Category: Native Plants

By mid-December, the deciduous trees and shrubs in the Puget Lowlands are mostly bare, and many of the views in the forests open up. But much too soon our short winter season will end. In a half-dozen weeks or so the buds will start breaking, and the forest will begin to close in around us…

Though the fall colors of leaf senescence in our native trees, shrubs, and other perennial plants may be less than spectacular visually, what the colors indicate is stunning — the incredible adaptations of plants to conserve nutrients through resorption.

As the leaves begin to turn, the hard, waxy fruits of fall catch my eye, including the bright red rosehips and the contrasting white snowberries.

Like the return of migrant birds, the flowering of native plants in spring reassures me that the circle of life is going to keep on rolling. In this post I look at ten flowers of May in the Pacific Northwest.

While you wander the forest paths admiring the native flowers this April, don’t forget to listen for birds — the year-round residents, the newly-arrived summer-only residents, the soon-to-leave winter-only residents, and the migrants just passing through – they’re all singing in April.

I learned recently (here) that changes in daylight hours determine when buds set and dormancy begins in winter, but temperature is the main factor in determining when the buds break in spring and leaves unfurl. A close look at Red Huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium) reveals that the white features on the stems are not flowers but…

Inspired by several blogs I follow (“In the Company of Rocks and Plants,” “Tuesdays in the Tallgrass,” and “The Prairie Ecologist”), I’m venturing into the realm of the photo essay.