Ordering & Pickup
Do you ship plants?
No, we do not ship plants.
How do I get my plants?
We offer contactless pickup only.
We’ll contact you to schedule your pickup date after we’ve received payment for your order.
Enjoy a nice scenic drive out to the Gorge near Cape Horn to pick up your plants! View map
Where do I pick up my plants?
We’ll provide our exact address when we schedule your pickup date after receiving payment.
Orders are staged just outside our security gate, sorted alphabetically by name. Our neighborhood is secure, and the pickup area is in full shade, so your order is safe and comfortable waiting for you.
What happens if I miss my pickup window?
If you don't pick up your plants by 6pm on your scheduled pickup day, your plants go back into the nursery and you’ll need to contact us to reschedule.
Can I have my plants delivered?
If you are unable to pick up your plants, we may be able to deliver to Camas and Washougal on a case-by-case basis. Contact us for more details.
Nursery
Do you have a storefront I can visit?
No; we're a small backyard nursery without a retail storefront, and we are unable to offer in-person browsing at this time.
What if a plant is out of stock?
If a plant is out of stock but still in production, the plant detail page lists an anticipated sale date under Plant Characteristics.
Plants that will not be returning to our inventory any time soon will be removed from the online store.
Looking for a plant you remember from a past visit that's no longer listed? Contact us and we can tell you if it's coming back.
What is "provenance"?
Provenance is where a plant's genetics originally came from: a specific region, watershed, county, or in some cases, a single specific site. A plant growing in a specific location in the wild has adapted over generations to that location’s local rainfall patterns, soil, and pollinators.
Many different microclimates and microhabitats occur in the Pacific Northwest, so choosing plants from near where you live can result in more successful planting.
We include provenance in the plant details, if known:
- Hyperlocal – SNP Nursery Grounds: originated right here on the nursery property.
- Hyperlocal: from within a few miles of our location.
- Columbia River Gorge: from within the Gorge ecoregion.
- Skamania County / other counties: provenance known at county level.
- Washington / Oregon / other states: provenance known at state level.
- If source material was acquired through the nursery trade, the provenance is often unknown. If provenance is not listed for a plant, it’s because we can’t say for sure where it originated.
Provenance can be important for ecological restoration work or ecologically sensitive sites. Plants with local provenance tend to establish faster and perform better long-term than plants sourced from far outside the area, even plants of the same species. It also helps preserve regional genetic diversity.
Provenance might not be important if you're planting a backyard native garden and mainly want common plants for pollinators, drought tolerance, or general Pacific Northwest conditions. It matters most when you're trying to match an existing plant community or restore a specific site such as in ecological restoration.
Not sure if provenance matters for your project? Contact us and we'd be happy to talk through what might work best for your plantings.
Can I request custom order plants?
Yes, we can grow plants not currently in our inventory upon request; contact us to learn more about contract ordering.
We have many common Pacific Northwest forest plants growing in the wild here on the nursery grounds. Many of these species are already widely available in the nursery trade so we don’t keep them in stock.
However, if you’re interested in natives with confirmed hyperlocal southwestern Skamania County provenance, we’d be happy to grow them for you. Species found here include:
- Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum)
- Bitter Cherry (Prunus emarginata)
- Black-cap Raspberry (Rubus luecodermis)
- Candyflower (Claytonia Sibirica)
- Cornus nuttallii (Pacific Dogwood)
- Corylus cornuta (Beaked Hazelnut)
- Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)
- Lily-of-the-Valley (Maianthemum dilatatum)
- Oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor)
- Oregon Ash (Fraxinus latifolia)
- Osoberry (Oemleria cerasiformis)
- Red Alder (Alnus rubra)
- Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis)
- Solomon’s Plume (Maianthemum racemosum)
- Star-Flowered Solomon’s Seal (Maianthemum stellatum)
- Trailing Blackberry (Rubus ursinus)
- Upside-down Flower (Vancouveria hexandria)
- Vine Maple (Acer circinatum)
- Western Hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)
- … and many more!
How are the plants grown?
We grow all of our plants ourselves right here on the nursery grounds. We are not a reseller.
We aim to replicate the plants’ natural growing habitats and processes as closely as possible. Our intact, mature forest provides us with the ability to grow in ideal natural conditions.
We grow our plants entirely outdoors and exposed to the elements. We start seeds outdoors as well, allowing natural processes to perform the stratification.
We custom mix each species’ growing medium (may contain fir or cedar bark or wood, humus, loam, compost, pumice, basalt, sand) based on their preferred conditions.
We mix native mycorrhizae from our forest into each batch of soil to ensure your plants have the natural connections they need to thrive.
We also position the plants in their ideal location in the nursery, providing individual conditions such as full shade, part shade, dappled sunlight, north or south-facing slopes, wind or no wind, summer drought, etc.
How are you ensuring sustainability?
Sustainability and environmental consciousness is hugely important to us as a native plant nursery.
Our soil and growing media is locally-sourced. Our pots are regionally-sourced, coming from Central Oregon.
We collect most of our seeds and plant material ourselves, and often from right here on the nursery grounds.
Sourced material is acquired as close to home as possible, usually within 50 miles.
Other than our pots and plant tags, we are 100% free of plastics and synthetics. You can request to receive your plants as bareroots and without plastic tags for a plastic-free purchasing experience.
We do not use plastic pellet fertilizers. We feed our plants with all-organic fertilizer (manure, kelp, and/or forest compost).
We do not use plastic weed barrier. We use bark chips on top of recycled cardboard to keep growing areas free of weeds.
We reuse and recycle wherever possible:
- When we trim trees and overgrowth in winter, we chip the branches and use the chips in our soil, or for maintaining walking paths.
- We use forest debris to create our native mycorrhizae mix: leaves, needles, cones, etc. that fall in human-claimed spaces are placed along the forest edge and allowed to decompose, intermingling with forest mycorrhizae.
- We reuse excess building materials such as wood trimmings and pallets to build nursery tables and structures.
About
Who is behind Skamania Native Plants?
Who we are
Hi 👋 We’re Kristine and Andrew, current caretakers of a small but special piece of unceded Cowlitz and Chinook land on the western edge of the Columbia River Gorge in Skamania County, Washington, near Canyon Creek and Cape Horn.
What we do
We steward the property by removing invasive plants, protecting and restoring native plants, and enhancing biodiversity with even more native plants.
The habitat
The parcel consists of about 1 acre of 35 year old replanted second growth which we are actively restoring, and over 2 acres of mature, naturally-regenerated 80+ year old mid-to-late seral forest which needs nothing but our protection from invasive species.
Preserving and sharing
Our forest is mostly intact, so we’re able to grow our own hyperlocal native plants from those growing wild here on the grounds.