PTA
Earth Day Plant Sale
Get ready to celebrate Earth Day on April 22nd, raise money for your PTA Council, and win free plants for a butterfly garden at your school! The fundraiser event will raise $10 for your PTA Council for each tray of plants your PTA members purchase. Plus we donate tray of plants for free ($100) to build a butterfly garden at schools for every 5 trays purchased.
Pickup for plants will be hosted on April 18th and 19th, the weekend before Earth Day, by the Richardson Council of PTAs at their Greenwood Hills Learning Center. Follow our event on Facebook so you can get important updates as we get closer. 99% of plants sold will be pre-purchased, with online ordering available starting February 1st. We hope to be sold out by March 15th, with only a few trays available for Day Of sales. This allows us to work with our network of native plant growers to ensure we get the highest quality plants, fresh from the farms, and that we have enough plants for everyone who wants them.
PTA members are invited from across DFW from Richardson, Plano, Frisco, Wylie, and Carrollton-Farmers Branch. A tray of 20 plants can create a 150 square foot butterfly garden. Plants are native (or well adapted) to our hot DFW summers and are highly drought tolerant. We sell perennial plants, so once they're planted they'll come back every year. Garden club leaders, environmental PTA chairs, art teachers, science teachers, school counselors, and PTA members are all invited.
Copper Canyon Daisy, also called Perennial Marigold, is a Texas Smartscape recommended plant. With bright yellow blooms in late fall up until frost, and marigold-scented leaves, it's a native of the Sonoran Desert of Northern Mexico and Arizona.
science teachers
Science teachers: want an easy way to engage students with STEM subjects? Many of these plants can be easily propagated with stem cuttings (Copper Canyon Daisy), root division (Gregg's Mistflower), or collecting seeds (Purple Coneflower). Show students how plants grow, and expand your butterfly garden with more free perennial native plants.
Teaching a class about water, rivers, and the hydrologic cycle? Bring the Stream Trailer to your school, a free resource available to teachers provided by the North Texas Municipal Water District, to teach your 3rd or 5th grade students about North Texas watersheds, keeping water clean, and conserving water resources. Available for public schools in Richardson, Frisco, Plano, Wylie, and 40+ other cities in DFW.
School counselors can recommend nature therapy activities in the garden, for students struggling academically or with their mental health. For art classes, bring students to the garden to draw, paint, and photograph these plants and the butterflies they attract. Read our blog article to learn about all the DFW wildlife that your garden can attract. Learn how school gardens boost academic performance and can help grow PTA membership.
Flame Acanthus, one of our Top 12 favorite native plants for North Texas gardens
Who Is Invited?
All PTA members, parents, teachers, and students from Richardson, Plano, Frisco, Wylie, and Carrollton-Farmers Branch are invited to our Earth Day plant sale. That's 50,000+ PTA members, at 270 schools, with 192,000 students. PTA membership chairs can reach out to the broader community and invite city residents (830,000 in 5 cities) to join their local PTA to save $20 when they order a tray of plants by April 1st. Online ordering will open for PTA members on February 1st.
Gregg's Mistflower...a great plant for chemistry teachers to explore biochemistry.
Event Location
The event is hosted by the Richardson PTA Council, at their Greenwood Hills Learning Center facility. We can accommodate 200 orders from each of the 5 school districts to raise $2000 for your PTA Council. 40 PTA leaders per district may sign up so that their local school will receive a free tray of plants. With questions about fundraising, please contact Richardson PTA Council fundraising chair, Sarah Southward.
We can sell up to 20,000 plants (1000 trays). Those plants will create about 150,000 square feet of new habitat for DFW birds and butterflies, or about the size of 50 residential lawns, reducing annual water use by over 1 million gallons. And we'll do it again to support PTAs across DFW in October 2026 and April 2027, twice a year.
Local PTA Leaders
Each PTA Council may invite up to 40 local PTA leaders to purchase a tray for their home garden for just $30. In order to save $70 and get 20 plants for $1.50 per plant, PTA leaders will promote the plant sale at their school and sell 5 trays to help raise $50 for their PTA Council, and get $100 of free plants donated to their school. PTA leaders can register now with the form below, until all PTA leader spaces are sold out for your district. Once we receive 40 PTA leader orders for your school district, we will post an update to this website.
Maximilian Sunflower. Plant it once, and get sunflowers every year.
Garden Club Leaders
Does your school have a garden club already with a lot of volunteers? Do you have a vegetable garden and want more plants for butterflies and beneficial insects? Your school can likely sell 20 trays of native plants and qualify to get $400 of plants free. We invite your school to sign up with 4 PTA leaders to build a new, 600 square foot butterfly garden.
These plants will be a great way to attract beneficial insects (like lacewings) that naturally control pests like aphids. You can use our Circle garden design template to lay out your butterfly garden, or easily create your own design. We can provide step-by-step installation instructions to install the garden, with materials that cost only $200 (paper and mulch). We can also provide a seasonal maintenance plan, so you know what to do each season of the year to care for these plants.
Plants For Sale
We offer a wide variety of plants....both for shady and full sun areas. PTA members can use our online store (available February 1st) to learn about the plants and search for plants that will work for their landscape conditions. While we can't guarantee that all of these plants will be in stock, the growers we work with are well aware that Earth Day is a big day for plant sales. We anticipate having many of these available for purchase.
For shade: Pigeonberry, Texas Gold Columbine, River Fern, Missouri Violet, Inland Sea Oats, Lyreleaf Sage, Cedar Sage, Horseherb, Turks Cap, Purple Coneflower
For full sun: Walker Low Catmint, Red Flame Acanthus, Gregg's Mistflower, White Gaura, Pink Gaura, Zexmenia, Purple Fall Obedient, Purple Skullcap, Pink Skullcap, Indigo Spires, Frogfruit, Four Nerve Daisy, Mealy Blue Sage, Gray Goldenrod, Woolly Stemodia, Fall Aster, Fragrant Mistflower, Powis Castle Artemisia, Black Eye Susan, Copper Canyon Daisy, Cutleaf Daisy, Damianita, Giant Coneflower, Lantana (New Gold, Native, Dallas Red), Mexican Oregano, Rock Rose, Russian Sage, Gray Shrub Sage, Autumn Sage (Red, White, Pink), Skeleton Leaf Goldeneye, Coral Honeysuckle, Sedums (Angelina, Hardy Ice Plant, Coral Reef, Red Carpet, John Creech), Little Bluestem, White Yarrow, Purple Coneflower, Turks Cap (Red and Pink), Butterflyweed, Golden Groundsel, Datura, Chile Pequin, Lanceleaf Coreposis, Chile Pequin, Fern Clover, Maximilian Sunflower, Pink Evening Primrose, Prostrate Rosemary, Forsythia Sage, Texas Betony
Turks Cap..... great for shady or sunny spots.
Get Your School Registered
Now's the time to get your school registered. Once you fill out our form, you'll receive a link by January 1st to pay your $20 deposit to reserve your order. You'll receive a unique Promo Code by February 1st, to share with PTA members so they can order their trays by April 1st. Once that code is used 5 times and we receive final payment on the 5 trays, your school will receive $100 of free plants. You'll complete checkout for your personal tray of plants with a final $10 payment. With any questions, please contact Ben Strube with Soils Alive (ben@soilsalive.com).
Russian Sage, a very drought (and cold) hardy plant from Asia that does very well here in DFW.
