Restoration News

The WSU Native Plant & Landscape Restoration Nursery is beginning its second year of operation on the Washington State University campus at Pullman and it's shaping up to be a busy growing season for Spring, 2004. Over 60 seniors and graduate students have signed up for WSU's spring course in Restoration Ecology and will be working at the Native Plant Nursery as they design and implement habitat restoration projects on campus and community landscapes.

The Native Plant Nursery started to take form last year when we began the project after everyone realized that WSU needed a local source of native plants for restoration purposes if we were truly committed to studying, conserving, and restoring Palouse Prairie - one of the most endangered grassland ecosystems in North America. Students in previous classes were excited about a hands-on, field-oriented approach to studying restoration ecology, rather than having the typical "professor behind the podium" course. Likewise, the students in 2003 were eager to get their hands dirty and jumped at the chance to help establish the nursery and we were off and running.

Last year's students potted up about 2,000 seedling trees and shrubs in plastic pots to establish a container nursery that will allow us to grow some larger trees for a year or two before we plant them out in landscape restoration projects. Although direct planting of smaller seedlings is a standard reforestation practice for big landscapes, we felt that students would get more satisfaction out of having some larger, container-grown trees to plant in the future so that they could more immediately see the results of their work.

Most of the trees the class potted were ponderosa pine and douglas fir, with a smattering of other landscaping conifer species mixed in as well. We were fortunate to get some trees and shrubs donated from other nurseries in Idaho and Washington to help us establish our initial foundation stock. The University of Idaho Forest Research Nursery was especially generous to us by donating some native trees and shrubs at the end of the spring planting season. It really helped boost the diversity of our nursery collection and we appreciate their help greatly.

The Native Plant Nursery occupies facilities at the E.H. Steffen Teaching & Research Center on the edge of the WSU Pullman campus and shares greenhouse and laboratory space with other researchers. After the restoration students completed their projects last spring, the Native Plant Nursery still had a lot of work to do to reach the goal of eventually becoming a fully functional production and restoration research nursery. For example, the little-used existing lathe shade house was in need of major repair. Doors were falling off, fencing was falling down, and rabbits and mice had free entry whenever they needed a tasty snack.

Three WSU students were hired last summer to continue some of the facilities repair and development work that the nursery needed. Although the students only worked part-time while taking summer classes, we were still able to construct some raised planter beds for propagating camas flower (Camassia quamash) seedlings, put up a fenced compound to protect the nursery stock from browsing rabbits and deer, and haul in several truck loads of top soil for a botanical garden and some propagation plots.

The Camas Garden was created in a wet drainage at the Steffen Center that dries out by mid-summer, a seemingly ideal spot for growing camas flowers. The Camas Garden was created in honor of Ellen and Roscoe Watson who pursued a lifetime passion for native lilies of the Pacific Northwest and helped us found the living plant collection that will be on display in the garden. Just before the cold weather and snow hit this fall, we were able to finish planting about 3,000 mature bulbs of commercial and regional varieties of Camassia spp., Calochortus spp., and other members of the Lily Family - so we are eagerly waiting for spring to arrive to see how well they make it through the winter.

If the initial display of the Camas Garden appears adequate, we may even offer the first public showing of this botanical garden in late spring and early summer, 2004, when the flowers will be blooming. Work on the garden will continue this spring and summer to establish paths, benches, signs, garden borders and many additional plantings of primarily native and naturalized flowering plants. We hope to enlist the help of a plant ecologist, horticulturist, and landscape architect or two to help us finish the design and plant collection for the Camas Garden.

This spring we will also be looking to fill several work-study and volunteer positions with the Native Plant & Landscape Restoration Nursery to continue the development and expansion of the nursery. We will be looking for people to fill the roles of forest nursery manager, greenhouse manager, and nursery assistants to help with stratifying seed and managing the propagation and growth of the nursery stock. Drop us an email if you would like to receive seasonal news updates about the student projects and activities of the Native Plant Nursery. We have a full slate of restoration and landscape design projects for the coming year, but we will occasionally wash the soil off our hands to take time to send out news updates.