Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Mark Turner is a freelance photographer specializing in botanical subjects, especially Northwest wildflowers and gardens. He photographs extensively for books and magazines both in gardens and in a wide range of native plant environments. He is an avid member of the native plant societies of Washington and Oregon and has more than 25 years of experience exploring for native plants, which he describes at the Turner Photographics Blog. Mark is author of Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Bellingham, Washington where he also runs a portrait studio photographing families, high school seniors, and pets.
My copy of the thick garden reference, The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, has a full page devoted to Crataegus, the hawthorns. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about narrowly endemic northwestern species lately. None of those are in the Encyclopedia, but the book does include several eastern North American species. Here [...]
Indian Plum Here in the Pacific Northwest one of the first sure signs of spring is when the Indian Plum, Oemleria cerasiformis, begins to bloom. Sometimes in the warmest and most protected locations I’ll see a few blossoms as early as the end of February, but most years it comes into full bloom around the [...]
Any discussion of native plants, whether for your garden, a restoration project, or simple curiosity about the flora on your back forty, has to eventually arrive at the question, “is this plant native or introduced?” You’d think it would be an easy question but it turns out to be more complex than you might imagine. [...]
When I wrote to you last month the year had just turned and we were lamenting short days and long nights. I mentioned a couple of evergreen ferns to brighten your garden throughout the winter season. I didn’t get to finish, so let’s continue where I left off in January. The third common evergreen fern [...]
What do swords and licorice have in common? If you live on the wet side of the Pacific Northwest you’ll recognize immediately that these are two of our common ferns that stay green all winter. I went for a walk on one of my favorite forest trails out at the Stimpson Family Nature Preserve on [...]
What’s that, glowing bright white among dull winter browns? It’s snowberries. November and December on the ocean side of the mountains in the Pacific Northwest are rainy, dreary, dark, and wet. Our flora has hunkered down for the winter. The last of the golden maple leaves blew down in one of the waves of “pineapple [...]
Northwesterners celebrate fall with the turning of maple leaves just as our compatriots on the sunrise coast do. We just have different species of Acer in our woods. New England and the rest of the Appalachians get hoards of visitors each autumn as rubberneckers and leaf peepers clog backroads and byways to soak up glorious [...]
Late summer is when I’ve always thought about goldenrod. It’s one of those brilliant and abundant wildflowers that graced abandoned meadows in central West Virginia where I grew up. It stands tall above the unmown grasses, golden beacons in a sea of green. The species I most easily recognized is Solidago canadensis, Canada goldenrod. It’s [...]
Tap into your inner artist and break out your paintbrushes. These colorful members of the Orobanchaceae (until recently in the Scrophulariaceae) can be found in every state or province in North America, although the great majority of the 200 or so species are limited to the western part of the continent. The USDA PLANTS database [...]
Big, bold, bright beacons of summer, showy native lilies tower above the groundcover plants along roads, trails, and meadows. They’ve been “stop the car” plants to me for many, many years. Earlier this month I was driving up the North Santiam Highway on the Willamette National Forest (Oregon Rt 22) between Detroit and Santiam Pass [...]
