Richard T. Haard, Ph. D.
Plant Propagation Manager
Fourth Corner Nurseries

Our loyal Washington State customers should not worry about continued supplies of seed source identified as Pacific Northwest native plants. We are continuing to grow these plants to meet the local demand for field-raised nursery stock.

Our job is to provide a service to other nurseries, large and small, and to landscape contractors who can take our relatively inexpensive, high quality, seed-bed grown 1-to-4-year-old native plants and use them in their own value-added operations. We have learned to produce bare-root plant material over almost 20 years for wholesale nurseries and as stock for out-planting in habitat restoration sites.

Many of the plant species we are now routinely growing in seed beds at our Sand Road Native Plant Propagation facility were not available on the market, or were only grown with costly techniques as wet boxes or by propagation of salvaged plant material. By continuing to refine our techniques, we are able to offer 1 to 4-year-old bare-root plant material to growers and restorationists that are essentially finished products only needing to be installed or placed in a container for rooting out prior to planting.

Here are a few ways the plants we produce can be attractive to our customers.

1. A landscape contractor in a short-season climate can take our plants in the spring and can them, growing into the container, to install the following fall or late summer.

2. The same contractor could use our bare-root material in an early spring planting from stock we grew at our farm from seed the contractor collected and supplied to us.

3. Growing nursery stock to size can be time consuming and difficult/expensive in terms of alloting growing space where the season is short and water is scarce. Our 2-1 or 2-2 transplants are supplied to the customer at finished size. Growing native plants to specification is often much faster under open field conditions.

We live in a changing world. This observation should not be a surprise to anyone, anywhere, but we have noticed in our travels around the Great Basin and the Intermountain West that there is a boom underway in new home construction. This building bonanza is creating a modern-day land rush, bringing residential settlements to former rural areas in unprecedented numbers. In the settled areas of Utah, eastern Nevada and Northern California, the demand for housing is causing developers to convert what was once open range and forest tracts into elegant housing sites. The recreational and residential commuter home owners prefer not to have their residences in low lying, saline, hot treeless areas or the sub-alpine high snowfall zones. It is the more temperate climate of the mid elevations or the shrub/desert/forest ecotone regions that have become most attractive to residential development throughout this region.

The original condition of the vegetation in these places was really quite different before settlement of the west took place. It is well known that the influence on vegetation of frequent burning by original people and natural processes shaped the landscape. Now fire suppression and all of the umulative effects of timber harvest, mining and, above all, ranching with sheep and cattle have made these areas different than before. The grazing and browsing animals have compacted the soil with their hooves, selectively removed grasses and shrubs that are tender to browsing and allowed other plant species to invade, replacing the natural vegetation with one that reflects overstocking and the deleterious effects of invasive vegetation. Also, not the least, watersheds and wetlands have been modified or eliminated for the convenience of agriculture.

In the last 50 years or so there have been many scientific accomplishments in the field of rangeland and wildlife range management. Selections of shrubs and forage grass species have been developed by the Universities and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, (NRCS) as species to make rangelands and shrub/scrub habitats productive for livestock production. In addition, there has been much progress made on the development of conservation corridors or strips of land that serve to preserve soil, plants, wildlife and fish resources. These corridors not only are well utilized by wildlife, improve water conditions and minimize erosion, but they become an esthetic resource that yields benefits to the landowner and society. For further reading we suggest you visit the NRCS site of the USDA to tap a wealth of information on this topic (a).

We have observed people are now settling into these once-open range lands desiring to reestablish a natural vegetation that provides food and protection for birds, fish, insects and other wildlife, while developing a landscape that provides a scenic vista and protects the homes from the ravages of wildfires. In one location, while looking for places to collect native shrub seed for a client, we came to realize the only shrub to thrive or survive the former era of livestock was the thorny, black hawthorne - Crataegus douglasii. Walking into a nearby narrow ravine protected from cattle by rugged terrain we were able to find shrub and under- story perennial species that were completely absent elsewhere, even though the habitat could support them.

One of the displaced shrub species in this location is Lonicera involucrata or black twinberry. We grow this plant by tens of thousands from western Washington seed sources. Our clients, however, are asking us for the same species grown from seed collected in their work areas. In addition, there is a tremendous diversity of species of willows that grow in the northern latitudes. They have been largely ignored or propagated only as male-only cultivars. These are examples of plants grown from local strains that tend to perform better in their natural settings.

In the coming growing season we will be releasing additional, native original vegetation trees and shrubs sourced from northern California to Colorado in a trans-section of the west. We have determined there is an emerging demand for native plants from this area for purposes of residential landscaping and environmental buffers and we intend to do our part to help develop these new supplies. What this means in these newly urbanizing areas is that there is a rapidly developing landscape and landscape nursery industry. The service we have been providing to these markets throughout our service areas is to support these businesses with the best plant materials for their specific sites targeted to the unique needs of this emerging market segment. Much time and money has gone into development of rangeland-specific plants; now we need to focus on and to serve the needs of people living in residential developments of these parts of the west.

(a) USDA, NRSC website