sunday was the annual wildflower festival at Mt. Pisgah Arboretum. the event is one of their biggest fundraisers each year, complete with plant sale, food carts, and my favorite part, a display of the willamette valley’s best wildflowers. i snapped some pics of my favorite native plants. i should have gone at the end or volunteered for tear down so i could take all these beauties and throw them in a giant wild arrangement. next year.

salal, sometimes called lemon leaf, is commonly used by florists all over the place for its foliage. this plant is truly one of the industry’s workhorses. i love its delicate little urn-shaped flowers. this stuff grows in giant mats, especially at the coast.

ferns, including this umbrella fern make the forest understory around here super lush.

viburnum. this is the native version, not the snowball that’s cultivated all over and just finished blooming. i just planted one of those myself, and can’t wait for it to grow up a little so i clip off all those blooms.

i love using snowberries in arrangements. they have the perfect blush or white tone to them. here’s the flower growing in those little clusters that make the berry so great later.

how sweet is this inside-out flower on its delicate stems?

anemone. i love seeing the wild counterparts to some of the flowers i use all the time.

delphinium.

california poppy. look at that fiery glowing center! prettiest roadside weed ever.

oregon iris.

rock penstemon. everything at the show is meticulously labeled and organized by family, so you can see the evolutionary relationships as you browse the aisles.

checkermallow.

nootka rose. yup, rose. this wild guy is in the same family as the roses we know and love. actually, that family is crazy huge, also including apples and stone fruit.

blue blossom. this is one that i wanted to design with the most. i think it’s the color that grabs me.

salmonberry. these guys are edible. nope, i’ve never tried one, but hopefully they’re called salmonberry for the color, not the taste.

and just for fun, poison oak (under glass). they harvest this guy with the aid of plastic garbage bags. some people are terribly allergic to this, some people are unaffected. i’m one of the lucky ones. fun fact: poison oak and mangoes are in the same family, and mangoes give some people the same sort of violent rash reaction as this guy.

all this really takes me back to my botany days in college. i remember more of it than i think sometimes, but i do confess that i cheated. i also snapped photos of all the labels so i wouldn’t get the names mixed up.

i’m so glad i live in a place where beautiful things grow. it’s positively inspiring.