Native plants and their cultivars are becoming increasingly popular with today's gardeners. Their simple beauty is enhanced by our surrounding forests and adding them into your landscape brings to life a style that truly is West Coast.

Native plants in your garden are easy to care for because once they are established they require little or no maintenance. Native plants will also encourage wildlife to enjoy your garden for both the habitat and for food. Remembering that most of our native landscape is naturally a forested woodland setting, you can easily add many of the natives to your woodland or shade gardens.

Spring is the time of year that the native landscape truly comes alive, so take a walk in the woods soon, perhaps along the lovely Canyonview Trail, and remember to stop and admire the bleeding heart, dog tooth lily, trillium, deer fern, western sword fern and so many more that grow beneath the magnificent douglas fir, cedar and western hemlock that are ours to respect and enjoy.

Drinking in the earthy smell of the skunk cabbage, one can easily imagine a magical, imaginary world where the forest fairies dance beneath the toadstools, where Bilbo Baggins and his Hobbits live and where the horsetail is a delicate and beautiful, ferny plant-worthy of our admiration.

Be still and behold the incredible beauty of our forests. Feel the smallness that too, is natural as you view the majesty of the conifers towering above you.

Commit to teaching yourself and/or your children which are the cedar, hemlock and fir; which are the western sword and the deer fern. Then you will not be amazed that you want to recreate a bit of nature in your yard, replacing a little bit of the wilderness that was taken away through development and providing a place where your imagination can dream of toadstools and fairy rings.

Come and visit our native plant section and choose from ferns, red currant, hemlock, and evergreen huckleberry and take home with you a little bit of West Coast Style to showcase in your landscape.

Shauna Lambeth ©

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