I have grown air plants for at least ten years. Surprisingly, many Tillandsia species are really hardy and these plants enjoy the temperature and the humidity in the greenhouse. I am not careful about spraying these plants in the summer–maybe they get sprayed once a week when I water. They seem fine, though, (and the ones that weren’t fine dried up and disapppeared).

I grabbed a branch from the yard of a rental house sister Cate was occupying. It has been a perfect place to display the airplants. They grow and multiply freely on it and look better and better as time goes by.

These plants have interesting and often beautiful flowers in pinks, magentas, and blues. My future plans are to keep these going on this branch and maybe add a branch or two as they multiply and need to be divided.

Creeping mahonia is a new native plant for our garden, added to the native plant bed in April. I have a couple of these and they seem to have settled in nicely, although they are not creeping just yet. These short shrubs get nice yellow flowers in the spring that are popular with pollinators and blue-purple berries in the summer/fall that birds will love.

My future plans for these plants are to water them some next summer to be sure they have established themselves well. I will watch for them to start to creeping so I can take some divisions and spread them around more and give some away.

Salal has been an important plant to humans since long before European settlers come to this land. It has been used as medicine and food for thousands of years. And I’ve only had it in my garden only since April 2020, with three plants added to my new native plant garden.

Locals take salal for granted because it is everywhere in woods and woodland edges. It is easy to miss the solid evergreen leaves, the graceful white bellflowers, and the nutritious dark berries that follow.

An impressive trait of salal is that it seems to get new growth in summer and looks pretty clean and fresh going into autumn. My future plans for my plants are to water them a bit next summer so they get fully established and to watch for berries to pick and spread aoround the native plant garden, hoping some new babies will spring up on their own. I’ve been grabbing berries off neighborhood plants, as well, to see if the seeds will come up on their own when thrown around the garden.

This giant thistle-like perennial takes the place of a shrub in the summer and early fall. It gets covered with globe-shaped bluish flowers on five- to six-foot stalks cloaked in silvery green thistle-like foliage. I’ve had the main plant of Echinops for twenty years or more. It has seeded around a bit, but not invasively.

My future plans for these plants are to keep them trimmed and tidy after they finish blooming and feed and water only as needed to try to control their exhuberant growth.

It isn’t absolutely clear that this plant is native to Seattle, but some believe it is and I’m optimistic that I haven’t planted an alien in my native plant garden. I just got the one shrub from Seattle Native plants and it is growing well.

This plant was my rhododendron family addition because the Pacific rhododendron is really too big for this garden. I’ll keep it watered and cared for in the next year until it has developed the strength to take care of itself.

Evergreen huckleberry is a new plant to the garden this year (2020), with several small shrubs added to the new native plant garden in April. They appear to be pretty slow growing for me, and I’m hoping I’ll get them to full and fruiting size in the next year or two. My understanding is that mature height is anywhere from three to six feet tall and wide, depending on sun exposure and other factors.

The plants have attracive leaves that are reddish when they first appear and then turn a healthy shade of shiny green. The berries will be a bonus for wildlife.

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I’m going to nurse and cater to these plants as needed to hopefully get them full-grown and drought-proof fo fulfill their food web potential for many years to come.

Known as blue wild rye, this grass is native to Seattle. I started a bunch of seedlings this year (2020) to add to the native plant garden. Luckily, they germinated well and I have about thirty starts, some that have been planted out already and others that are waiting to go into the garden.

Native grasses are important food for native food webs, and I’m really hoping this grass attracts some woodland skipper butterflies to lay their eggs next year so I can have more of these skittish flyers in and around the garden.

I’m mixing some other prairie or meadow plants with the blue rye grass to hopefully create a space that butterflies and other pollinators love.

Purchased from eBay about ten years ago, I have a very cramped pot of this tuberous plant and also one smaller cutting that has survived. This plant is probably hardy outside here in Seattle, so I’m going to plant the cutting out in the memory garden to see how it does.

Sinningia is an attractive plant family, and this is no exception with its gray-green fuzzy leaves and fragrant tubular white flowers on tall stalks. They have a very faint scent of vanilla. The added bonus is that the flowers arrive really late in the season, September and beyond.

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Future plans for this plant include a division and repot in the late winter to get at least six plants and a few small divisions coming along. And I could use a lot better photos, too, of all stages of this plant’s growth.

Henderson’s checker mallow is a native plant here in Seattle that I decided to grow from seed and add to my native plant garden. The seeds germinate well and I’ve gotten several plants to the adolescent stage, large enough to plant out in the open garden. The plants resemble more refined hollyhocks, smaller in all ways. I’ll expect some pink flowers on two- or three-foot stalks next summer.

My future plans will be to keep an eye on the garden plants and also to purchase more seed and get more checker mallows started to add to the garden and give away next year.

There are three different jungle cactus in my collection, two orchid cactus and a night-blooming cereus. One of the orchid cactus plants is an old friend, having come from brother Tim over twenty years ago. It cycles through good and bad years and blooms every now and then with huge, electric magenta flowers. The second orchid cactus came from a cutting that Leon’s cousin brought to the family reunion several years ago. I grew it on and it has gotten to blooming size–we’ll see if any buds appear in the spring.

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The night-blooming cereus is a gift from our friend Staci Adman who has an old “mother” plant that blooms for her every year. These plants are famous, not just for their fantastic, intricate white flowers, but also for the fact that they open in a time window narrow enough to visibly see, so you can literally watch the plant bloom. This plant was given to me about five years ago and it has done terribly for me. One year, I put it outside for the summer and some bugs found it and stripped it to almost nothing. I thought it was a goner, but it has come back a bit and gotten a good fat stem on it this year.

The flowers of these plants are simply shocking. Six or more inches across and in the brightest of colors, they provide a stark contrast to the simple, sometimes homely form of the branches from which they spring.

Like the holiday cacti, my future plans for these plants are to study their care and then apply my learnings to hopefully get bigger, healthier, more floriferous plants.