Potentially Askable Questions
Why should I plant native plants in my yard?
Cause they're awesome. Because, if planted in the correct location, once established, native plants require zero suplimental water, fertilizer, money, or time. Because, unlike commonly accepted gardening practices that strive for, but can never obtain, perfection through physical characteristics of color, shape, and size, native plants do allow for perfection in gardening through harmony, charity, kindness, intelligence, and life.
Why don't you sell "native" cultivars like, [native plant] var: "white icycles" or "red fire"?
Great question! Because I think cultivars are an insiduous evil. English ivy, English laurel, and Himalayan blackberry are all easily reconizable invasive species, which means when society eventually gets their stuff together, they will be easy to identify for eradication. Cultivars can be difficult to segregate from their naturally occurring counterparts and there is a risk of them crossing with naturally occurring plants. So while the visible, immediate damage of cultivars is less than many foreign plants, the possibility of them crossing with local plant populations and causing permanent genetic change, while low, is not unheard of (see American bison and cattle for one example) and would be awful and likely impossible to fix with current levels of technology and knowledge. The dominant motive behind the creation of these "native" cultivars was not to make the world a better place. Besides, if you are willing to make the noble sacrifice (or wise calculation) to dedicate your land for what's left of nature, why not do it right with the flora God created for our area, instead of trying to improve on it with, "native on (some) paper(s), but engineered, bred, or sourced to be even better!"
I have a large property and am interested in planting trees, what should I plant?
It depends! If you have no space limitations but really like a certain native tree, and if that tree will naturally grow off the soil, moisture, and light your land naturally provides, then pick what you like! If you want to recreate an old-growth-forest feel as fast as possible, I would recommend planting tree clusters of 1-4 trees at 10-foot spacing, with 30-foot spacing between clusters, of large, long-lived (500-2000 years) conifers of your choice (douglas-fir or western-red cedar being the most naturally common choices for dry and wet locations, respectively), and interspersed between those conifer clusters, fast-growing decidious tree clusters (e.g. black cottonwood, red alder, big-leaf maple) which will only last 80-250 years and then fall and provide the beginnings of a nice, mulmy, old-growth-forest base. A lot filled with Pacific dogwood, Pacific madrone, or paper birch could also be very pretty. Burien also has a very rare, small, surviving patch of naturally occurring Garry oak at Three Tree Point if you want to try your hand at giving them an assist and sprouting acorns.
I want shrubs, what should I plant?
It depends! We have some nice flowers and some nice berries. We have polite shrubs that stay put and we have monsterous shrubs that will invade all the territory you (and your neighbors) don't vigorously defend. We have screen-providing evergreen shrubs and barrier-establishing thorny shrubs. If you have the space, one nice idea to support polinators is to promote flowers flowering during the entire flower season, beginning with osoberry and red-flowering currant in the early early spring to snowberry in the late summer. However, for most city lots, I would pick one or two favorites and run with those. My favorite flower visuals are from Pacific rhododendron, red-flowering currant, evergreen huckleberry, and tall Oregon grape. My favorite berries are evergreen huckleberry, red huckleberry, thimbleberry, and salal. My favorite smells are from our three native roses, tall Oregon grape, and Lewis' mock orange.
I want something to cover the ground, what should I plant?
It depends! Do you want a front lawn replacement? Are you trying to stabilize/life-afize an open area while keeping it accessible? Do you want to fill in gaps in a shady area? We have lots of options. We have naturally occuring low-land meadows, beach meadows, and rocky balds that can be replicated. We have many grasses (lawn-grasses are not native) that are hardy and can grow almost anywhere with enough sun. We have a vast array of forest herbs that are interesting and pretty (e.g. western trillium, pacific bleedingheart, starflower). One of my favorites is fringecup, a small, tough, grow-anywhere plant with fuzzy leaves and flower stalks that bumblebees love. We have three varieties of low-land strawberries that taste amazing. Replacing a front lawn with early-blue violet, nodding onion, or woodland or Virginia strawberry would look gorgeous. We have fireweed, elegant goldenrod, pearly everlasting, and douglas aster that could line street edges. My favorite sun-loving flowers are common camas, fawn lily, nodding onion, western columbine, pearly everlasting, and douglas aster. Nodding onion and douglas aster can provide blooms for multiple months.
Do you have any aesthetic gardening tips or tricks?
I love wild habitat, but it can be hard to replicate in a city yard. Whatever light/soil/moisture conditions the wild uses to create that perfect, beautiful, harmonious balance of hundreds of species existing together naturally might sometimes be impossible to casually replicate in a yard. While I have succumbed many times to the urge to buy as many different species as I could and cram them into a small a space as possible; to offer something visually comprehensible to your average neighbor, I would keep your ambitions limited to one or two species each of groundcover, shrubs, and trees. If you convert your front lawn into an even cover of a single species of violet, it looks organized and intentional (and holy cow from March-May). If you stick 30 different species together to duke it out, many will be outcompeted and you'll likely end up with a patchy mess. If you go for shrubs of Pacific rhododendron and evergreen huckleberry, maybe encourage one neighbor to go for red-flowering currant and clustered wild rose and encourage another to go for blue elderberry and salal. Each yard will look organized and purposeful individually and, when working together as a community, will provide the year-long variety your natural critters need to thrive.
What's your vision for an ideally-planted near-future?
I think a future with knowledgable individuals opening small, local nurseries supplying locally sourced native plants to their local communities would make for an important piece of a great future. Outside of a few exceptions, any for-profit, business, government, or multi-unit developments would be required to landscape solely with natives. Individual residences would keep their right to plant whatever they want, but the current "American dream" of idealized English lawns would be replaced with higher standards. Those residents who loved growing food crops, or were members of garden/rose/iris/whatnot societies, or needed a place to kick a ball around with kids, could still pursure plantings that supported those activities without objection, but the default community expectation would be to plant your local, native plants.
