Real Gardens Grow Natives: Design, Plant, and Enjoy a Healthy Northwest Garden By Eileen M. Stark

Is it possible to appreciate butterflies without appreciating native plants? Well, no. If you start out strictly chasing fauna, you’ll quickly see that the story’s incomplete without flora. If you want to find Behr’s Hairstreaks, you’ll do well to look for bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata.

Learning to field-identify native host plants and nectar sources leads to the delight of stumbling on familiar floral friends, wherever encountered. That camaraderie expands until you’re disdainfully eyeing marguerite daisies in your own garden, and wishing for a little Erigeron speciosus instead.

But if you’re still not won over to the cause of native plants, Eileen Stark, an Oregon landscape designer, presents Real Gardens Grow Natives, a book that makes a good case for choosing natives over exotics. She champions plant diversity and explains the many ways that we can attract birds, bugs, and many types of animals to use and feed in our yards.

With Ms. Stark’s book, you have a clear guide to transforming your own patch of the planet into a haven for native plants and animals. She offers advice for all situations – even if you’re currently stuck with a turf lawn and overbearing hedges, or you’re in the unusual situation of tackling a blank slate.

Rather than surrender to impulse purchases at a plant sale, Ms. Stark would have us create an overall plan for our gar- den. She guides us through each step of drawing a scaled site plan showing available light and space, and advises us on ways to rejuvenate starved soil without the use of additives – like peat moss – that ultimately deplete other environments.

But Ms. Stark is no purist, and she offers suggestions on combining natives and exotics. She also sings the praises of a messy garden, with leaf litter and brush piles to provide animal cover, and she explains alternatives to using dangerous insecticides.

Almost half of her book is devoted to presenting 100 native plants appropriate for home gardens. Grouped according to light requirements, each plant’s needs and benefits are detailed – including how each one could more beautifully fulfill the function of common exotics. For instance, wouldn’t you rather establish a background hedge of redtwig dogwood, Cornus sericea, and aromatic mock orange, Philadephus lewisii, instead of Portugal laurel or invasive butterfly bush?

Any butterfly-lover would nod approvingly at Ms. Stark’s many references to butterflies, the entire section “Providing for Pollinators”, and her lovely photographs that include quite a few insects and birds drawn to native plants. Regrettably, she does not mention WBA in her helpful appendix of resources, but she does list the BugGuide website and the Xerces Society.

Even though this book applies mainly to gardens west of the Cascades, it’s also useful to those of us living east of the mountains. I found many of my own familiar floral friends among the pages, and I appreciated her clear information on what each plant requires to thrive. And I found a little hope in imagining the restoration of a network of native habitat – one backyard at a time.

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by Joyce Bergen