Plant-hunting is always in season at the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon, the storybook base of the botanist Lilla Leach, where Land Morphology has begun a next-century upgrade to the grounds.

By Bradford McKee / Photography by Sahar Coston-Hardy, Affiliate ASLA

“We wanted that project so badly,” a friend told me when I mentioned my upcoming visit in May to the Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon. The Leach Garden is a former private property, about 90 years old as a garden and about 40 years old as a Portland public park.

It’s run by 15 employees of a nonprofit conservancy, Leach Garden Friends, for Portland Parks & Recreation. In 2021, the conservancy and Portland Parks unveiled $12 million worth of improvements to its 17 acres, the first of a series of planned improvements.

The friend, a landscape architect, said her office had vied for the project during a 2014 competitive solicitation, but, obviously, didn’t get it. I said I’d be meeting with the designers who did get it, from the Seattle firm Land Morphology, including its founder and CEO, Richard Hartlage, Affiliate ASLA. “Oh, Richard Hartlage is great,” the friend said. “He’s a real plants guy.”

The Leach is a real plants place. It has more than 2,000 species and cultivars in collections focused on the ecology of a riparian forest, including the forest floor, canopy, and edge; there are fen and bog plants, mosses, and alpine plants. It is the longtime home of a noted independent botanist, Lilla Leach, and her husband, John Leach, who was a pharmacist.

The Leaches took title to the place in the 1930s and called it Sleepy Hollow, apt for a deep stream valley of Douglas firs and western cedars 12 miles from downtown Portland. By the stream, Johnson Creek, the Leaches built a small stone cabin, then a roomier house. They plotted a garden that brought their obsessions to a broad wooded slope above it.

In their wills, they bequeathed their garden, then 13 acres, to the city of Portland for the public’s enjoyment. If the city didn’t take over the land in earnest within a decade, it was to convey to the YMCA—which it very nearly did. John Leach died in 1972, and Lilla Leach then moved to a nearby town. The city let the garden lie unclaimed, and in 1980, the YMCA called on the city to make up its mind.

The city’s mind was to let it go. Paperwork declining the Leaches’ land bequest is said to have been all but signed. The decision belonged to Charles Jordan, a city commissioner from 1974 to 1984 who had legislative oversight of Portland’s parks.

Jordan, who died in 2014, is a figure of enduring respect in Portland. He was its first Black city commissioner and served as the bureau director of Portland Parks & Recreation for 14 years. Jordan led the addition of 44 new parks as the city’s population grew by 20 percent.

At what is described as the last minute, Jordan went for one final (and apparently first) look at the place. He called it a “little jewel” and kept it. The garden’s volunteers, who later coalesced as the Leach Garden Friends, were greatly relieved.

A Record of Discovery

The volunteers knew that Lilla Leach, born Lilla Irvin in 1886 near Portland in Barlow, Oregon, became a botanist and, with her husband and the aid of two burros named Pansy and Violet, went all over the Pacific Northwest to collect plants, particularly around the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon and Northern California.

Lilla Leach is credited with finding and adding as few as two and as many as a dozen species to the Linnaean taxonomy of botany. The Leach Garden’s records show officially four. She is credited as having identified two plant genera endemic to the Siskiyou region.

One genus is Kalmiopsis, of the heath family (Ericaceae), which for a long time had one species, Kalmiopsis leachiana, that she spotted in 1930 and took to the books; a close variant, K. fragrans, was named a second species in 2007. The other genus, the saxifrage Bensoniella, with one species, B. oregona, is linked early to Lilla Leach, though botanical records vary as to who among Leach and three other plant hunters found and recorded it. In 1964, Congress set aside a large reserve of land on Lilla Leach’s beat and called it the Kalmiopsis Wilderness after her namesake plant. It now fills 180,000 acres that are among the most botanically diverse in the United States.

