Native Plants Fuel the Hummingbird Highway

North Central Washington is on the map for migrating neotropical Rufous, Calliope, and Black-chinned hummingbirds, as they fly thousands of miles from their wintering habitats in the mountains of Western Mexico northward, as far north as southern Alaska. During migration they fly during the day, and use early mornings and late evenings to fuel up on nectar, insects, and sugar water in feeders. Abundant nectar-producing flowers on early-blooming native shrubs like Serviceberry and Currents offer critical calories that fuel long-distant flight. Continue Reading →

70 Days in the Life of One Balsamroot

As I walk, I often think about this resilient and wide-spread native plant, that is found throughout the western U.S at a wide variety of elevations. You can still find fresh flower blooms on plants growing at 3000″ in mid-June in the Wenatchee Mountain while the mid-June Wenatchee Foothills plants have already shed their ripe seeds. Continue Reading →

Neotropical migrants raising their young in our canyons

Hanging clothes on my backyard clothesline gives me a chance to look west, up into the V-shaped Number Two Canyon, where steep sagebrush-covered slopes plunge down to the brushy canyon Continue Reading →

Shrub-steppe Plant Adaptations

  Compared to mobile animals, plants can’t walk away when the weather gets severe and water is scarce.  Plants employ several strategies that allow them to cope with water shortage Continue Reading →

What’s in a Name: Why Our Region Has So Many Names for the Plant Communities

Depending on who’s talking, our landscape is called by many names:  the Columbia Plateau, the Columbia Basin Eco-region, Arid Lands, the Shrub-steppe Ecosystem, or simply, the sagebrush grassland.  Surprising, all Continue Reading →

Ideas for Beating the Heat

The extreme heat forecast for the coming week might provide an opportunity to stay inside and do some armchair natural history adventuring. This is National Pollinator Week , so you might want to learn a bit about our Pacific Northwest pollinators. Continue Reading →

Spectacular Wenatchee Rock Rose on Display

We locals like to call it Wenatchee Rock Rose, and others call it Tweedy’s lewisia. In all the world, it only grows in our neck-in-the-woods, something botanists call an endemic species. It turns out, our Wenatchee Mountains have the highest concentration of endemic plants in all of Washington. Continue Reading →

Curious About … Using Native Plants?

The “Natives ‘N More Garden” contains a mixture of native and non-native plants that may be grown in our north central Washington climate. The plants are labeled with their common and scientific names, with additional designations of which are native and Firewise. Continue Reading →

Curious About … Plant Recovery After Fire?

Plants are closely attuned to the places they live, their habitat. Plant species differ in their ecological amplitude to respond to changes to their habitat. They grow successfully in places within their tolerance levels for environmental factors such as cold, shade, or drought combined with abiotic factors such as soil type and geographic locale. In addition to usual fluctuations in the growing conditions habitat can be altered, at times dramatically, by disturbances such as fire or flood. Continue Reading →