In their 1969 treatment of Pacific Northwest Iris, Hitchcock and Cronquist noted that Iris tenax, the Oregon iris, with all its remarkable variability in color, was especially to be enjoyed along Willamette Valley highways. Unfortunately, decades of roadside and grass field spraying have reduced this once common plant, and it is now exceedingly rare along … Read more

For those of you involved in the restoration and management of native plants, it’s time to get serious and do the math, assuming you actually want to make a difference, whatever that means for you. For some of you, perhaps it means a future world where nature functions to support a diversity of wild populations … Read more

If you are a plant population biologist, what’s not to love about willows? Don’t get me started…oops..too late! Earlier I introduced to you an undescribed hybrid between Salix prolixa and Salix sitchensis https://schollsvalley.com/notes-from-the-farm-28-september-2025-more-climate-adapted-willows/. This hybrid has emerged spontaneously here at the farm, and it has almost certainly emerged in other locations where these two species … Read more

We tend to think of willows, with their long stamens and dioecious nature, as wind-pollinated, but bees certainly play a role in moving willow pollen around. In fact, willows attract swarms of bees of many kinds, from tiny solitary bees to honeybees to bumblebees, and Scouler willow in particular does it at a time when … Read more

Our farm is the most beautiful place in the world. That’s a pretty grand claim, but for me it is true, and I couldn’t be more grateful. Both my parents came from farm families, and owning my own place has been a life-long aspiration. We bought Half Mile Farm in 2008, moved the nursery here … Read more

Willamette Valley prairies – what’s left of them anyway – are a sight to behold. What an unbelievable Garden of Eden we had here. When white settlers first showed up in the Willamette Valley, they encountered this: Hundreds of thousands of acres of wildflowers were ours to do with as we would and now, there … Read more

Nothing says springtime in the Northwest better than our beautiful woodland flora, and now is the perfect time to plant woodland rootstocks, like this gorgeous Dicentra formosa, the Pacific bleeding heart, growing here at the farm in our experimental woodland with Claytonia sibirica, our native candyflower: Wendy Kral, our Hort Manager, has perfected the art … Read more

When the architects of AI raise deeply worrisome concerns about their own products, we should pay attention. These computer geniuses do not know themselves where this juggernaut they are building will take us. They have real fears about its misuse by authoritarians, and about its ability to take on a “life” of its own, completely … Read more

Here’s how we manage soils and water quality here in the Tualatin Valley: This isn’t some aberration, it’s the norm for Washington County farms. Gouged-out, sprayed-out ditches are the standard of treatment to keep the water flowing off roadsides and farm fields, simultaneously washing sediment and all manner of pesticides directly into waterways. Meanwhile, taxpayers … Read more

You gotta hand it to life…wow..is it tough! From trees to toadstools, living beings on this planet have an arsenal of weapons to guard themselves and promote their progeny in the face of every imaginable threat, the legacy of billions of years of selection which has weeded out the vast, vast majority of lineages. If … Read more