Out of Hiding

The Leaches brought back plants from their trips and put them in their garden. They also loved plants of the southeastern United States. For the grounds, they had designs made but not completely built by Wilbert Davies, who went on to become a landscape architect of note in California.

On a slope behind the house, the Leaches planted an Alpine Garden of uncommon species from the Siskiyou. That Alpine Garden has been dying out in shade as the forest canopy overhead has thickened. The rest of the garden has survived but struggled over the years under the labors of volunteers, and for much of the past few decades, the Leach Garden has been among the lower-profile assets of Portland Parks & Recreation.

“Not a lot of people knew it was there, frankly,” says Irene Bowers, a landscape architect in Portland who is a recent past president of the board of Leach Garden Friends and has been involved closely with the garden for more than a decade.

On the beautiful Oregon spring day of my interview, Richard Hartlage’s practice partner at Land Morphology, Lindsey Heller, ASLA, met me with Sandy Fischer, FASLA, a quasi-staff adviser to the firm, and Christine Nack, the firm’s business manager, who was carrying a large camera to document progress. Also present was Ross Swanson, a landscape architect and the capital program manager for expansion projects at Portland Parks & Recreation.

Swanson hoped to cover a few things before peeling off for other work. He noted first the importance of the Leach as an atypical property in the Portland park system. Portland has a prodigious parks budget that, as summarized by the ParkScore rating system of the Trust for Public Land, allocates double the average spending per capita compared with 14,000 other U.S. cities. But both anecdotal and ParkScore data suggest that Portland continues to confront a gap in park access for its poorer neighborhoods, which, the trust computes, have 60 percent less park space per person than rich neighborhoods. In any case, Swanson wished to emphasize that in cities where playgrounds and playfields are more the rule, “Things like botanical gardens and cultural interests are relevant.”

Not present was Hartlage. I later caught up with him on the phone. Hartlage, who is brisk and talkative, with a steady flow of earned wit about his business, seems to like the phone. He didn’t come to the Leach that day because, he said of his colleagues who did come, “They did all the work.” He said he’d waved a wand at times over some of the horticulture, and he left it at that.

Hartlage is indeed a plants guy, and a veteran of work in public gardens. But he said it was Fischer, a sort of whisperer around his practice, who gamed out the master plan for the Leach, which needed fresh thinking about its future and purpose as well as about its spaces. And it was Heller, someone you can tell greets a design or construction problem like a red cape, who ran the layers, megabytes, and muscle of detailing and getting phase 1 of the Leach overhaul built.

We were in a big sunny clearing near the entrance zone in the Upper Garden, where there is a neat compound of small work buildings and greenhouses surrounded on three sides by dark curtains of conifers. We walked first up a modest slope into a big new Pollinator and Habitat Garden that is filling in the foreground to the forest. Tender spring plants were bursting out. It wasn’t yet nearly the explosion of flora that it will be as it fills in a planting plan as intricate as the Pastrana Tapestries, but it’s clearly taking hold. “When we took out the plant list one day, it took up the entire front of the truck,” Heller said. “It was that big of a list.” And at one point, pages of the list fell off the truck.

Heller says there were surprises in the site’s geology (bags and bags of pile grout disappeared into holes drilled in the earth), surprises in the pandemic’s disruptions, and surprises in the civil unrest that beset Portland in 2020. There were air-quality problems owing to wildfire smoke. There was a historic heat wave when the temperature went to 116 degrees Fahrenheit in 2021. At one point, a heavy snowfall closed the site.

Breaking New Ground

Over a couple of generations, the Leach Botanical Garden has wobbled to life on relative scarcity. In the 2010s, some real money started to come its way, and talk became possible of investments to lift its rarefied presence in town.

Irene Bowers led an effort by Leach Garden Friends to raise $1.26 million in private gifts. The city gave the garden $6.5 million from fees developers pay for new construction. Prosper Portland, an economic development agency, gave $2 million, and Portland Metro, the transportation agency, made a $188,000 grant. In 2014, the city added four adjacent acres to the garden, which enlarged it to 17 acres.

