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Thinking About Fruit and Fragrance
English ivy under a Deodar cedar where other evergreens were removed.When we purchased our home last year, the front southwest corner had overgrown evergreens that poked into the path. The trunks had...
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What’s the Impact of an Early Spring?
Skunk Cabbage, photographed February 26. Always early, this precocious blossom opened unusually early this year. Here on the west side of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest it sure feels like spring...
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Planting Time
Red-flowering Currant at the border between woodland and lawn, with the shadow of a Bigleaf Maple. You can just see the open area we cleared this winter. Spring and fall are both good times to plant...
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May Lily: A Native Groundcover
May Lily groundcover at the Washington Native Plant Society Salal Chapter demonstration garden near Mount Vernon, Washington. Sometimes we have large swaths of ground that we’d like to cover. In the...
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Stinging Nettle: Feast for Little Lepidoptera (and Humans)
Stinging Nettles in forest understory. I was excited to discover that we have a large patch of stinging nettles, Urtica dioica, on our property. While brushing against any part of the plant with bare...
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Please Send Rain
Drying Pacific Bleeding Heart foliage It feels like mid-August in Bellingham, not the first of July. The sky has been a clear blue most of the last 30 days and temperatures have been in the 70s and...
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Scarlet Whirligigs
Vine Maple seeds in their scarlet winged samaras, more commonly called whirligigs. When Americans think of fall color, one of the first trees to come to mind is the maple, particularly our stately...
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Plant Strategies for Dry Times
Dried up Salmonberry foliage against a backdrop of Black Cottonwood trunks. A couple of months ago I wrote about the effect of the dry spring and early summer on our native plant garden and woodland....
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Rose Hips
Baldhip Rose fruit Autumn doesn’t come immediately to mind when I think of roses. Since my childhood, roses have been associated with warm summer days and with colorful blossoms emitting rich...
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Adding Conifers
New growth on young Grand Fir. The orange flagging is to help this youngster stand out among surrounding vegetation in the summer. I live just a few miles from the shore of the Salish Sea, on...
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