In Tukwila this Saturday, we’ll be celebrating Wildlife; with our families on Sunday, we’ll celebrate our Mothers. You may think the two celebrations have no relation to one another, but you will discover the perfect convergence in our booth at the Backyard Wildlife Festival. Native Plants! They benefit the whole circle of Life AND make a great gift for your Mother, who gave you Life (you know I’m right).

 Here are a few ideas:

 Camas: Common Camas (Camassia quamash) and Great Camas (Camassia  leichtlinii)

• Blue or purple flowers.
• Grows from an edible bulb.
• Does well in soil that holds winter moisture – can be completely inundated — but dries out in the summer.
• Readily re-seed themselves, but it is easy to unwittingly weed out their seedlings, which resemble blades of grass.
• Check out a previous blog entry for more info.
• Beautiful and showy!

Small-flowered Alumroot (Heuchera micrantha)

• Native perennial with neat, ruffly, glossy, semi-evergreen foliage and frothy white flowers taller than the leaves. With the flowers, they can be up to approximately 2½’ tall.
• Partial to full shade, moist-to-wet soil.
• Not as show-offy as some ornamental Heucheras, but honest and classy–like your mom, right?

Black Twinberry (Lonicera involucrata)

• Deciduous shrub up to 9’ tall (in the sun, it grows full and fat; in the shade, tall and lanky).
• Moist to wet soils.
• Hummingbirds and butterflies come to the small paired yellow flowers which look like little trumpets and give way to two shiny black berries.
• As the berries ripen, the bracts (petal-like leaves) which hold them turn a striking scarlet-purple.
• Birds love the berries (inedible for humans)
• Beside a stream or on a wet hillside, Twinberry’s roots anchor the soil against erosion.

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