The city and Leach Garden Friends opened a public bid in 2014 to renew the Leach landscape, and that process delivered to them a proposal by Land Morphology, working with the architecture firm Olson Kundig of Seattle. A groundbreaking took place in August 2019 to begin creating, as Charles Jordan might have it, a bigger little jewel.

Standing in the Pollinator Garden, we talked about plants. Across the Leach Garden, the design adds about 300 varieties. The census of bulbs for the Pollinator Garden comes to around 30,000, plus 10,000 other starts. Heller recalls trying to hack the planting version of the design software Land F/X, creating some symbols of her own to codify each plant variety for the plans. The installation of the Pollinator Garden was a whole other spectacle, a team sport involving countless little colored flags and constant rechecking of work, with the help of a drone as an aerial guide.

For the master plan, Fischer was looking at a legacy site packed with living parts on terrain that is steep and sensitive, and where ferns are almost as big as cars. Her remit had pages of history, layers of functional requirements seen and not, and infrastructure needs neglected and projected. Plus, she had the Leach Garden Friends’ desires for what this place could become, for its own sake and for communities all around it, which were likely not aware of all or perhaps any of this garden’s secrets.

The Leach is near an area called Lents where, it is said, 150 languages are spoken (a Bosnian Islamic center shares a boundary with the Leach to the north), and where it also is said that the people don’t have enough parks.

Fischer, who has brought to life all kinds of sites in 40 years of practice, cooked down the master plan to a simple transect of zones that progress in their character from the Leaches’ house at the heart of the garden up and out to its more recently acquired edges.

The house is possibly among the last things visitors see today, unless perhaps they come for one of the weddings that are an important revenue source for the conservancy. Deep in the stream valley, the Leaches built a modest, L-shaped Arts and Crafts-ish cottage of white brick and white shingle, with a smaller secondary building across a rustic terrace of red brick.

The house was obviously placed to be in sensory reach of Johnson Creek, which washes through the lowest point of the property. Johnson Creek, in this location, is about midway in its 26-mile run from the uplands of Boring, Oregon, on the east, to the Willamette River in the town of Milwaukie, just south of central Portland, on the west.

Johnson Creek is named for a settler family who assumed ownership of hundreds of acres in this part of present-day Portland under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850. The Leach property had earlier been part of a land claim taken by a Johnson son, Jacob Johnson.

Congress made these claims available to “every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included, above the age of eighteen years” once the recipient had lived on and “cultivated” the land for four years. The 1850 law specified that “no alien shall be entitled to a patent to land.” The term “alien” was to exclude fully Indigenous persons, who, in this locality, were likely Chinookan (probably Clackamas).

The Leach Botanical Garden website puts the time span of previous human presence at 11,000 years. Under its “About” section, there is an unsparing statement, called a Land Acknowledgement, to highlight the “systemic policies of genocide, relocation, and assimilation” that destroyed societies residing over those millennia in what is now the Portland metropolitan area.

A Garden More Modern

In the master plan, Fischer drew a line around the house and stream to mark a zone of fragile streamside habitat and to change as little as possible the historic architecture of the stone cabin and house. (The plan calls for the shaded-out Alpine Garden behind the house to move to a brighter spot in the Upper Garden.)

Outward from the house and creek, Fischer’s plan loosens to allow stronger alterations as it moves farther up the site’s main slope to the Pollinator Garden and entrance area. There is a newly groomed network of paths laid in crushed stone, some with stretches of retaining gabions built on-site from the plentiful cobble the earth yielded during construction. There are plunging stairs of plain, light concrete and simple iron railings.

At the garden’s far other edge, where the public now enters, Fischer felt freer to have the design signal a modern institution in the shapes of its spaces and particularly in its architecture. “When you see the Arts and Crafts house down below, some people would say, ‘Well, you would just pull that style up the hill,’” Fischer said. “Sure. But we also thought about the Leaches’ values, and they were pretty forward-thinking. And we had Olson Kundig on the team, and they don’t do Arts and Crafts.”

