It first caught my eye on a walk in the sunny, rolling hills of Panama Flats.  What a pretty shrub!  AND It’s happily growing in the wild with no gardener to fuss over it!!!

My mind flashes to fantasies of a low maintenance garden. Isn’t this shrub  a good candidate for membership?

My go-to native plant guide, Plants of the Pacific Northwest, helps identify it:
Common names: hardhack & steeplebush.
BUT it’s the Latin name that rings bells with me:   Spirea Douglasii
Spirea !!
Cousin to the decorative spirea that I see in so many urban landscapes.
Very encouraging.

The Douglas Spirea ‘s deciduous leafs are grayish with woolly texture which leads me to guess that they’re deer tolerant. Word has it that black tail deer graze it.  Then another source says it is deer resistant  Who knows?

It tops out at 6ft./ 2m, which is handy for hedging.

The typical home is in moist areas.  That explains why it’s found at Panama Flats as well as Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary.  It’s suckering habit produces dense thickets along stream banks.

The pink steeples of Hardhack first appear in June.  The flowers last through the heat of summer eventually turning to brown seed clusters that hold on long after the leaves fall.  That’s a luxuriously long season for feeding bees, then birds!

This plant is just as pretty as the classic lilac (syringa)  & butterfly bush (buddleja).  Both of those shrubs can be dominating in a garden landscape, seeding or suckering willy-nilly.  I reckon hardhack is a choice replacement option, especially because it is much more of a food source to local birds,  pollinators, & wild life.   It can be dominating like the other two, but only in very moist situations.

I’d like to grow hardhack in my yard, but the moisture requirements are too high.  We do have a ditch that would supply the moisture needed…  maybe C would give up a patch of grass along there ??

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