Appreciating Native Plants

In the relatively mild Pacific Northwest we are blessed to enjoy a wide assortment of native plants that thrive in our surrounding native settings as well as our home gardens. When I set out to write this article, I initially planned to focus on natives for the home garden, but the more time I spent thinking about the subject, the more I realized I should include some of the plants that we rarely find at home but get to enjoy in the wild. Getting out of our gardens to appreciate nature is just as important as getting into our garden to cultivate!

The plants that lend year-round interest but are often labeled "boring" are the broadleaf evergreens. So often I visit a client who has Salal "invading their beds". Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this simple understory native provides habitat and evergreen interest. It thrives in forest settings but may get rather ragged and scraggly in too much heat. Another of my favorite evergreens in the forest and at home is Evergreen Huckleberry. It provides beautiful, small glossy green leaves year-round. Plus, its coloration tends toward deep greens and purples. Plus, it offers edible fruit from summer through fall! Desperate for something to provide bright winter flowers and evergreen privacy or interest in the garden? Look no further than Garrya eliptica, but don’t forget that the Silktassel Bush gets enormous. Still, if you have the right spot for this small tree, nothing beats its chains of white flowers brightening the dark days of January and luring in hummingbirds early.

Seeking something to add different forms and textures to your native garden? Consider the wide array of ferns native to our area. The simple Swordfern is evergreen and will perform beautifully in exposures ranging from hot, reflected gardens to woodland understories. The herbaceous Maidenhair Fern may disappear in winter, but there’s nothing as lovely as its graceful, deep purple-black stems unfurling and extending delicate green fingerlike fronds for spring and summer. And, if you’re look close to the ground on a hike--at the edge of a path perhaps--notice the smaller tight forms of deer fern providing evergreen interest to your garden or your forest trail.

And what about some of those oddball plants we run across on our hikes? Indian Pipe is one of my favorites. It lacks chlorophyll and lives off of food produced by other plants. Its ghost-like white is an eye-catcher in the forest, but don’t try to harvest it or cultivate it at home. It requires a complex setting to thrive. While we’re talking about oddballs, don’t forget about all of the fantastic fungi that abound in our woodland settings. Our area is host to King Bolete, Morels, Old Man’s Beard, Chanterelles and so many more delicious edible mushrooms. To gain a full appreciation of them and to know which are safe to eat and which are not, consider taking classes with the Puget Sound Mycological Society. Never eat any wild foods until you are 100% certain you have properly identified your source!

In this brief, I’ve barely scratched the surface of our fantastic native plants. A few other favorites include Vine Maple, Twig Dogwood, Vancouveria, Darlingtonia, Dicentra and Columbine. I could go on and on. Instead, I encourage you to learn more about other great natives in books like Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast by McKinnon and Pojar , Encyclopedia of Northwest Native Plants for Gardens and Landscapes by Kathleen Robson, Alice Richter, Marianne Filbert and Gardening with Native Plants by Arthur Kruekeberg – all available for sale online here.

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