Landscaping With Native Plants Goes Mainstream
Without artifice, but full of authentic Mountain style
Shade garden created by Blake Nursery with abundantly
naturalized Aspen (Populus tremuloides), Columbine (Aquilegia), Sticky Geranium (Geranium viscosissimum), and Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia). This is truly close to a no-maintenance garden, with the understanding that you are willing to “go with the flow”, i.e. it is always evolving with self sowing of seeds and thus is different from year to year. Photo courtesy Cherie Rutt, Ringo Marketing.
Low maintenance, drought tolerant, occasionally irrigated lawn south of Livingston, Montana created by Blake Nursery using a custom native grass seed mix. Grass species selection was based on soil, water, and elevation conditions. Francis Blake, is the company guru for native grass seeding. Photo courtesy Sandi Blake.
Low-growing, delightful and often overlooked Gumbo Lily, or Gumbo Evening Primrose (Oenothera caespitosa), attracts nocturnal hawk moths for pollination when flowering at sunset. Meriwether Lewis collected a specimen in Montana in July, 1806. This original plant was exhibited at Crazy Mountain Museum in Big Timber during the 2006 bicentennial celebration. Photo courtesy Sandi Blake.
Carefree beauty abounds in the Lewis & Clark Montana Native Plant Garden at Crazy Mountain Museum in Big Timber. This interpretive garden, created in 2004 for the L&C Bicentennial includes many of the plants collected by the explorers, including Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata), Purple Prairie Clover (Dalea purpurea), Silky Lupine (Lupinus sericeus), and Golden Currant (Ribes aureum). Photo courtesy Sandi Blake.
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MONTANA NATIVE PLANTS WERE ONCE CONSIDERED LOWLY OUTCASTS IN THE WORLD OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN. But today the use of indigenous plants in Montana and the region has gone mainstream. It’s enough to make a native plant lover downright euphoric!
When we opened our nursery in Big Timber, Montana in 1977 we suffered roars of laughter when sharing our dreams of creating landscapes with Montana native plants. Skeptics inquired, how we’d be able to dupe customers into purchasing such common plants as Cottonwoods, Sagebrush, Rabbitbrush, Sumac, and Wild Roses? We were surely going to lose our shirts if we went down that ill-conceived garden path, they scoffed.
It did not matter that we had a deep sense of appreciation for the natural landscape surrounding us. Though nurturing to us, native plants had few advocates then. At that time, customers coveted introduced plants — plants they’d seen growing elsewhere or in dream-on gardening magazines — hybrid tea roses being #1 on the flowering hit parade. That they lacked hardiness and needed endless TLC to survive in Montana seemed irrelevant. We should be selling them, chided the skeptics again.
At first the naysayers were winning the battle. The robust Montana native plants we’d grown from seed languished forlornly in their pots in our nursery, waiting patiently for takers who seldom materialized. For years the most healthy, handsome plants in our nursery were reduced to sale prices just to find them a caring home. It was humbling,
to say the least.
Fast forward to 2008. For the last two years our highest sellers by volume have been Cottonwoods, Aspens, Sagebrush, Rabbitbrush, Chokecherry and Wild Roses. Obviously there is pleasure derived by having stayed the course, but more significant is the groundswell of interest in Montana native plants during roughly the past 20 years.
Montana Native Plant Society and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service deserve much of the credit, as do nurseries and landscape architects/designers dedicated to ensuring that Montana looks like Montana and not Ohio or Oregon. But still, there are additional reasons for the hit parade switch:
  
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