It’s an unseasonably warm October morning in Napa as the sun crests over the hills of Skyline Wilderness Park, peeling back the shadows cloaking the CNPS Napa Valley Chapter nursery. More than a dozen volunteers scurry between tables loaded with nearly 2,000 salvias, fuchsias, dogwoods, and other native plant species. One volunteer straightens a fleet of small wagons at the nursery’s entrance. Another prepares stacks of flyers, brochures, magazines, and educational materials. In a few minutes, the nursery gates will open, inducing a stream—then a flow, then a flood—of customers ready to load up at the chapter’s fall plant sale. 

Versions of this bustling scene unfold throughout the fall and spring, when CNPS chapters host their own plant sales statewide. Many sales, like those offered in Napa Valley, Sacramento Valley, or the North Coast, double as showcases for the area chapters’ thriving nurseries. Other chapters, like South Coast or Riverside-San Bernardino, set up shop at local nature centers or other partner sites. Some offer online presales to CNPS members, triggering a windfall of orders that can sweep up some of the season’s most in-demand offerings even before the in-person sales open for business.  

However and wherever they operate, CNPS’s plant sales support the chapters’ visibility and community engagement. In doing so, they fortify their vitality and community connections alike, serving as indispensable sources of local biodiversity and transformation.  

“There is no place in Napa where you can regularly go to get native plants,” says Christine Waskowiak, who chairs this year’s Napa Valley Chapter plant sales. “It’s one of the reasons we tend to sell out both of our sales. They have a reputation for variety and quality. People arrive early, because they’re one of the few opportunities that people in Napa can get native plants without driving afar.” 

CNPS has hosted plant sales since Dec. 5, 1966, when the flagship Berkeley chapter held its inaugural sale at the Lakeside Park Garden Center in Oakland, adjacent to Lake Merritt. Early sales served as clearing houses of donated plants, books, and other goods to subsidize the fledgling organization and advance the cause of native plant horticulture in the Bay Area. (The famed photographer Ansel Adams—an early CNPS member—even donated two photo prints for sale in 1967.) The first CNPS spring plant sale was offered by the Monterey Bay Chapter in 1976. In the nearly half-century since, CNPS plant sales have developed into finely honed seasonal rituals, typically balancing inventory grown in-house and plants either acquired from or donated by commercial growers. In keeping with modern quality-control standards, source nurseries employ propagation methods closely guarding against phytophthora and other diseases.  

A few sales, like those hosted by the Bristlecone Chapter, set themselves apart by almost exclusively propagating plants from seeds drawn from hardy regional specimens. “We are the only show in town if you want to grow local natives,” says Bristlecone plant sale coordinator Katie Quinlan, who grows offerings like grape soda lupine (Lupinus excubitus) and other resilient plants that can withstand its rugged coverage area encompassing Inyo, Mono, and northeastern Kern counties. Keeping in mind its region’s colder fall and winter climates, Bristlecone typically hosts its fall plant sale as early as mid-August and provides a spreadsheet identifying the best prospects for specific elevations and terrains. “It’s like, ‘OK, what will grow in your neighborhood?”, says Quinlan, hastening to add that more well-known plants like common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and California fuchsia (Epilobium canum) are also popular at the chapter’s plant sale. “The elevation and microclimates over here are really specific. You think, ‘Oh, these desert plants are really tough.’ And they are, but they’re also incredibly picky where they live.” 

Quinlan’s insights point to the importance of “right plant, right place,” says Ann-Marie Benz, the horticulture program manager for CNPS. “Native plants can be easy to grow and successful when we choose the right plants for the location or ecosystem where you live.”

