James Neitzel wrote:

>To add to the list of plants that attract waxwings: Holly also seems to
>be an amazing attractor. In west Oympia we can have 30-50 at a time in
>our one tree when the berries are ripe.

But please don't plant more holly in the pacific northwest even so! It
invades wild areas, and is a real pest, even though it's not officially on
the state or king county noxious weed lists [the king county noxious weed
booklet does list english holly, as well as the possibly even more evil
english ivy, but I don't think either has official 'noxious' status yet,
which would make it illegal to sell or grow them]. English holly rings
most of the warning bells of an invasive exotic: grows well in sun or
shade, grows pretty fast (faster than many of the natives which need to
compete with it), hard as heck to kill once established, and is loved by
birds, who spread the copiously fertile seeds wide and far...

As much as I want to start attracting birds to my miniscule yard so that I
can learn more about them, I'm trying to avoid putting in plants that are
the vegetative equivalents of house sparrows and starlings. Unfortunately,
that eliminates a lot of the plants recommended by many 'how to attract
wildlife' books :-(

It's starting to become easier to find information about native plants that
do well in cultivation, but there still isn't much out there that I've
found that talks about which wildlife species needs or likes which plants.
If anyone knows of any decent sources for local plant/animal interactions,
please tell me!

Possible holly substitutes if you want evergreens (though they are shrubs,
not trees): evergreen huckeberries, salal, oregon grape, several others.
And there are scads of good deciduous berrying shrubs and trees: pacific
crabapple, pacific dogwood, serviceberry, native mountain ashes, douglas
(black) hawthorn, bitter cherry, lots of huckle and blueberries, thimble
and salmon berries, many more, even a couple of strawberries... Mine are
still all infants and not bearing yet, so I don't yet know which birds are
going to prefer what; probably the #*% starlings will grab the lot :-(


Allyn Weaks
allyn at cornetto.chem.washington.edu aka allyn at u.washington.edu
Pacific Northwest Native Wildlife Gardening:
http://chemwww.chem.washington.edu/natives/