In the master plan, Olson Kundig places four buildings by the entrance for visitor and staff uses. They’re to be built in future phases and are suggested as calm shedlike structures framed in fir and clothed in cedar lath. For now, a small pavilion by the forest edge, behind the Pollinator Garden, previews the mood of the architecture: reticent, elemental, domestic. That modest structure opens to a hearth on a terrace facing the woods and steps off in two directions onto the new Tree Walk, a looping aerial pathway that carries you out amid the forest’s colossal trunks to look over the Lower Garden in the stream valley.

The Tree Walk is elliptical, though not one ellipse but two, inner and outer, set eccentrically to shape the walkway and widen it at midpoints, which makes space for groups of as many as 30 people to stop and stare at the gallery of soaring trees inside it, the deep canopy around it, and the blasts of sunlight over the opposite slope. The path pinches more narrowly where it leaves the ground a full 39 feet below your shoes, every foot of which you are aware by looking down through the steel grate—Heller says she was after just a tiny bit of disequilibrium at the spot farthest out.

No 3D model in the world can tell you how such an imposing structure will play in a place that has a strong mystique of its own. Heller describes all-hands efforts at mock-ups, done full scale on the site. In silhouettes, the Tree Walk’s black steel piers, railing, and deck edges differ not much from the visual patterns of the forest. To the degree it escapes this camouflage, the structure’s frank verticals, flat lines, and plain arcs add a sublimated drama to the hillside when seen from the ground below.

Circuiting the Tree Walk is a serene experience—the people I passed seemed hushed. It’s an experience you didn’t know you needed before you walked it, one you won’t forget, and one you’ll want to come back to experience again.

The coming back is crucial for an institution like the Leach. Land Morphology’s upgrades overlay a sense of fresh organization and attention to a set of surroundings that people say over the years had come to feel random and uneven and made the place feel like a relic.

Keep Them Coming

This first big push at its renovation, along with the immersive learning programs it offers to people of all ages, should help allay concerns shared among many stewards of public gardens, botanical gardens, and arboreta everywhere. Numerically speaking, those concerns involve getting good visitor traffic, but missionwise, they include a push to find new relevance, to engage people and educate them, not least the unsuspecting ones.

A nature garden may strike some people as a plant zoo. It has to be sticky, to be memorable in ways ball fields and playgrounds aren’t. Portland Parks & Recreation budgets annual funding to the Leach; in 2021, it amounted to $131,000, about a quarter of that year’s bottom line (which, that year, included pandemic payroll-relief funds). The city would like the garden ultimately to become financially self-sustaining.

The intrigue created around the start of its modernization, with luck, should help draw new visitors who prove loyal, propelling the garden toward completion of its remaining plans. People go back to places like the Leach because they are irresistibly beguiling and always reveal something new. Among those people, speaking whatever language, could be someone with the genius of the former Lilla Irvin.

Bradford McKee is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.

PROJECT CREDITS
Prime Consultant and Landscape Architect Land Morphology, Seattle (Richard Hartlage, Affiliate ASLA; Lindsey Heller, ASLA; Sandy Fischer, FASLA; Garrett Devier). Consulting Landscape Architects Knot (Construction Administration and Irrigation Design), Portland, Oregon; Greenworks, PC (Green Infrastructure), Portland, Oregon. Client City of Portland Parks & Recreation.

Phase One Project Team (Upper Garden Development, Permitting, and Construction Documents)
Prime Consultant and Landscape Architect Land Morphology, Seattle. Architect Olson Kundig, Seattle. Electrical Engineer Reyes Engineering, Portland, Oregon. Civil Engineer Janet Turner Engineering, LLC, Lake Oswego, Oregon. Structural Engineer Lund Opsahl, LLC, Seattle. Arborist Morgan Holen & Associates, LLC, Lake Oswego, Oregon. Cost Estimating Mitali & Associates, Portland, Oregon. Geotechnical Engineer Northwest Geotech, Inc., Wilsonville, Oregon.

