Water resources have been increasingly polluted, while vegetative filter strip (VFS) is accepted as one of the best management practices to reduce water body pollution, especially non-point source pollution. A vegetative filter strip is a vegetated strip of land, which separates the runoff and pollutant contributing areas from surface water bodies and allows the runoff and associated pollutants to be attenuated before reaching surface waters via infiltration, adsorption, uptake, decay, filtering, and deposition. In this paper, the research and application advances on VFS were reviewed, including the history, structure, mechanisms of pollution control, design, management, and cost effectiveness of VFS. The studies on VFS in China started recently, and very few results of experiments and applications had been achieved. In order to efficiently promote and use this ecological technique in China, more studies on VFS are needed to obtain relative experimental data and results.