Native plants are very resilient, and determined, and usually regrow despite having been kept at bay for years by a lawn mower. But, given a chance they will take their rightful place and flourish. The huge bonus is the area can become almost zero maintenance except for removing unwanted, or troublesome, plants. Yes, things can look bushy at first, but remember you can prune and shape things and you didn’t have to purchase the plants or dig holes to plant them! Native plants left to grow back will be strong and grow quickly once allowed.
I used to love visiting native plant nurseries and would purchase wagonloads of plants, but illness prevents me from doing that now. Great news here is that I still get new plants, almost every day, for free! Allowing the natives to come up on their own usually rewards me with many, many, free plants. Mother Nature is my guide.
Years ago I learned to stop fighting Mother Nature. You eventually lose out and have nothing to show for all that work unless you spend a great deal of time on maintenance. Native plants, aside from all the economic and ecological reasons we must incorporate them into our yards, afford the gardener a dramatically greater chance of creating a successful landscape and are just simply easier to work with because they grew here first. Period. I learned to appreciate the labor-saving aspect of native-plant gardening years before Lupus would strike and render me solely dependent on this common-sense approach to growing plants and gardening.