Joliet, IL Landscaping Rules: Native Plants (2026)

Section 8-338(b) gives any owner, authorized agent, or authorized occupant the right to install and maintain a 'managed natural landscape,' defined as a planned, intentional, and maintained planting of native or non-native grasses, wildflowers, forbs, ferns, shrubs or trees, including rain gardens, meadow vegetation and ornamental plantings. The section also separately defines 'meadow vegetation' as grasses and flowering broad-leaf plants native or adapted to Illinois and typically found in meadow and prairie communities, and 'noxious weed' by cross-reference to Illinois statute, 505 ILCS 100/1.

Under the requirements in § 8-338(b)(2), a managed natural landscape may include plants and grasses over eight inches, and plants that have gone to seed, without triggering the city's ordinary weeds-and-grass nuisance rule in § 8-339. But the exemption has three limits: the planting can't include any noxious weed and must be kept from including unintended vegetation; it can't include plantings that, by their location or manner of growth, create a hazard or risk of injury to people or property; and an owner can't simply stop mowing a turf-grass lawn and call the resulting overgrowth a managed natural landscape, since abandoned turf-grass left for the purpose of returning to a natural state is expressly excluded from the definition.

This subsection was added by Ord. No. 17233 on May 20, 2014, in the same rewrite that repealed and replaced the city's whole weeds-and-nuisance-greenery division. The code does not set a permit or registration step for a managed natural landscape; it stands or falls on meeting the definition and requirements above.