Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012 - (Page 274)

Columbia Plateau tribal ranges and fur trade posts 1825–34 (Emily Nisbet) In early April, with most of the shrub-steppe still emerging from winter, Douglas admired the yellow-blooming bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata), and decided that it would make a nice complement for Scotch broom in British gardens. At the mouth of the Snake River, he was encouraged to see some lupines peeking up, but saw the famed White Bluffs of Hanford Reach as “mountains of white clay, with scarcely a vestige of herbage or verdure to be seen.” Thick snow still blanketed the ground from Priest Rapids north to Fort Okanogan, so he turned his attention from flora to fauna, taking potshots at bears, wolves, foxes, badgers, and dancing leks of sharp-tailed grouse. By the time the voyageurs pulled the canoe ashore at the mouth of the Spokane River, it was late April, and the gardener in Douglas was beginning to appreciate his surroundings. He found that the receding snow exposed “an extensive plain, with groups of pine trees, like an English lawn, and rising bluffs or little eminences clothed with small brushwood and rugged rocks sprinkled with Ferns, Mosses, and Lichens…this part of the Columbia is by far the most beautiful and 274 Rock Garden Quarterly Vol. 70 (3)

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012

Digital Quarterly
Expanding Panayoti's Axioms
Photo Contest 2012
Photographing Alpine Plants: A Landscape Point of View
NARGS 2013 Election Timetable
Rock Gardening from Scratch - Seeds
Kim Blaxland and the Violets of North America
Viola pedata
Violas, Kim, and Us - A Celebration
Cooking Native Japanese Plants
Carl Gehenio Memorial Trough Show
Fire in the Hole: Phlox across Colorado
Rebuilding a Rock Garden in Pittsburgh
A Remarkable Garden: David Douglas and the Shrub-steppe of the Columbia Plateau
Bookshelf - Reviews
Swedish Dreams
Treasurer's Report
Bulletin Board
2012 - Eastern Study Weekend: October, Pittsburgh

Rock Garden Quarterly Summer 2012