My oldest grandchild is coming for a week-long visit in just a little over a week from today. He wants to visit before he gets too busy with his Senior year of high school and basketball, and, I think, he wants to check out his mother’s alma mater. It’s hard to believe we will be driving to Newberg to tour the campus of George Fox University again: wasn’t it just yesterday that we made the trip with our daughter? I secretly hope our almost-18 year grandson will decide to attend college there instead of Anchorage. Sure, the latter is closer to his parents, but the former is closer to us.
Z’s arrival means I have to create space for him in our little house. The “spare bedroom” is now my studio and cluttered with what my husband refers to as “the detritus” of my later life career as an eccentric. I have sculptures, paintings, canvases, paints, sewing, and more stacked up waiting for cooler weather and my attention.
Gardening takes up the good weather season, and I have herbs hanging and drying up here as well. Herbs I have forgotten to label: sage, betony and bee balm, feverfew, self heal, horehound, peppermint, and nettle. I can smell the peppermint. The sage and horehound are easy: sage has a distinct aroma and horehound is also soft and grey. The feverfew is obvious with its white blooms as is the self heal with its purple ones. The bee balm and betony are probably the same, just one was labeled as “betony” and one was labeled as “bee balm” when I purchased the plants.
The nettle is the easiest to identify: despite being dry and the same color as the bee balm, nettle still retains a “sting” to its leaves. The sting isn’t close to what nettle feels like when it is alive and bare skin brushes against it; it is just an irritating little prick felt when stripping stems of leaves that soon disappears. I have more nettle than any other herb, mostly because I do not allow it to go to flower or seed: the plant I am growing is safe within the confines of a planter where one cannot accidentally brush up against it without protection.
Because, yes, I have experience with stinging nettle and it wasn’t pleasant. I once crawled on my hands and knees into a mess of it growing in an aspen grove on the side of Chocolate Mountain. The full-face effect was… well, stinging! (Why would I do such a stupid thing? We were at a large camp-out with many families, I was a preteen, I was probably hiding from a sibling, and I wasn’t thinking about the ever-present rattlesnake danger of my childhood in the high desert of Nevada. Maybe I was pursuing a garter snake? Or pretending to be a coyote or mountain lion. Who remembers such mundane details?
I remember the facial.
(Cover photo: Betony in Bloom) (All photos are mine unless otherwise noted. Just FYI)
Tiny pinks on long stems. This mallow started life in out garden as a tiny free specimen. I put it in a planter and it thrived. Moved it into the ground and it nearly died. It is in a large planter, soil mixed with sand, and it is happy once again. It is a bee favorite & common on the Coast.
stinging nettle – urtica dioica
I hope you know what plant that is without the ID below it: run into this without enough clothes on and you’ll wish you had never met it. I crawled into it once when I was a child. Nettle stings all over my face! Fortunately, the damage is never serious and the sting can be dealt with (in my case, I probably smeared mud all over my face. I was a clever child – HA!). I started growing it for the medicinal benefits of nettle tea. It is in a pot so it doesn’t escape into the yard and I deadhead the flowers before they produce seeds: this is all the nettle I need in my yard. Harvest with care: garden gloves, long sleeves. I dry the leaves in the dehydrator instead of hanging them to dry. I’ve read you can cook the leaves as a spinach substitute (I’m not fond of cooked spinach except on pizza). The leaves lose their sting when dry. I mix the leaves with feverfew and yarrow for a green tea that I can drink without sweetener.
Nettle may lower your blood pressure, help with blood sugar, hay fever, reduce inflammation, and help with enlarged prostate, and contains antioxidants and many vitamins. (I may write more on nettle in another post on herbs in the future.)
I love irises! These are my wild native irises (I have “domestic” irises as well). The first two iridacea shown love moist soil and are planted in a little shady swale next to the south fence of our yard along with the camassia. I need to divide the flag iris this fall. The Douglas iris is more like its commercial counterparts: dry soil is fine. They love sunshine. The blooms are larger than the flag iris but still delicate.
wild camas – camassia quamish
Wild camas (which is related to asparagus) is a beloved forage plant for the Indigenous peoples of the PNW. I loves marshy areas. I have not tried eating it: I have too few of the plants to forage just yet.
false Solom0n’s Seal (m. stellatum) & bear grass (xerophyllum tenax)bear grass – xeropyllum tenaxfalse Solomon’s seal – m. stellatum
My husband brought me a gift of bear grass one year along with the deer ferns. Falso Solomon’s seal hitched a ride. My bear grass has never failed to bloom: the spikes tower above the heavy leaves. I think one of my plants is showing its age and beginning to die out, but it produced three beautiful spikes of flowers this year. And the false Solomon’s seal never disappoints, but it is gone by summer and the ground bare where it flourished in the wet of spring.
This beautiful ground cover was also a hitch hiker. I think it came with the yew and maple (long gone now). It spreads quickly, covers the ground beautifully, and attracts every bee, bee fly, and wasp. It greens up in the Autumn, overwinters green, and blooms in the spring – and then it is gone. The ground bare.
I have not tried too many other plants mixed in with the false Solomon’s seal to cover the bare spot in summer, but I have tried where the meadowfoam is. And meadowfoam does not like to be shaded out during the dormant stage! The bare spots in the photo are where i removed plants that shaded out the meadowfoam and it died back. However… it seems to love peonies and grows profusely around them despite the shade of summer, so I may try putting a couple peonies in there.
vine maple – acer circinatum
Don dug this out of a bar pit one year. he intended to make it into a Bonsai tree, but vane maple grows too quickly and he had to put it into the ground. It is as large as it is ever going to get. The leaves turn brilliant red in the autumn. The squirrels love the helicopter seeds. Very little grows under it but I am hoping some huechera (coral bells) will take off.
narrowleaf milkweed – asclepias fascicularis
Milkweed. I could write a blog post on this, the last of my Natives to show off. I planted it by seed: two kinds of native milkweeds, the showy (pink flowers) and a few of the narrowleaf. They didn’t grow. Well, to heck with that idea, right? I could purchase some starts but it just never seemed to happen. And four years after I tossed those seeds in the garden, I had a thick stem poking out of the ground. Suspicious, I broke a leaf off and watched as it oozed thick milky sap. Eureka! It only took four years for those seeds to grow! And grow they did: I now have to fight the plants to keep them contained in the corner of garden where I planted them: milkweed spreads by runners underground.
Bees, flies, butterflies (but never Monarchs – so far), and milkweed beetles love the plants. Invasive as the plant is, it grows well in the little corner of yard where it is, sharing space with peonies, asters, Voodoo lilies, and grape hyacinth. The hyacinth blooms first, then the peonies, followed by the voodoo lily. The milkweed rises up and blooms, fades and dies, and the asters bloom. A perfect full summer garden of bloom.
That is it for my native plants! My next posts will be about herbs in the garden, uses, recipes, and cautions. I’m excited for those posts!
Jaci Dawn 