The Joy of Native Plant Gardening

In the late 1980s, when my husband and I moved from Bozeman to Jackson Hole, we were lucky to find a lot in town we could afford to buy. It consisted of a patch of quack grass and one young cottonwood too small to offer shade. My head filled with plans: vegetable garden, flowerbeds and a little forest like the one we left in Montana.

We ordered a truckload of topsoil after the house was finished, and in it were numerous bits of wilted rhizome. Hoping some would take root, I raked them in with the soil. If they turned out to be weeds, I would deal with them later.

The lot in Jackson was less than one-eighth the size of our yard in Montana, but that didn’t prevent me from imagining something similar as I drew up a site plan. The pen transferred my vision to paper: aspen and conifers for the overstory, a mix of red-twig dogwood, black hawthorn, chokecherry and serviceberry to cover the intermediate heights, and an understory of wild rose, snowberry and fireweed. Transferring the drawing into a garden proved more difficult, however. Most of what I wanted was unavailable at nurseries.  

But they had plenty of aspens. The largest of them, a group of seven stems about 10 feet tall, arrived via front-end loader having traveled only a few blocks from property slated for new condos. I was pleased to help rescue them and hoped they were equally glad to be transplanted close to home. They prompted me to picture Jackson before it became a town, with Cache Creek flowing from the mountains in riffles and ponds, willows and alder shading its water and aspens growing nearby. Perhaps, rather than our yard in Bozeman, this is what I hoped to replicate.

We found ways to introduce the understory plants we couldn’t buy. The Forest Service issued permits for landscaping plants at three for $25, so we took advantage of that. Meanwhile, the rhizomes in the imported soil began sending up slender shoots. As their leaves opened they could be easily identified: wild rose, snowberry, and fireweed. They have since taken over the ground beneath the aspens, which have sent up their own new stems that are now trees as tall as the originals.

Wildflower seeds I gathered while wandering in the mountains and scattered in sunny spots have thrived as well. My favorites are members of the sunflower family, whose roots can quickly spread into a colony. Asters and fleabanes are especially productive, not to mention beautiful.

The most interesting components of the garden are the unexpected plants that gardeners call “volunteers” (ones that were not deliberately planted), many of which were delivered as seeds by birds: chokecherry, serviceberry, Canada gooseberry and black twinberry. Others didn’t need the help of birds. In a bare, west-facing strip beside the back deck, a Bebb’s willow came up on its own. Now vying with an adjacent chokecherry for light and height, it has hosted visits from bumblebees, songbirds, a ruffed grouse, a large and brilliant sand wasp, and a porcupine.

A tall, showy member of the buttercup family known as monkshood appeared beside the willow and has increased to a half-dozen plants. This made me wonder again what the land once looked like, for both species prefer locations near water and our lot was flat and dry. Was there a buried spring nearby, an old meander of Cache Creek? The sediments we dug through for the house certainly suggested that water had once been active here. Shoals of rounded gravel gave way to lenses of clay and sand. But any live water would have long since disappeared since most of Cache Creek is now underground in pipes.

Then a mountain hollyhock showed up. The ceramic-hard seeds of this species can lie dormant in the ground for a century, but knowing this didn’t lessen my surprise when the first leaves appeared. How did that tiny bit of nascent life arrive here, when the closest plant I knew about was several miles away? Was it too a remnant from an earlier time? Regardless of its origin, the hollyhock grew larger each year until we had a five-foot vase-shaped plant with many panicles of pale pink flowers in the spring.

I weed and water by hand, and often when I’m working near the street, people will stop and tell me how much they enjoy the yard. After thanking them, I offer starts and seeds if they want to do the same, but so far no one has asked for any. Green turf managed by professional landscape outfits is the norm here, even as we know about the biological deserts of lawns and the resulting loss of pollinating insects. I haven’t seen other gardeners on my block following the advice of the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation to allow fallen leaves to remain over the winter so those pollinators have a place to hibernate.

My job as a professional landscape architect was to draw a planting design that the city would approve before we started building the house. My job as a gardener is to basically ignore that site plan in favor of encouraging native plants to grow where they want to. I think of them as friends, and I their caretaker, not their owner.

Each spring is a time of discovery. As I lift off the black leaf mulch, I greet old friends and find new ones I didn’t know were there. I keep gathering seeds in the fall in hopes of adding to the diversity of wildflowers, which so far tops 50 species.

Not all of the seeds I gathered took root, and the garden isn’t 100 percent native. Amur maple substitutes for the native bigtooth maple that I can’t start from seed. Raspberries and Nanking cherries fill the freezer. And I love the irresistibly showy blooms of bearded iris. Growing among them are native iris from seeds I gathered on one of our last hikes in Montana before moving here. We wanted to visit a favorite late fall spot in Beartrap Canyon where patches of wild iris were thick with dry, ripe seedpods. I put a couple in my pocket, and now have several healthy clumps.

Native plants in the garden bring beauty and comfort when I’m feeling a bit desperate about the state of the world. All I need to do is spend time with them, witnessing their determination to grow and thrive, and my spirits lift for a while. I engage in the simple acts of bending to the ground, of kneeling with my hands in dirt. These are my prayers of wonder and thanksgiving, my form of manifest hope.

Given the current housing trend in Jackson, when I leave this life my 1,500-square foot house will likely be torn down for a much larger one, and the yard may join all the others dominated by chemical-laden turf. Meanwhile, I have given the plants I love a few decades to flourish and send their seeds to who knows where. And I have faith that someday the wild plants will return to this small parcel long after I am gone. As the volunteer willow and mountain hollyhock have shown, native plants will always find the light again.