Strategic Master Planning, Design Development, and Entitlement Phase Project Team
Civil Engineer Capital Engineering & Consulting, LLC, Eugene, Oregon. Transportation Planning Lancaster Mobley, Portland, Oregon. Mechanical Engineer Hodaie Engineering, Portland, Oregon. Graphics/Signage/Wayfinding Concepts Suenn Ho Design, Portland, Oregon. Land-Use Planning Winterbrook Planning, Portland, Oregon. General Contractor J. W. Fowler, Dallas, Oregon. Landscape Contractor Pacific Landscape Services Inc., Vancouver, Washington. Steel Fabrication Albina Co. Inc., Tualatin, Oregon.

 

POLLINATOR AND HABITAT GARDEN PLANT LIST

Shrubs
Calycanthus occidentalis (Western sweet shrub)
Ceanothus x ‘Dark Star’ (Dark Star ceanothus)
Chaenomeles speciosa ‘Pink Storm’ (Double Take Pink flowering quince)
Chaenomeles speciosa ‘Scarlet Storm’ (Double Take Scarlet flowering quince)
Chaenomeles x superba ‘Cameo’ (Cameo flowering quince)
Clethra alnifolia ‘Hummingbird’ (Hummingbird summer sweet)
Deutzia gracilis ‘Nikko’ (Nikko slender deutzia)
Hamamelis vernalis ‘Purple Ribbons’ (Purple Ribbons Ozark witch hazel)
Hamamelis virginiana ‘Harvest Moon’ (Harvest Moon witch hazel)
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Diane’ (Diane witch hazel)
Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’ (Jelena witch hazel)
Heptacodium miconioides ‘SMNHMRF’ (Temple of Bloom seven-son flower)
Hibiscus syriacus ‘America Irene Scott’ (Sugar Tip rose of Sharon)
Hibiscus syriacus ‘ILVO347’ (Orchid Satin rose of Sharon)
Hibiscus syriacus ‘SHIMCR1’ (Ruffled Satin rose of Sharon)
Hydrangea macrophylla ‘SMHMLDD’ (Let’s Dance Diva hydrangea)
Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ (Limelight panicled hydrangea)
Hydrangea paniculata ‘SMHPFL’ (Fire Light panicled hydrangea)
Hydrangea quercifolia ‘JoAnn’ (Gatsby Pink oakleaf hydrangea)
Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Ruby Slippers’ (Ruby Slippers oakleaf hydrangea)
Hylotelephium spectabile ‘Zion’ (Zion showy stonecrop)
Mahonia x media ‘Arthur Menzies’ (Arthur Menzies mahonia)
Phlomis fruticosa (Shrubby Jerusalem sage)
Phlox paniculata ‘Ditomfra’ (Bubblegum Pink phlox)
Rodgersia podophylla ‘Rotlaub’ (Rotlaub rodgersia)
Rosa x ‘Morning Has Broken’ (Morning Has Broken rose)
Rosa x ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (Rhapsody in Blue rose)
Rosa x ‘Roseraie de l’Hay’ (Roseraie de l’Hay rose)
Rosa x ‘The Poet’ (The Poet rose)
Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’ (Black Lace elderberry)
Viburnum dilatatum (Linden arrowwood)
Weigela florida ‘Verweig 6’ (Sonic Bloom old-fashioned weigela)

