Our Roots

Our interest in native plants began years ago while working on land restoration projects throughout the Crown of the Continent ecosystem.

The more time we spent in the woods, the more we began to appreciate the beauty and broad diversity of native plants, as well as their many benefits.

As native plants are sometimes hard to source, we started growing them for restoration and landscape projects that our parent company, Forestoration, Inc., was undertaking. As it turned out, growing native plants was a fun challenge! Since then, we have expanded our plant species selection and opened a retail center for folks working on their own landscape and restoration projects.

Today, Center for Native Plants is Flathead Valley’s only retail native plant nursery. We grow a diverse collection of plants—over 200 different species of wildflowers, grasses, shrubs, and trees—that are native to Montana and the intermountain northwest region.

Located in Whitefish, MT, our nursery is an open air environment year-round, making our plants hardy and well-adapted to our climatic extremes. Come by for a visit!

The Rest of Our Subterranean Story

Speaking of roots, you might be interested in knowing a bit about our native plants’ roots.

We know it’s an obvious conclusion, but we couldn’t exist without them. What’s not so obvious, perhaps, is what it takes to make roots grow and thrive.

Let’s start at the beginning of the life of a native plant at our nursery.

We responsibly hand collect seeds for the majority of our 200+ species sold at the nursery. To achieve high propagation rates for the 21,250 plugs we germinate each year, we sow seeds in sterile soil (think: no weeds or pathogens). The goal is to create the best growing environment possible—one that enhances root system growth, nutrient and CO2 take-up, and water absorption. To do that, we inoculate (introduce) each plug (all 21,250 of them!) with Mycorrhizae and beneficial bacteria. Then we let the seasons do their magic as each plug winters over in our open-air environment.

So in the quest to enhance your world with native plants, know that the beauty you see above ground began with what we achieved below ground.