Plant guide by bird

Plants for Northern Cardinals

Plants for northern cardinals come straight from their diet: cardinals eat mainly seeds and fruit, and All About Birds' wild-food list includes dogwood, wild grape, mulberry, hackberry, blackberry and sumac ¹.

All About Birds' backyard tip is that leaving undergrowth in the yard or around its edges can bring a nesting pair ¹; growing facts are from the Wildflower Center [3–9], the native-plant case is Audubon's ².

Male northern cardinal in a shrub — plants for northern cardinals mean fruit, seed and dense cover — Photo: Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Plants for northern cardinals: fruit and seed

Two plants on the All About Birds list are profiled here: flowering dogwood, with red fruit for birds ³, and red mulberry ⁴. American elderberry's berries are relished by many bird species ⁵, Canada serviceberry is an important food plant for birds ⁶, and winterberry holds fruit into winter ⁸. For seed, common sunflower ⁷ is the plant behind black oil sunflower, the feeder seed cardinals particularly use ¹.

Dense cover for the nest

Cardinals live in dense shrubby areas — forest edges, hedgerows, thickets, ornamental landscaping — and nest in a fork of small branches in a sapling, shrub or vine tangle, 1–15 feet up, hidden in dense foliage ¹. Elderberry grows fast into a hedge ⁵, serviceberry forms multi-trunked clumps ⁶, and eastern red cedar gives evergreen density and nesting material ⁹. Cardinals also feed their nestlings mostly insects ¹, which native plants supply ².

Why native plants first

Native plants are those that occur naturally in the region where they evolved, and Audubon calls them the ecological basis on which birds depend: without them and the insects that co-evolved with them, local birds cannot survive ². The scale matters — a native oak supports over 500 species of caterpillars where a ginkgo hosts five, and it takes more than 6,000 caterpillars to raise one brood of chickadees ². Most nursery landscaping plants are alien species, so choosing natives is the single landscaping decision with the clearest effect on bird populations ².

The alternative is what most yards already have. Audubon notes that manicured lawn now covers over 40 million acres of the United States as a green monoculture, that the traditional suburban lawn carries on average ten times more chemical pesticide per acre than farmland, and that the continental U.S. has lost 150 million acres of habitat and farmland to sprawl ². Every bed of natives that replaces turf is habitat that lawn cannot be, and long-lived native trees such as oaks and maples also store carbon ².

Check the native range before buying: the Wildflower Center record for this species lists the states and provinces where it occurs naturally ³, and Audubon's zip-code native plant database narrows that to your area and the bird groups each plant attracts ². Once established, native plants generally need little maintenance and far less water than lawn, and they do not need the pesticides that make a yard poor bird habitat ².

More plant guides

American Elderberry →Canadian Serviceberry →Flowering Dogwood →Winterberry →American Holly →Eastern Redcedar →Common Buttonbush →Virginia Creeper →Red Mulberry →Native plants for birds →Berry plants for birds →Seed plants for birds →Nectar plants for birds →Shelter plants for birds →

Frequently asked questions

What plants attract cardinals?

Fruit plants on their diet list — dogwood, mulberry — plus elderberry, serviceberry, sunflower, and dense shrubs to nest in ¹³⁴.

Where do cardinals nest?

In a fork of small branches in a sapling, shrub or vine tangle, 1–15 feet up, hidden in dense foliage ¹.