Grasses
Andropogon gerardii ‘Lord Snowdon’ (Lord Snowdon big bluestem)
Calamagrostis brachytricha (Korean feather reed grass)
Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ (Karl Foerster feather reed grass)
Carex comans ‘Frosted Curls’ (Frosted Curls sedge)
Carex tenuiculmis ‘Cappuccino’ (Cappuccino sedge)
Celtica gigantea (Giant feather grass)
Dierama pulcherrimum (Angel’s fishing rod)
Koeleria glauca (Large blue hair grass)
Luzula nivea (Snowy wood rush)
Miscanthus ‘Purpurascens’ (Flame grass)
Miscanthus sinensis ‘Malepartus’ (Malepartus maiden grass)
Miscanthus x giganteus (Giant miscanthus)
Molinia caerulea ssp. arundinacea ‘Skyracer’ (Skyracer purple moor grass)
Molinia caerulea ssp. caerulea ‘Moorflamme’ (Moorflamme moor grass)
Molinia caerulea ssp. caerulea ‘Strahlenquelle’ (Fountain spray moor grass)
Muhlenbergia capillaris (Hairawn muhly)
Panicum virgatum ‘Cloud Nine’ (Cloud Nine switchgrass)
Panicum virgatum ‘Rotstrahlbusch’ (Rotstrahlbusch switchgrass)
Sesleria autumnalis (Autumn moor grass)
Sporobolus heterolepis (Prairie dropseed)

