Wildlife Botanical Garden in the Fall

These Hawthorn trees could be found in several garden rooms.

One reason I love it: plant id tags galore

I've discovered a wonderful local garden near here, The Wildlife Botanical Gardens in Brush Prairie, WA. I posted about them before last spring when they were full of blooming perennial flowers.

I took my mom there last spring. I've since been trying to plan a picnic for my mom and her friends, but it just hasn't panned out. 

In September it started raining here and I figured our nice weather was over, but we've been having the most beautiful fall weather for the last few weeks. I decided to go back to the garden and check it out. October is pretty late in the year for gardening here, but I was surprised to find that the garden has a lot of fall color and evergreen plants. These would all be excellent additions to a garden in this climate. 

 The focus of the gardens is "Naturescaping", examples of gardening to attract wildlife, such as birds, butterflies, etc. Many of the plants have a label with the plant name and symbols showing which critter they attract.

I liked this repurposed bird bath made into a fountain. Go to the garden's home page for a slide show of images, one showing several birds perched at this fountain.

The gardens are set up as themed rooms, so you can wander in and out of them and discover something completely different. They have such a large variety of plants that each time I go there I find something new to me. This vine is one I've never seen before and the foliage and berries were just gorgeous.

Marked with an id tag, this vine is called Porcelainberry, it's one of the most attractive vines I've seen here in the northwest. Plus, the tag says both birds and butterflies like this plant.

I really love this place, and think I need to go once a month to work on my plant i.d. and observe the seasonal changes. They have a very nice website if you're interested in visiting:

http://www.naturescaping.org/