Tadpole Haven: Planting a Flag for Local Flora on the Eastside

I don’t have a particularly green thumb. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy gardening, or that I don’t appreciate a beautiful landscape. I do. I just haven’t had a lot of luck getting the seeds and seedlings I so optimistically sow each spring to survive and thrive in my yard.

I’m feeling a new resolve, however, after visiting Tadpole Haven, a native plant nursery located just off Paradise Lake Road in Woodinville. Natives, it turns out, are relatively low maintenance; in fact, says Tadpole Haven owner Shirley Doolittle-Egerdahl, that is one very practical reason for planting them.

“They’ve adapted to our climate,” she says, making them easier to grow in our yards. But Doolittle-Egerdahl, who has owned and operated Tadpole Haven since the early 1990s, feels there is an even better reason to incorporate native plants into local landscapes.

“It’s kind of a moral issue,” she says. “They were here first.”

Noting that many people who live on the Eastside came here from elsewhere, Doolittle-Egerdahl explains that planting natives in a home garden can “ground you in the terrain (in which) you have chosen to live.” Growing natives can be “a way to heal the little patch of nature you call a yard,” she says. “It’s very healthy for a person’s psyche,” she adds.

“I’m not asking people to be purist,” says Doolittle-Egerdahl, adding that a lot of native plants work well in a cultivated yard. “It doesn’t have to be wild,” she adds. Doolittle-Egerdahl suggests that homeowners use natives as the “bones of the yard.” Then, she says, “work in some of your garden favorites.”

A good place to start, says Doolittle-Egerdahl, is by figuring out what you have on your property. “It’s kind of fun for people to learn what’s already in their yard that’s native,” she says. You can hire someone to do that for you, or you can “have the fun of learning for yourself.” One of Doolittle-Egerdahl favorite resources is Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska, by Jim Pojar.

In fact, Doolittle-Egerdahl had no background in horticulture when she decided to open the Tadpole Haven. What she did have was “a pretty keen sense of wanting to do something for the environment.” And she had her family’s property, which was homesteaded by her great-great-great grandfather in the 1880s.

Doolittle-Egerdahl took classes through the Washington Native Plant Society’s Native Plant Stewardship Program – “the single most useful thing I did” – and spent hours poring over field guides like Pojar’s. And she started planting plants.

Today, Tadpole Haven has thousands of plants in pots and beds on its one-and-a-half acres. Doolittle-Egerdahl buys some of her stock from other native nurseries in the area and harvests some of it from her own beds. “I try to gather a fair amount of material from the woods on our property,” she adds.

Some 97 percent of the nursery’s stock is native to the area west of the Cascades, says Doolittle-Egerdahl. Rather than emphasizing quantity, or specializing in a particular type of plant, she has focused on plant diversity.

“I’ve got more variety than you can usually find,” she says, adding that the nursery may have over 100 different species available at any given time. “I’m trying to provide plants that work in the whole ecosystem,” she adds.

Tadpole Haven has found a niche serving local government and neighborhood groups working on restoration of local parks. Doolittle-Egerdahl particularly enjoys working with volunteers who want to use natives in a landscaping project. “That’s really fun,” she says. “They’re so excited.”

Doolittle-Egerdahl tries to “keep things as natural as possible” at Tadpole Haven. “We work pretty hard to blend in with the nature that surrounds us,” she says, adding that she uses only organic methods. “It’s a healthy environment,” she adds.

Primarily a wholesale operation, Tadpole Haven is open to the public by appointment only; Doolittle-Egerdahl also holds several open days a year for retail sales, and offers her plants at area plant sales in the spring.