A similar ethos prevails at the Riverside-San Bernardino Chapter’s events, where the hotter climate means two plant sales late this fall: The Inland Empire sale on Nov. 1 in Riverside; and the Nov. 22 “desert” native plant sale in Rancho Mirage. Of the hundreds of species that the chapter sells, the most popular tend to be local endemics like sugar bush (Rhus ovata), woollyleaf ceanothus (Ceanothus tomentosus), and showy penstemon (Penstemon spectabilis). “We’re seeing more people really going after a diversity of our local species to put in their gardens,” says Arlee Montalvo, a retired ecologist and longtime CNPS volunteer who helps plan and lead the chapter’s plant sales. “They want more plants to support native pollinators. It’s not just milkweeds and monarchs. We also try to provide a lot of plants that are really good for our native bees and hummingbirds and moths.” 

In more temperate climates throughout the state, CNPS fall plant sales mark almost every weekend in September and October. Longtime observers of the sales note their evolving appeal among a growing constituency of native-plant-curious gardeners over the decades. “At the end of the ’70s, with the drought, there was lots of interest in native plants because they were so drought-tolerant,” recalls Liz Parsons, the Milo Baker (Sonoma County) Chapter president who has helped organize and/or lead the chapter’s plant sale for years. “And then that sort of morphed into zeroscaping. Now it’s all about creating habitat for pollinators and native species. People want native plants that were perhaps growing here before colonization. The interest has just grown exponentially.” 

Modern technology—not to mention current events—has had its own considerable impact on the sales’ growth. Barbara Reiley of the Willis Linn Jepson Chapter estimates that sales doubled after the chapter started taking orders online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The Sacramento Valley Chapter’s nursery offloads the majority of its offerings each fall to members in its online presale. When current South Coast Chapter vice president Angel Garcia first started volunteering with CNPS in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, customers flocked to the drive-up version of the fall plant sale. In 2025, as the chapter determines the prospects for its own nursery, that sustained demand—driven in part through Garcia’s social media efforts for the chapter—has led to packed sale days and even a popular native plant seed swap at the Madrona Marsh Nature Preserve in Torrance.  

“Last year, we had at least three or four people that had two shopping carts full of plants,” says Garcia, who works with the chapter’s horticulture chair Tony Baker on planning the sale. “They bought around $600 worth of plants because they were just redoing everything in their yards. I ask people when they’re paying, ‘How did you hear about us?’ They’ve said, ‘I saw it on CNPS’s Instagram account.”  

In the end, as with the beginning at Lake Merritt in 1966, the plant sales round out their ecological impacts with invaluable economic boosts for CNPS chapters that go back into chapter-designed programs and resources for their communities. Sale revenues support myriad efforts, ranging from grants and scholarships to purchasing chapter materials and hosting events like wildflower shows. In 2024, Garcia says, the South Coast Chapter’s fall plant sale pulled in roughly $9,400. The Bristlecone Chapter plant sales this year brought in just over $12,000, according to Quinlan. The Riverside-San Bernardino Chapter—which offered seeds, bulbs, and books in addition to plants—earned nearly $18,000 in revenues for its two regional sales in fall 2024.  

“These sale numbers are happening in a matter of hours,” emphasized Liv O’Keeffe, senior director of public affairs for CNPS. “The year-over-year success of CNPS chapter plant sales is a testament to the knowledge and dedication of our incredible volunteers, and it’s also a message to the greater horticulture and landscape industry: The widespread demand for native plants is here—and growing. The outcomes of these local sales signals a real opportunity for larger industry players. We hope they’ll jump in and work with us to make California native plants more available across the state.”  

Back at the Napa Valley Chapter’s nursery on that warm October morning last fall, revenues climbed with the temperatures. By the end of the three-hour sale—which the chapter offers only in person, not online—the chapter had sold 1,990 plants for a tidy $7,300 profit. The spring 2025 plant sale would yield another $5,700 from 1,800 plants. They were wins for sustainability across the board, and another sign that the volunteers’ hard work for biodiversity pays off.  

“Even my local beekeeping group is a huge advocate in promoting the sale,” says Waskowiak, the sale co-chair. “The underlying mission is not just to make money for the chapter so that we can fulfill our function, but also just to get the word out in the larger community about the importance of native plants in the home landscape.” 

Find information about the chapter plants sales near you on CNPS’ calendar of events.