Perennials
Achillea ‘Apfelblüte’ (Appleblossom yarrow)
Achillea millefolium ‘Lilac Beauty’ (Lilac Beauty yarrow)
Achillea x ‘Moonshine’ (Moonshine yarrow)
Actaea simplex ‘Hillside Black Beauty’ (Hillside Black Beauty bugbane)
Agapanthus x ‘Storm Cloud’ (Storm Cloud agapanthus)
Agastache x ‘Blue Fortune’ (Blue Fortune giant hyssop)
Agastache x ‘Raspberry Summer’ (Raspberry Summer giant hyssop)
Allium cernuum ‘Falling Stars’ (Falling Stars nodding onion)
Allium x ‘Millenium’ (Millenium ornamental onion)
Allium x ‘Windy City’ (Windy City ornamental onion)
Amorpha canescens (Leadplant)
Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’ (Blue Ice blue star)
Amsonia ciliata (Fringed blue star)
Anemone hupehensis var. japonica ‘Pamina’ (Pamina Japanese anemone)
Anemone x hybrida ‘Ruffled Swan’ (Ruffled Swan anemone)
Artemisia versicolor ‘Seafoam’ (Seafoam curlicue sage)
Aster tataricus ‘Jindai’ (Jindai Tatarian aster)
Aster x frikartii ‘Flora’s Delight’ (Flora’s Delight aster)
Astilbe chinensis ‘Vision in Pink’ (Vision in Pink astilbe)
Astilbe chinensis ‘Vision in Red’ (Vision in Red astilbe)
Astilbe chinensis ‘Vision in White’ (Vision in White astilbe)
Astilbe x arendsii (False spirea)
Astilbe x arendsii ‘Augustleuchten’ (August Light astilbe)
Baptisia x ‘Blue Candelabra’ (Blue Candelabra false indigo)
Baptisia x ‘Blueberry Sundae’ (Blueberry Sundae false indigo)
Baptisia x ‘First Blush’ (First Blush false indigo)
Baptisia x ‘Grape Taffy’ (Grape Taffy false indigo)
Carex flagellifera ‘Kiwi’ (Kiwi weeping sedge)
Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Emberglow’ (Emberglow montbretia)
Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Star of the East’ (Star of the East montbretia)
Digitalis x ‘Honey Trumpet’ (Honey Trumpet foxglove)
Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’ (Magnus purple coneflower)
Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’ (White Swan coneflower)
Eryngium ‘Big Blue’ (Big Blue sea holly)
Eryngium ‘Sapphire Blue’ (Sapphire Blue sea holly)
Euphorbia polychroma (Cushion spurge)
Eurybia divaricata ‘Eastern Star’ (Eastern Star white wood aster)
Eutrochium dubium ‘Little Joe’ (Little Joe joe-pye weed)
Geranium ‘Gerwat’ (Rozanne cranesbill)
Geranium x riversleaianum ‘Mavis Simpson’ (Mavis Simpson cranesbill)
Geranium x riversleaianum ‘Russell Prichard’ (Russell Prichard cranesbill)
Geum x ‘Coppertone Punch’ (Coppertone Punch avens)
Geum x ‘Dark and Stormy’ (Dark and Stormy avens)
Geum x ‘Tequila Sunrise’ (Tequila Sunrise avens)
Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’ (Moerheim Beauty sneezeweed)
Helenium ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’ (Sahin’s Early Flowerer sneezeweed)
Helenium ‘Zimbelstern’ (Zimbelstern sneezeweed)
Helianthus x ‘Lemon Queen’ (Lemon Queen sunflower)
Helleborus x hybridus ‘Ballerina Ruffles’ (Ballerina Ruffles lenten rose)
Helleborus x hybridus ‘Mango Magic’ (Mango Magic lenten rose)
Helleborus x hybridus ‘Pink Parachutes’ (Pink Parachutes lenten rose)
Helleborus x nigercors ‘Snow Love’ (Snow Love lenten rose)
Hosta x ‘Branching Out’ (Branching Out plantain lily)
Hosta x ‘Floramora’ (Floramora plantain lily)
Hosta x ‘Royal Standard’ (Royal Standard plantain lily)
Hylotelephium spectabile ‘Brilliant’ (Brilliant stonecrop)
Hylotelephium spectabile ‘Zion’ (Zion showy stonecrop)
Iris sibirica ‘Bennerup Blue’ (Bennerup Blue Siberian iris)
Iris sibirica ‘Butter and Sugar’ (Butter and Sugar Siberian iris)
Iris sibirica ‘Dreaming Spires’ (Dreaming Spires Siberian iris)
Kniphofia uvaria ‘Alcazar’ (Alcazar red-hot poker)
Kniphofia uvaria ‘Primrose Beauty’ (Primrose Beauty red-hot poker)
Kniphofia x ‘Percy’s Pride’ (Percy’s Pride red-hot poker)
Lathyrus vernus ‘Rosenelfe’ (Rose spring vetch)
Liatris spicata ‘Alba’ (White blazing star)
Liatris spicata ‘Kobold’ (Kobold blazing star)
Monarda didyma ‘Aquarius’ (Aquarius bee balm)
Monarda didyma ‘Jacob Cline’ (Jacob Cline bee balm)
Nepeta x faassenii ‘Dropmore’ (Dropmore catmint)
Paeonia itoh ‘Bartzella’ (Bartzella itoh peony)
Penstemon campanulatus ‘Garnet’ (Garnet penstemon)
Persicaria amplexicaulis (Red bistort)
Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Alba’ (Alba mountain fleece)
Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ (Firetail mountain fleece)
Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Rosea’ (Rosea mountain fleece)
Persicaria polymorpha (Giant fleeceflower)
Phlomis tuberosa (Tuberous Jerusalem sage)
Phlox paniculata ‘Blue Paradise’ (Blue Paradise garden phlox)
Phlox paniculata ‘David’ (David garden phlox)
Phlox paniculata ‘David’s Lavender’ (David’s Lavender garden phlox)
Phygelius aequalis ‘Yellow Trumpet’ (Yellow Trumpet cape fuchsia)
Phygelius x rectus ‘African Queen’ (African Queen cape fuchsia)
Rudbeckia ‘American Gold Rush’ (Black-eyed Susan)
Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Tanna’ (Tanna great burnet)
Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Pink Elephant’ (Pink Elephant burnet)
Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’ (Fireworks goldenrod)
Solidago shortii ‘Solar Cascade’ (Solar Cascade Short’s goldenrod)
Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’ (Hummelo betony)
Symphyotrichum cordifolium ‘Little Carlow’ (Little Carlow blue wood aster)
Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Andenken an Alma Potschke’
(Andenken an Alma Potschke New England aster)
Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Purple Dome’ (Purple Dome New England aster)
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium ‘Dream of Beauty’ (Dream of Beauty aromatic aster)
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium ‘October Skies’ (October Skies aromatic aster)
Vernonia lettermanii ‘Iron Butterfly’ (Iron Butterfly ironweed)

