I know my mom has to plant only certain kinds of plants because she lives 30 paces from the ocean. She can throw rocks from her porch into the Atlantic. All the salt in the soil makes it hard to even grow regular grass. It is all spongy Bermuda grass down there, like an overgrown golf course. Very strange. But if she wants regular plants, she has to have planter boxes and buy soil to put the flowers in. She also has a lot of baskets hanging up on her porch with green plants growing in them, since otherwise it seems a little barren.
Sometimes I find interesting plants on my walks in the woods and bring a sample home to plant in my garden. I would plant bamboo, but it grows so fast that my little 1/4 acre would quickly be overgrown.
Nothing to see here, move along folks.