The Multnomah Villager

So we stopped by the Native Plant sale at Maplewood School Saturday morning. It was cold and misty, but crowded due to a baseball game and a nearby estate sale, which both contributed to a good turnout, according to our sources. We bought a native plant, an “Evergreen Huckleberry“, which is now spending some transitional time in a large pot on our front porch while we decide where it’s going to live for good.

On the way home from the sale, Jr. V asked me what a “native plant” is. I gave him a sort of half-assed explanation, because to be honest, I don’t know jack about plants or gardening. So for anyone out there who’s in the same boat as me, here’s a little information about native plants. This information is specific to Oregon, if you’re reading this post from somewhere out of state, you might want to check with your state’s Environmental Bureau or the equivalent.

The phrase “native plants”  often comes up in meetings of the neighborhood association, as one of the elements of “sustainable development”. The theory is this: plants that are native to a particular area can grow with a lot less human intervention, take less water and require no artificial fertilizers or chemical treatments to maintain. This helps maintain water quality since there’s less runoff and leaching of chemicals into streams and rivers.  The other half of this equation is the need to reduce or eliminate non-native species. Especially invasive species such as English Ivy, Himalayan blackberry and other things. Good thing we don’t have any kudzu out here - all you need to do is take a drive through the south for a while to see what can happen when a non-native plant gets out of control. As you may know, there are also very active groups in and around Portland working on these problems, and none more so than the No-Ivy League.

A huge amount of information can be found at the City of Portland’s Naturescaping For Clean Rivers section of Portland Online. This includes links to PDFs of a native plant poster, a guide to removing invasive species, a native plant selection guide and links to enroll in Naturescaping for Clean Rivers workshops.

So our purchase of this single plant is certainly not going to turn us into some sort of dirt-stained gardening family. My ambitions are pretty much limited to keeping the grass cut and trying a pumpkin patch this year, but we’ll see what happens to this little huckleberry bush and where it takes us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.