A native plant is a plant which naturally grows on the piece of ground where you garden. To really have a garden of native plants, you have to rigorously suppress the desire to collect, even plants from nearby mountains don't qualify as natives unless they are native to the property that you are creating your garden on.
The idea that a garden has to contain non-native plants in order to really be a garden is fairly recent. One of the main reasons why patterns have played such an important role in European gardens is that before the nineteenth century, European garden designers did not have a lot of plants to design with. Hundreds, if not thousands of species were introduced to the West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the modern collectors garden mainly dates from that period.
My garden is a collectors garden, and it contains a small Japanese inspired garden. I am not recommending that Westerners imitate Japanese gardens, or my Japanese inspired garden, but the West still has some important lessons to learn from Japanese gardens.
The art of Japanese gardening developed primarily in Kyoto, Kyoto was the capital of Japan for over a thousand years. Early Japanese gardens often included exotic plants from China, but as the Japanese developed their own styles of gardening, the use of non-native plants became less acceptable. Japanese garden designers divided plants into two categories: niwaki (garden plants) and Zoki (miscellaneous plants). Those plants which were classified as niwaki were almost entirely native to Kyoto and it's surrounding hills. The term Zoki was generally used to express a negative attitude towards most non-native plants. This wasn't nationalism, the Japanese thought that most non-native plants were too different from the native vegetation, and that using non-natives in a garden was unnatural and a bit vulgar.
What the West needs to learn from Japanese gardens is how to create gardens which are living poems, using native plants. I live on the Oregon coast, this part of the world looks a lot like Japan, so it may be easier for me to learn from Japanese gardens than it is for gardeners in other parts of the world, but if you go beyond superficial appearances and look at how Japanese gardens are composed, everyone can learn from them.
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