant 100 trees in their own gardens at home,” Davis said.

For Davis, she loves nature and is wanting others to grow to love it as well.

“It’s, you know, we all start somewhere. And I started on the scale of I loved English ivy, and it was all over my house, and I couldn’t imagine it without it too, to the point that if she is proud of it anywhere, it’s I just have to stop and pull it,” Davis said.

The City of Greensboro wants its new native plant policy to will help shift wholesale growers to grow and see native plants make native plants more accessible to buy and more people on native plants.

“Create beautiful visual cues for us that we begin to learn our native plants, and we see them as a plant community that represents something beautiful to North Carolina. We have plants that grow here, that grow nowhere else in the world, represents something beautiful to North Carolina,” Davis said.

The Greensboro City Council unanimously passed a new policy that when the city installs new or replacement plant materials in outdoor landscaped areas it is to use at least 50% seeds and plants classified as native to North Carolina. This policy will also eliminate invasive plants at city-owned facilities.

Native plants help maintain, restore and protect the biodiversity of local ecosystems. Invasive plants disrupt the native ecosystem and displace native plants and animals.

“The city receiving $825,000 to do a reforestation project in the disadvantaged communities that points to us using natives as well. So it’s amazing when you start talking about sustainability, how connected things are,” said Dr. Shree Dorestant, chief sustainability officer for the City of Greensboro.