Nursery sends native plants to their roots

I’m not much of a gardener, but every morning and evening for the past two weeks I’ve been strolling the perimeter of my back yard, checking on my plants.

They’re little, just seedlings, and I fear I’m starting to obsess about them much like I did when my dog was a puppy. I notice any growth, however slight. I notice their exuberance or decline. I can’t wait to see how they’ll turn out when they’re big.

Our 95 seedlings arrived in a box from the University of Idaho’s Forest Nursery in Moscow. Packaged in groups of five, their roots kept moist in plastic, were two types of dogwood, two types of cherry, serviceberry, syringa, golden currant, kinnikinnik, ninebark, cinquefoil and quaking aspen.

Since 1909, the Forest Nursery, which is Idaho’s state nursery, has been researching plants and trees that are either native to the state or well-adapted to the region. The nursery grows 75 different species of trees and shrubs, said Sue Morrison, the greenhouse manager. Students of agriculture or natural resources tour the nursery in their classes while graduate students work toward degrees in forest nursery management.

In addition to its educational mission, the nursery has always had some type of program to sell plants to the public. In the past 20 years, Morrison said, the number of people ordering seedlings from the nursery has grown from a few hundred to about 1,500.

The trend has been for people to seek native plants. That’s because they obviously do well in their native soil, Morrison said, but there’s another reason as well.

“The majority of our customers are just small landowners who have a few acres or a back yard and they want native, the sense of having the land go back to the old days,” Morrison said. “They like that.”

That certainly played into our decision to order mostly native plants. Sure, I live in the suburbs of Coeur d’Alene, but still I can’t help but feel that in some small way I’m returning the land to its original state. I like imagining what this area was like before growth and development hit.

And it’s been a learning experience. Now, when I’m out mountain biking on Canfield Mountain or hiking around Tubbs Hill, I delight in recognizing the serviceberry and the ninebark, the kinnikinnik and the syringas.

I know which plants provide good food and cover for birds, which have showy flowers, and which crave sun. I see stands of quaking aspen and look forward to the day when our trees will be that tall, their round leaves fluttering in the breeze.

There have been disappointments. One of the cinquefoils never seemed to get off the ground, so to speak. It shriveled up and died within days of being planted. And though our dog is gradually learning that running through the plants is a big “NO,” he has nonetheless trampled on some.

But the vast majority are doing fine, mirroring the more than 90 percent success rate Morrison said nursery customers generally see.

Getting the plants into the ground was a ton of work. Many of my friends laughed when they heard we ordered 95 seedlings. There was a weekend of rototilling, nights of laying out weed barriers, and a full weekend of planting, installing a drip system and carting wheelbarrow load after arm-aching wheelbarrow load of bark to the back yard.

But the rewards have been immediately plentiful.

You more-experienced gardeners out there may laugh at my naivete for there are surely many things I do not know about my plants and how they’ll grow.

Maybe we spaced them too close together.

Maybe they’ll become overgrown, intense tangles that will drive me batty.

Maybe they won’t be as pretty as I hope.

But those lessons, too, are mine to learn.

To learn more about the University of Idaho’s Forest Research Nursery, call (208) 885-3888 or visit the Web site at http://seedlings.uidaho.com.

The nursery, at 1025 Plant Science Road in Moscow, is open weekdays to visitors from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.