Holistic edible, native, & medicinal plant design, maintenance, & nursery
Design & Stewardship
Mission Statement
Wild Elder Gardening LLC cultivates healing relations with the Earth by growing awareness and love of place through well-designed and maintained gardens. We offer nursery plants, nurse logs, sustainably harvested lumber, and gardening skills to build good relations with Gaia. We provide garden consultation and stewardship of large and small landscapes in celebration of the Pacific Northwest. Every garden has its own beauty and healing properties. Call on us to steward your sanctuary to beautiful abundance.
Our passions include maximizing urban green spaces, artistic pruning, food forestry and permaculture, biodynamic and regenerative agriculture, woodland fire prevention, non-chemical invasive plant removal, and ancestral sacred spaces and healing gardens.
Garden Design
Wild Elder Gardening LLC revels in landscapes profuse of native, medicinal, and ornamental plants that present as biomes of the Pacific NW. Mixed woodland meadow, Oak Savanna, and maritime Pacific rainforest are the 3 prominent themes of our region, and the native plants available for choosing in wet, dry, sunny, or shady sites includes a humungous variety of flowering trees, shrubs, forbs, and bulbs, as well as ferns, grasses, mosses and mushrooms. Biodiverse gardens bring us unique and healthy foods, medicines, and the opportunity to provide wildlife supporting species to the neighborhood. Wild Elder Gardening helps you pick the color palette, medicines, and wildlife you wish your site to gift in abundance.
While we enjoy the charms of modern minimalism, we eschew repetition and formalism and gravitate toward elegant use of the cottagecore, rustic, natural building, faerie gardening aesthetic. While one could boast of being capable of providing the client with any design they desire, most Wild Elder clients want a profusion of plants mimicking the natural areas around their site. Some clients are already working to be a Certified Backyard Habitat. Wild Elder Gardening LLC is an excellent resource for increasing your level of such certification.
Land Stewards
For those seeking assistance in the labor of stewarding their land, weekly visits of 2 hours or more are available with some current openings on Thursdays and Fridays. Please call or email about availability. Whether you need seasonal fruit tree or Japanese Maple pruning, look no further. Wild Elder Gardening LLC practices Integrated Pest Management, deploying compost sprays, garlic insecticidal sprays, lactic acid bacteria (LAB) sprays, diatomacious earth, and more in support of healthy plants under predation. Invasive plant identification and removal, seasonal leaf and storm cleanup, transplanting or installing shrubs and perennials – these are the everyday tasks we handle with care.
As Above So Below
The universe is a place where beauty is created by integrating disparate energies into a unified whole toward ever-expanding complexity. Cultivating relationships with mosses, fungi, and microorganisms as well as flowers and trees brings holistic health and biodiverse beauty to the garden. Working with nature to mimic its patterns and showcase its grand gestures in time brings wisdom and peace through appreciation of how every garden can capture the imagination. Each individual garden is an microcosm of the universe, just as is each human being an expression of divinity.
Photo Gallery
A backyard sanctuary within a forest of primarily natives can indulge in inclusion of beloved ornamentals. Smoke tree, Day Lillies, Black-eyed Susans, Snowdrop, and Witch Hazel ensure year-round blooms, but even the fragrance of Winter Daphne meets a challenge compared to the divine scent of native Mahonia.
A welcoming garden provides a place where humans can just be in nature observing its changes in time. Grass can be water resource intensive and high maintenance. However, it can also be ideal for minimizing soil degradation of high traffic areas. We generally defer lawn care maintenance to other companies that enjoy using machines all day.
Eye-catching root crown nurse logs, mosses, and sustainably harvested timber provide the foundation for you to fill in with your imagination your beautiful and spirited garden.
Wild Elder Plant Nursery
Healing Plants
These plants can thrive and spread in most PNW landscapes. On any maintenance visit, one or more of these beauties could be in tow to establish in your garden. Each 5 to 10 gallon plant is $15 to $35.
Inula helenium – Elecampane
Tellima Grandiflora – Fringecup
Mentha spicata – Moroccan Mint
Origanum vulgare – Oregano
Carex obnupta – Slough Sedge
Polystichum minutum – Swordfern
Nurse Logs, Mushroom Logs, and Sustainably Harvested Timber
One 8' to 20' 6" to 12" caliper trunk moss log with root crown – $25 - $150 each.
Moss log with root crown – $150 to $2,000 each.
One 8' to 15' Cascara Log inoculated with Turkey Tail shelf mushroom – $150 - $300 each.
One cubic yard pick-up truckload of 5’ to 20’ moss logs – $200 each.
One 10” X 20” tray of PNW bryophytes: Red-stemmed Feathermoss, Slender Beaked Moss, Rough Moss, Oregon Beaked Moss, Treeruffle Liverwort, and/or Cat-tail Moss – $30 each.