Story 2: Native Plant Nursery Grows

The Native Plant & Landscape Restoration Nursery is entering its third growing season at Washington State University in 2005 with the help of over 60 students working on campus and community landscape restoration projects.

The Native Plant Nusery is a new campus ecology project started last spring by WSU faculty and students, partly to respond to the challenges of conserving and restoring native Palouse Prairie, one of the most endangered grassland ecosystems in North America.

Students taking the Restoration Ecology course at WSU work in interdisciplinary teams to design landscape restoration projects, develop on-campus greenhouse and nursery facilities, plant demonstration botanical gardens, and grow native plants for use in restoration projects on both campus landscapes and those of surrounding communities and cooperating private landowners.

One of the 2005 student-designed projects is to continue to expand the Steffen Center Campus Forest on the edge of the WSU Pullman campus. Tree by tree, this campus forest has been growing steadily for over 40 years to support teaching and research activities of WSU faculty and students.

In addition to trees, the campus forest provides habitats for wildlife and an increasing diversity of shrubs, grasses, and other flowering plants. Over the years, students have noticed frogs, salamanders, snakes, owls and hawks, and other wildlife regularly living in the campus forest. Students now have an opportunity to conduct ecological field studies in an outdoor laboratory right on the edge of campus.

Rob Westra, graduate student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, says "it's amazing to be in class up on campus one minute and then just a short while later, be at the Steffen Center watching a hawk fly overhead or a coyote hunt for rabbits or mice to feed the pups in its den."

Another one of the student restoration projects conducted at the Native Plant Nursery is to grow bulbs to restore the beautiful blue flowers of common camas (Camassia quamash), an important food plant for the region's original native peoples. The Native Plant Nursery is propagating local sources of camas seeds to eventually produce, literally, millions of bulbs needed for the restoration of wet meadow and Palouse Prairie habitats.

A variety of technical challenges confront the students who work with a number of faculty to design restoration projects. Restoration projects on real landscapes simply cannot be completed overnight, requiring students to develop long-term plans that allow a series of annual steps to be taken by new student teams each spring.

Faculty and students working to develop the Native Plant & Landscape Restoration Nursery hope to more than double the initial collection of plants started by students in 2003 by adding about 5,000-10,000 additional trees and shrubs to the nursery in 2004.

January 1, 2004

For more information, contact: WSU Campus & Community Ecology Project