Gardening with Natives
An important part of our mission is encouraging Lane County residents to use native plants in their gardens. Research has shown that having natives in the garden boosts pollinator and local arthropod populations that use or feed on those plants, which in turn helps support a more robust food chain for birds, mammals, and other vertebrate species. To begin exploring how you might use natives in your own yard we highly recommend the following two online resources (and the additional resources these sites link to):
NGAP
The Native Gardening Awareness Program (NGAP), a committee of the Emerald Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Oregon, has produced a set of three booklets about gardening with native plants. Online versions of these booklets (links below) are provided in the hope that they will serve as a useful reference for home gardeners, as well as landscape architects and nursery retailers. The booklets cover plants locally native to the southern Willamette Valley and the specific gardening conditions encountered here.
Native Plant Propogation Protocols
If you have collected seeds of native plants and you are wondering about how to propagate them, go to rngr.net (Forest Service National Center for Reforestation, Nurseries and Genetic Resources) for a list of protocols for plants found in the Pacific Northwest. We encourage you to try protocols developed by our colleagues at USDA’s Dorena Genetic Resource Center, if they are available for your species of interest.