Idaho hort goes wild!
by Bill Loftus
The slope presents a rock garden worthy of Eden. Planted and tended by Mother Nature, blooms spring from the rocky soil small and colorful.
“You find the most interesting plants in the most difficult environments,” observes Steve Love, University of Idaho Extension horticulturist. We’re searching in late June for native plants suitable for Idaho gardens. On this bright sunlit morning, Love works his way up a steep slope near the Seven Devils Mountains high above Riggins. The coarse, dry soil is newly crumbled rock.
Wild buckwheats launch small puffs of bloom skyward in cream, pink, white, orange, and a palette of shades in between. Penstemons compete for Love’s attention with intense purple blossoms. Bright blooms of Indian paintbrush range from scarlet to salmon in pockets across the slope.
Love, Tony McCammon, UI Extension educator in Payette County,
and Phillip Waltman, a 2007 Aberdeen High School graduate who helps Love tend
his experimental plot of native plants
at the UI Aberdeen Research and Extension Center, began their collecting trip
the day before by descending into Hells Canyon from Cambridge.
Almost immediately, Love’s truck stops and his crew piles out to look at a large buckwheat, its powder-puff blooms in striking contrast to roadside cheatgrass. Around the corner taillights flare again, and the crew repeats the routine: investigate a showy plant, look for others, consult on its identity, plot its location with a GPS unit, collect photos, and take notes.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this penstemon before,” Love says as he examines a bushel-basket-sized clump of lavender spires. He records it so he can return when blooms yield ripe seedpods.
The Idaho Native Plant Society’s Sah-Wah-Be Chapter of southeastern Idaho applauds Love’s interest in developing native plants for home gardens. In past summers, Love has explored the Owyhee desert and mountains and headwaters of the Salmon River for flora.
Next stop: Aberdeen experimental garden for further research
Collected seeds are planted in Love’s Aberdeen plot. “If a native plant can make it in the silt soils of Aberdeen, it can make it anywhere in Idaho,” observes Love with a wry smile. A plant breeder by profession, he spent most of his career with UI CALS as a professor of potato breeding. Idaho’s expanding nursery industry convinced UI Extension to serve its needs with research and education. As part of that shift, Love’s focus switched from potatoes to native plants and Idaho horticulture.
Steve Love examines penstemon (top) in the Seven Devil Mountains
for its potential as the parent of future garden favorites.
Waybe and Jacie Jensen (above) see the beauty and business
opportunity of Palouse natives. Blooms that don’t measure up in his research garden are ignored when he gets his shovel out to begin selecting. He seeks desirable traits—a bigger bloom, brighter colors, more tolerance to drought, or, in the case of native plants, ability to survive overwatering.
On this western Idaho expedition, Love looked for columbines to serviceberry, agastaches to yarrows. Heading west from Cambridge, he found several species of buckwheats and penstemons that intrigued him enough to mark their locations. He passed on skyrocket scarlet gilia blooms. “We have to focus because we are already working with a lot of different plants,” he explained.
“If nurserymen like what they see, a plant can get to the public pretty fast,” said Love.
From his Aberdeen garden, a plant can take one to five years to reach market. Love has sent two species out to nurseries now for trial—a silver rabbitbrush from the desert west of Aberdeen and a giant hyssop from the Grande Targhee area.
Cultivating prairie plants
Jacie and Wayne Jensen of Genesee take
a different approach.
We’re producers, and that’s the way we orient our business,” said Jacie, who
serves on the UI CALS advisory board. The Jensens’ farm and Palouse Prairiescapes
business lies between Moscow and Genesee on the east side of Paradise Ridge.
The story of their family and heritage was told spectacularly several years back
on public TV’s “Outdoor Idaho.” The crew was back again in 2006 to film for an
episode entitled “Palouse Paradise.” Part of that film showed Jacie on one of
the largest remnants of original Palouse prairie, spangled with wildflowers.
On the edge of that remnant, Jacie and Wayne began cultivating native wildflowers and grasses. Plants grown from seeds collected on the ridge stocked their initial one-acre plot. Since 2004, Jacie has collected enough seeds from 15 prairie natives—including prairie smoke, western aster, two cinquefoils, buckwheat, penstemon, and grasses—to begin commercial production in 2007.
8-packs of native prairie species
In contrast to Love’s efforts to breed the best cultivars to offer singly to customers, the Jensens’ focus is packaging eight species together in packs—five flowers and three grasses—simulating the essential prairie core. The marketplace has yet to signal clearly whether that strategy will work.
“We collect from different elevations and from different aspects, north, south, east, and west, when we can,” said Jacie Jensen. Their goal is to create for public and private lands a supply of quality, certified seed stock and plants from these drought-tolerant, regionally adapted species.
Their prairie packs reflect a respect for the synergy that can exist among plant species, and it’s that web that keeps a plant community whole.
The Jensens are also planting 2- to 5-acre plots of native plants hoping to supply federal and state agencies or other customers with large volumes of seeds. “It takes at least five years to develop enough seed to produce 5,000 or 10,000 pounds of seed from wildflowers and grasses we’re growing,” said Jensen. “What’s rewarding is seeing if we can get these seeds propagated, how we can grow these plants for production, and how we can harvest their seed. We need to produce native seeds that are economically sustainable.”
Contact Steve Love or Wayne and Jacie Jensen.
Finding Idaho native plants
Find Idaho native plants at nurseries throughout Idaho and beyond. Some with good selections include
--Draggin’ Wing Farm, Boise;
--Native & Xeric Plants, Emmett;
--Trail Creek Nursery, Victor; and
--Plants of the Wild, Tekoa, Wash.
Find Idaho prairie natives in Tekoa and
--At Fiddler’s Ridge, Moscow and Potlatch;
--Prairie Bloom between Moscow and Pullman;
--Westwood Gardens Nursery & Garden Art, Coeur d’Alene; and
--Blue Moon, Spokane.
 top
|