I would be very careful about plant exchanges with friends, neighbors, garden clubs, etc., however well-intentioned. It is very easy to accidentally import unwanted invasive organisms.
Invasive nonnative plants can be undetected in soil or pots, and be quite capable of running rampant.
My personal nemesis is “Goutweed” (a.k.a. Bishop’s weed) which I have been battling for two decades. It needs only a tiny fragment of root to propagate, a fact that I learned, to my lasting horror, when I inadvertently started a patch in my own woods, by dumping my weeds there. You would not want me to kindly offer you a native fern from my garden, because goutweed is there, and it’s never going to not be there…
And there are other organisms as well. I have a great fear of accidentally acquiring the ecologically damaging “jumping worm” earthworms that are becoming a big problem in many areas, including Vermont.
https://vtinvasives.org/invasive/jumping-worms