Going native is a good resolution for 2009, especially when it comes to your own habitat.
Two Idaho landscapers are offering a free, daylong program about native plants and xeric gardening on Saturday at the Foothills Learning Center in Boise.
The Center is home to a new native plant garden that looks like a field of rocks and dirt for now, but will start to show a little green this spring.
Susan Bell, a horticultural educator with the University of Idaho Ada County Extension Office in Boise will lend her expertise at the Saturday program, along with Steven Paulsen, general manager and restoration ecologist with Conservation Seeding and Restoration Inc., in Kimberly.
Paulsen told us more, and asked us to pass on this message to program participants: If you want him to identify a plant for you, bring a clipping of the plant or a photo. Don’t rely on verbal description alone.
Q: What can attendees expect on Saturday?
A: We’ll talk about plant species, functionality, realistic time lines, cost. All the issues that come up when you rethink your personal space to include natives.
I do talk about the difference between xeric and native concepts. A lot of people confuse those terms.
Q: What’s the difference?
A: A native plant, one that grows naturally in an area, is an extension of the habitat. It includes features for birds, animals, insects, soil. Everything is there.
With a xeric plant, you are targeting water use, and the value for you, of that plant in the landscape. Native does not imply xeric.
Q: There’s more and more talk all the time about the reasons to grow native plants here in the Valley. What are the top selling points from your perspective?
A: Natives are tough, resilient. They let you get away from the traditional concepts of planting everything in the spring.
Natives have a ‘habitat function’ for animals and insects, and promote a connectivity of the landscape.
I’m not taking the desert and breaking it apart by putting a patch of bluegrass in the middle.
Natives promote responsible use of resources – less need for water, fertilizer.
A native landscape is less expensive over time, and less intense from the maintenance standpoint. [Note: a healthy native landscape tends to crowd out weeds].
You’ll spend less time cutting, watering and fertilizing. More time watching, with the occasional flower-picking and photo-taking.
Q: And natives do provide year-round interest?
A: No question. You have to talk about birds, moths, butterflies that are dormant. The native winter landscape harbors them. You have color, structure.
Looking out my window right now, I can see red dogwoods, rusty-colored junipers, basin wild rye that’s easily seven feet tall, Idaho fescue with a nice green patch of new growth at its base, elderberry.
All this stuff is going on. There’s a lot of action in the winter.
Anna Webb: 377-6431