Residents looking to give their garden a more pacific northwest look have an opportunity this weekend to gather native plants from the former WSU Demonstration Forest during Sunday’s native plant salvage.
“Some of these plants you can’t get at the local big box stores,” said Anna Thurston, volunteer program director for the Native Plant Salvage Alliance. “And they’re preserving heritage; local, Washington heritage.”
Thurston and her group lead plant salvages throughout the region, taking groups into forests and prairies that are scheduled for development. The volunteers can then take the plants and transplant them to their own yards.
Thurston said adding native plants can help preserve habitats and require less work by gardeners because they evolved to live in the climates and environment instead of having to be cared for.
“We can achieve landscapes that require fewer chemicals and less water,” she said.
As Europeans settled in North America and spread across the continent, they brought many of the plant species with which they were familiar along with them to plant as food. Other plants, such as the Plantain (known as the “white man’s footprint”), piggybacked on settlers and spread across the world.
The native plants for which the Alliance are searching are those that pre-date settlement.
“It’s going to be a plant that is within a three- to 30-mile radius and 500 feet elevation difference … that was growing in that habitat before Europeans settled in that area,” Thurston said.
Thurston said non-native plants can cause problems because they were not necessarily designed for the conditions in this area. She cites ivy as an example of a plant that not only smoothers local plants, denying some animals their natural food sources and creating an “ivy desert,” but can also climb trees and create a “sail” that can catch wind and topple trees in a wind.
“It’s a big web and if you pull one thread a lot of others are going to wiggle along with it,” she said of the ecosystem in any given area.
Thurston said the WSU forest is “high quality” and the group;s website calls it an “unusually weed-free and healthy urban habitat” which means finding native plants to salvage should be easier than some other locations, though she said even if it weren’t pristine, she would still lead a group into the forest.
“I’ll dig even when there’s weeds growing,” she said. “A lot of people are discovering native plants are pretty cool.”
For more information or to register for the event, visit www.ssstewardship.org or e-mail Anna.Thurston@ssstewardship.org. Sunday’s event is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and volunteers will meet behind Safeway.
According to the Native Plant Salvage Alliance website, the registered participants may salvage the following trees and shrubs from the area: big leaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), vine maple (Acer circinatum), red alder (Alnus rubra), cascara (Rhamnus purshiana), poplars (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), Doug fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Western red cedar (Thuja plicata), willows (Salix spp.), ocean spray (Holodiscus discolor), osoberry/Indian plum (Oemleria cerasiformis), sword ferns (Polystichum munitum), bracken ferns (Pteridium aquilinum), wild roses (Rosa spp.), black-cap raspberries and salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis), hardhack spirea (Spiraea douglasii), snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus), and shade-loving mosses. If you’re feeling lucky, you can also dig for salal (Gaultheria shallon), red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium), evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum), and grape hollies (Berberis/Mahonia spp.).
It’s also possible to find special forest perennials including Vanilla Leaf (Achlys triphylla), Deer Ferns (Blechnum spicant), Fairy Bells (Disporum spp.), Roemer’s fescue (Festuca roemeri), vining Honeysuckles (Lonicera spp.), Solomon’s Seal (Mianthemum spp.), Licorice Ferns (Polypodium glycyrrhiza), Fringecup (Tellima grandiflora), Piggy-back Plants (Tolmeia menziesii), Trillium (Trillium ovatum), Nettles (Urtica Dioica), Violets (Viola spp.), mosses and other specialty natives.
