Healing Gardens

Plans for the Future

• Bring Beargrass to the Savannah.
• Bring Madrona, to watch over site, to the hill entering mixed forest
• Make traditional digging sticks to go with new signage (Prairies).
• Innoculate with native lichens/mosses
• Transplant snowberry from Camas site to Savannah
• Re-define path with burnt wood and stepping stones
• Have a controlled burn.

Beargrass  (Xerophyllum tenax (Pursh) Nutt, Melanthiaceae)
Beargrass Savannah vegetative communities have historically been maintained by native people's in the North West. For centuries, Beargrass has been an essential element of baskets made by local tribes. The basket making quality (specifically leaf pliability) of Beargrass improves with exposure to fire and tribes historicly burned to stimulate the new growth of fibrous leaves. Quinault and Skokomish Tribes still maintain Beargrass Savannahs today. At the center of this site is Blue Elderberry (Sambucus caerulea). Fire scarifies the hard seed coat of buried seeds and stimulates their germination, which usually occurs the first growing season after a fire. Edible berries and flowers are used for medicine, dyes for basketry, arrow shafts, flutes, whistles, and clapper sticks. Elderberries are high in vitamin C. The flowers when prepared as a tea, are used to break dry fevers and stimulate perspiration, aid headache, indigestion, twitching eyes, rheumatism, appendix inflammation, bladder or kidney infections, colds, influenza, bleeding in lungs, and is helpful to newborn babies. Applied externally, leaves, flowers, bark and twigs are excellent as a poultice, mixed equally with chamomile, for soreness, inflammations, joint stiffness, and to reduce the swelling of bee stings.

We warmly welcome you!!!

• Fescueplanted throughout site every 10-15 inches      
• Danthonia califorica- placed near center with blue elderberry
• Carex inops (long stolen sedges)placed near center with blue elderberry
• Erigeron speciousus(fleabane) by light post
• Fragaria virginiana (Strawberry) by dumpster in small area along cement path with ...
• Plectritis congesta Seablush
• Aster curtis  around Fire Hydrent

*Most pictures taken by Kinberly Uribe, Aster curtis and Danthonia califorica from Laura's Camas Prairie plant List

Local Savannahs and Prairies

Beargrass Savannah Site Fall:

                                                             Beargrass
                                     (Xerophyllum tenax (Pursh) Nutt, Melanthiaceae)

"This prairie area was extremely important to the
well-being of...Skokomish people. This particular
area in fact was the domain of my own family...
I've been told by elders who have already passed
away...the practice of caring for this land was
something that we maintained for several thousand
years... it was manicured like a park. And it was that
way until the late 1800s. People stopped doing that
around that time when they were forcibly moved to
the reservation..."CHiXapkaid (November 4, 2004)

Healing Gardens 2006-2007

Long-house Garden Project:

Beargrass Savannah