Alaska

Oyster Leaf. The leaves are edible and taste - and feel - exactly like raw oysters. If raw oysters are your thing, this is an OMG veg alternative. The now closed El Bulli in Catalonia, regarded as one of the greatest restaurants ever, ran with Oyster Leaf innovative ways. Loved to have tried the leaves striped in golden caviar and splashed with Grey Goose. Beautiful glaucous blue-green leaves on sprawling stems tipped in small sky blue flowers. This likes ample nutrition. Perennial and dormant in winter. This is a plant of just above high tide line on cold northern hemisphere beaches from Maine to Greenland and Japan to Alaska so if you have a cool to cold garden, here you go.

Seed-grown plants of the dwarf red pussytoes which we presume will come true to form.  Short stems with clusters of red flowers over small mats of dense small leaves  Tough small-scale carpeter for a sunny area and can take drier conditions when established.  Perfect for the rock garden or hell strip where it can cope with some foot traffic. Native to Alaska and Eurasia.

Gold Thread. This is a rare native to WA but more common in BC and AK. Great evergreen groundcover for moist shade with glossy parsley leaves and golden thin rhizomes hence the common name. Dye plant and most likely medicinal. This spreads well in loose moist soil.

Superb free-flowering selection of this tight, low-growing heather relative which covers itself in white bells. Cassiopes need a cool position in an airy acidic soil to perform at their best much like Rhododendrons. Morning sun is ideal and this will be one of those delightful little plants in your garden that makes your pleasure centers light up. Washington to Alaska native.

Our native creeping dogwood from seed collected during one of our many hikes in the Olympic Mountains. This deciduous groundcover is such a good plant with obvious white dogwood flowers on 4"-6" stems followed by clusters of red fruit. We like it when it climbs a bit up mossy trunks and logs. Loose soil with a good organic content.

Tough as all get out circumpolar herbaceous species of the subarctic which is found in Alaska and the Yukon and skips along the mountain tops as far south as Wyoming. This is a tap-rooted species and will not run but settles for making a nice low clump of soft as a mouse-ear silver haired leaves which are great with the sizable yellow flowers. It does great here at sea level in Port Townsend and our plants are descended from our dear departed friend Steve Doonan of Grande Ridge Nursery.

Western Shooting Star. A pleasing western wildflower California to Alaska that one can't help but enjoy with its showy pinkish flowers with its strongly backswept petals. Likes it moist in spring and goes summer dormant when it gets drier. The taxonomic move of Dodecatheon to Primula nearly made us give up on plants and take up studying something stable and predictable like Constitutional checks and balances. These from a Ron Ratko collection.

Mountain dweller in the Cascades BC to CA, popping over to Colorado and up into the northern arctic regions. Good rock garden plant down here where the livin' is easy. Succulent blue-green leaves clad the many stems while the terminal clustered red flowers glitter like a garnet hatpin.

Twisted Stalk. One of our favorite natives (the list spans several pages of small print) of our woodlands is this Solomon's Seal relative. These are seed-grown from a collection near Easton WA. Branched stems bear dangling white flowers followed by showy red-orange fruit.