Bulbs
Allium amplectens ‘Graceful Beauty’ (Graceful Beauty ornamental onion)
Allium christophii (Star of Persia)
Allium ‘Globemaster’ (Globemaster ornamental onion)
Allium siculum ssp. bulgaricum (Bulgarian honey garlic)
Allium sphaerocephalon (Roundheaded leek)
Allium ‘Summer Drummer’ (Summer Drummer onion)
Anemone blanda ‘Pink Star’ (Pink Star windflower)
Anemone blanda ‘White Splendour’ (White Splendour windflower)
Anemone nemorosa ‘Leeds Variety’ (Leeds Variety wood anemone)
Anemone nemorosa ‘Royal Blue’ (Royal Blue wood anemone)
Anemone nemorosa ‘Viridiflora’ (Viridiflora wood anemone)
Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’ (White large camas)
Camassia leichtlinii ‘Blue Heaven’ (Blue Heaven large camas)
Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ (Caerulea large camas)
Camassia leichtlinii ‘Sacajawea’ (Sacajawea large camas)
Camassia leichtlinii ssp. suksdorfii ‘Blauwe Donau’ (Blue Danube large camas)
Chionodoxa forbesii ‘Blue Giant’ (Blue Giant glory-of-the-snow)
Corydalis solida ‘Beth Evans’ (Beth Evans fumewort)
Crocus chrysanthus ‘Cream Beauty’ (Cream Beauty crocus)
Crocus chrysanthus ‘Goldilocks’ (Goldilocks snow crocus)
Crocus tommasinianus ‘Roseus’ (Roseus crocus)
Erythronium ‘Pagoda’ (Pagoda fawn lily)
Erythronium ‘White Beauty’ (White Beauty fawn lily)
Galanthus elwesii (Giant snowdrop)
Galanthus ‘Hippolyta’ (Hippolyta snowdrop)
Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’ (Flore Pleno snowdrop)
Galanthus nivalis ‘Magnet’ (Magnet snowdrop)
Galanthus nivalis ‘Sam Arnott’ (Sam Arnott snowdrop)
Galanthus nivalis ‘Viridapice’ (Viridapice snowdrop)
Hyacinthoides non-scripta ‘Alba’ (White English bluebell)
Hyacinthus orientalis ‘Blue Festival’ (Blue Festival hyacinth)
Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ (Gravetye Giant summer snowflake)
Lilium ‘Fusion’ (Fusion lily)
Lilium martagon ‘Sunny Morning’ (Sunny Morning martagon lily)
Lilium regale (Regal lily)
Lilium ‘Silk Road’ (Silk Road lily)
Lilium speciosum ‘Album’ (White lily)
Muscari armeniacum ‘Valerie Finnis’ (Valerie Finnis grape hyacinth)
Muscari aucheri ‘Blue Magic’ (Blue Magic grape hyacinth)
Narcissus ‘February Gold’ (February Gold cyclamineus daffodil)
Narcissus ‘Mount Hood’ (Mount Hood trumpet daffodil)
Narcissus ‘Rapture’ (Rapture cyclamineus daffodil)
Narcissus ‘Thalia’ (Thalia triandrus daffodil)
Narcissus ‘Topolino’ (Topolino trumpet daffodil)
Narcissus ‘W. P. Milner’ (W. P. Milner daffodil)
Scilla mischtschenkoana (Misczenko squill)
Scilla siberica ‘Alba’ (Alba Siberian squill)
Scilla siberica ‘Spring Beauty’ (Spring Beauty Siberian squill)
Triteleia laxa ‘Queen Fabiola’ (Queen Fabiola Ithuriel’s spear)
Triteleia ‘Rudy’ (Rudy triteleia)