ABOUT US

From Left: Pat, Paige and Dorrie Woodward when we started out.   

Pacific Rim Native Plant Nursery is a family endeavor. The firm is owned by Patricia Woodward and her daughter Paige Woodward. Another daughter, Dorrie Woodward, contributed photographs, energy and wisdom for a decade. 

We started out growing BC's tiger lily, Lilium columbianum, for our own garden. But we kept noticing other native species, plants rarely mentioned in gardening books, yet perfectly adapted to local gardens: not just red huckleberry and Nootka rose but native gentians, irises, lewisias, sedges and rushes, penstemons, geraniums, pussytoes, buckwheats, saxifrages, scads of other native lilies. 

In 1995 we founded our nursery. To honor diversity, we grew almost everything  from wild seeds and cuttings. We grew hundreds of native species, but always in small quantities.

People began to ask for advice; we became consultants. They asked for plants they couldn't find; we became contract growers. One thing led to another. We hiked, to experience habitats first-hand. We began to collect wild seeds that we couldn't buy. We started a display garden. We began taking school kids on nature walks through the wild part of our land. Eventually we had to give up selling seeds; the time for that went into other projects.  

Pat, who has a doctorate in education, began to dream of a centre where people could study native plants and natural history. Interest in habitats led to plant geography. While BC natives are still important to us, we now also grow species from around the temperate world. In China and elsewhere, Paige now organizes plant-study tours in collaboration with leading botanists.

We recognized early that our nursery can't compete on numbers with large production growers. We do grow common native plants but two things set us  apart: species that are hard to come by, and provenance: descriptions of where in the wild our plants began. We are specially proud of our range of ferns, iris, lilies and other bulbs and perennials.

Our goals more than a decade ago, when this page was inaugurated, were "to get the nature reserve, study centre and study-tours well established, and to keep on working with wonderful plants."

The Hillkeep Nature Reserve was formally established in 2009. For family reasons the nursery and study-tours paused for a couple of years, but we continued to cultivate our garden. We expect to reopen our nursery in 2012, we are planning to become a botanical garden  with an arboretum, and we hope to establish a natural-history discovery centre allied with the nature reserve, the botanical garden and the arboretum.