Can my HOA ban a native plant garden?

A front-yard xeriscape planting: prickly pear, agave, and native flowering shrubs, bordered with gravel. Exactly this kind of clearly bordered, deliberate design is what tends to separate a garden HOAs tolerate from one they challenge.

The short answer

It depends entirely on which state you live in. A small but growing number of states now legally limit how much power an HOA has to ban native plant gardens, pollinator habitat, or drought-tolerant xeriscaping. Everywhere else, an HOA's covenants generally still control, and can still require turf grass or prohibit the kind of landscaping that actually supports birds, pollinators, and local ecosystems.

The case that started it

In Howard County, Maryland, homeowners Janet and Jeff Crouch spent more than a decade turning their yard into habitat for birds and pollinators. Their HOA, Beech Creek, demanded they tear it out and replace it with a conventional lawn. What followed was a three-year legal fight: the HOA spent an estimated $100,000 of the community's own dues pursuing the case, and the Crouches spent roughly $60,000 of their own money defending it. They eventually reached a settlement that let them keep most of the garden, with a mowed setback along the property line and sidewalk.

The dispute drew the attention of Maryland lawmakers, and in 2021 the state's senate passed House Bill 322 unanimously. Now codified as Real Property Article §2-125, the law bars HOAs and deed covenants from imposing "unreasonable limitations" on low-impact landscaping, defined as techniques that conserve water, reduce maintenance, prevent pollution, or create wildlife habitat, and specifically forbids requiring that cultivated vegetation consist wholly or partly of turf grass.

Where the law protects you

Maryland's law kicked off a pattern other states have followed, though not always in the same way. Maine, Florida, and Illinois have since passed similar laws that prevent HOAs from banning low-impact or native landscaping outright. Illinois's version, the Homeowner's Native Landscaping Act, took effect in July 2024 and bars community associations from completely prohibiting residents from growing native species.

California, Colorado, Washington, Nevada, and Utah took a related but narrower approach: rather than protecting native landscaping broadly, these states specifically require HOAs to accommodate drought-resistant, water-wise landscaping. The distinction matters. A xeriscaping accommodation law doesn't necessarily protect a wildflower meadow planted for pollinators the way Maryland's or Illinois's broader native-landscaping laws do.

What protection doesn't cover

Even in the strongest protected states, an HOA generally keeps the right to set reasonable standards for how a yard looks: tidy edges, defined borders, and a sense that the landscaping is intentional rather than neglected. A native garden that reads as "cared for," a mowed strip along the sidewalk, a small identifying sign, clear bed edges, is far less likely to draw a complaint in the first place, protected state or not. Design and documentation still matter, even where the law is squarely on your side.

Visible bed edging and drip irrigation, the kind of small, deliberate detail that signals a native planting is maintained rather than neglected.

HOAs govern roughly a third of existing US homes and close to two-thirds of new homes being built today, which makes them, according to the researchers behind this research, one of the most overlooked forces in residential environmental policy, operating at a scale most state and federal environmental law never reaches: the individual yard. The same researchers argue HOAs don't have to stay obstacles. With the right rules, they could just as easily become the mechanism that spreads pollinator habitat and native planting at scale.

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