Today for plant school I went to the Hopkins Demo Forest for a native plant walk. The site is a demonstration garden and tree farm. The Master Gardeners have created a garden of native plants and there are also trails throughout 140 acres. Including wetlands and places trees were cut at various times and you can see how the native plants and invasives duke it out.
Most of the native trees were vine maple, bigleaf maple, Doug Fir, red alder, western red cedar, cascara, also western beaked hazelnut and nine bark. I can now better identify those and also salal, insideout flower, a variety of Oregon grape, fringecup, native honeysuckle and a bunch of others
One of my favorite things was learning that people are tapping our native big leaf maples to make syrup! There's 1% sugar vs the 6% sugar of the Eastern sugar maple so you need more of it and the syrup is more molasses-y. I really wanna try it but it appears to be pretty expensive.
Apparently, people think I know stuff. I answered too many questions and I had to stop. The leader of the group asked if anyone knew anything about the red alder and I just rattled off about how it is the only tree west of the rockies that fixes nitrogen into the soil. After that a lady was all "so, you seem to know a lot about this" I was all "... I know a little bit about a lot of things" and proceeded to talk about how lightning helps fix 20% of the nitrogen available for plants.
Some guy asked if *gestures at trees* is part of my work. I told him I own a business that makes custom buttons and he looked super confused.
I'm so not used to being around "normal" people, but I'm old enough to not care about what they think of me. I had a good time and met new plant friends.
