ARTICLE BY: KATE McMILLAN Kate McMillan is a HPSO Board member and owner of Cultiverity, a garden design company in Portland. When she’s not working on her own or someone else’s garden, she’s running her web design studio, Outbox Online. She can often be found posting to the HPSO Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter feeds, and coordinating this blog. *** The story of native plants in our gardens is, oddly, a story of adversity. There’s a pervasive idea that somehow a garden of native plants is less beautiful, less interesting, or less elegant because of its regional origins. But that… 

ARTICLE BY: RICHARD HOFFMAN Richard Hoffman is a member of the HPSO Board and his current interests range from identifying edible wildflowers to working edible plants into a mostly ornamental garden. *** One of the joys of gardening stems from experimentation. As gardeners, we’re always trying to benefit the plants within our garden, find diverse ways to utilize the garden space, increase garden sustainability, improve the quality of our garden design, grow food for the table, and provide more visual, tactile and olfactory beauty. Curiosity initiates garden experimentation also, featuring age-old statements and questions like: “I wonder what would happen… 

Hortlandia’s 30th anniversary is coming up fast, and one of the ways we’re celebrating is by focusing on pollinators. After all, where would we gardeners be without them?!  If you don’t already know about it, Hortlandia is The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon’s Annual Plant & Garden Art Sale on April 14 & 15, 2018 at the Portland EXPO Center.  The event features dozens of vendors from all over the Pacific Northwest — it’s open to both HPSO members and non-members alike, and admission is FREE. Paying Tribute to Pollinators As any gardener knows, pollinators are crucial to the overall health…