The Tacoma Garden Club

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The Northwest
Native Plant Garden
at Point Defiance Park

2006-07 Year in Review Slide Show
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Slide show author & photographer: Barbara Dalton.

The Pacific Northwest Native Plant garden is an ongoing project of The Tacoma Garden Club. 
Started in 1963 the garden displays a wide variety of Northwest native plants. 
It is maintained by the Tacoma Garden Club in cooperation with the Tacoma MetroParks District. 

The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Garden includes plants from the region that ranges from Northwest California to British Columbia, and from the Pacific Coast to the Cascade and Coastal Range Mountains.

The garden is intended to be a retreat from the city and to display techniques
for gardening with native plants.

We hope you will enjoy spending time in the company of native plants, birds and animals
that make their home in the garden.

A printed guide to the garden may be found just inside the gate.  The guide is meant to help you meander through the garden at your own pace.  Each season will reveal its own treasures. 
In the guide you will also find a list of local nurseries where native plants might be purchased.
View a map and directions to the Pacific NW Native Plant Garden.

NOTE:
To view the guide on line: click on the word guide (use your browser back button to return to this page).
To view the map on line: click on the word map (use your browser back button to return to this page).
To dowload the guide to your computer: right-click on the word guide and from the sub-menu choose "Save Target As...", accept the default name and click OK (be careful of choosing the right target location i.e. the folder in which you want to save the guide.
To view the GUIDE you must have Adobe Acrobat reader, you may already have it, but if not, click the Adobe graphic below to download and install the latest version from Adobe.

Below are short descriptions of some of the key areas, to see a full size picture click on the thumbnail image
(use your browser back button to return to this page).

The meadow spreads out beneath the open sky, in strong contrast to the sense of enclosure experienced elsewhere in the garden.  The San Juan area contains several of the drought tolerant natives of that geographical area.  Up the path from here is the creek where water trickles through plantings of lewisias, penstemons, and rock ferns.

The sub alpine zone displays conifers and mid-altitude Cascade shrubs and ground covers.  The newest and most challenging zone is the east Cascade zone which features a stunning basalt rock formation completed by Prentice Nursery in 1985.

Within the garden there are many unusual and rarely seen native plants such as Saskatoonberry, tanbark oak, chinquapin, Brewer spruce and the native Douglas maple, acer glabrum var. douglasii.

Barbara Dalton