For gardeners in the Seattle area, the release of the Great Plant Picks each year is right up there with the Academy Award nominations. OK, not really, but it’s a still pretty cool list of showstoppers. Check it out.

If you aren’t already familiar with Great Plant Picks, it’s like having the chef of a restaurant come out and tell you the best things to order from the menu. The experts of the Northwest horticulture community have done all the work for home gardeners. They’ve weeded through and came up with a list of reliable, hardy and easy-to-care-for plants for this region. All the plants must be hardy for USDA climate zone 7 and 8, which covers most of the Seattle area. (Find your plant hardiness zone here). All the plants must be vigorous, easy to grow by the average gardener, reasonably disease- and pest-resistant, have a long season, be available from at least two retail outlets in the state and generally not be too needy or picky. Time and time again, Ecoyards has turned to this list to find the most suitable plants for our Seattle landscaping clients.

Shade tolerant plants, Seattle

The 2012 Great Plant Picks includes some of our favorite plants, including several varieties of Hosta and Trillium, as well the Virginia creeper vine. New for 2012 is a list of plants that are made for the shade. You can look up bulbs, shrubs or trees for shade. The newly-designed website now has categories that are broken down even further, into plants for light shade, dappled shade, deep shade, open shade and dry shade. Find your great plant pick using this search tool.

Winter storm Jan. 2012 – photo courtesy of Hector Castro

Rain, snow, ice, wind. The Seattle area got walloped with all of that in January 2012, when a storm toppled trees, broke branches and downed power lines. The storm caused a lot of damage when trees landed on cars, homes and in yards. For big trees and big jobs, homeowners dealing with tree damage should call a certified arborist. Need a referral? PlantAmnesty can help.

For smaller trees, make sure you prune the branches properly. Use a sharp pruning tool and make clean cuts. Contact Ecoyards for help.

Whatever you do, don’t top the trees. The practice of topping, or removing large branches or the tops of trees, can actually create more problems in the future. As PlantAmnesty explains, topping can lead to thick regrowth of suckers or sprouts that make the tree more top-heavy and more likely to catch wind. That makes it more vulnerable to getting blown down in a storm. Selectively thinning trees is a better way to go. This allows wind to pass through the branches.

Sometimes you can’t anticipate what Mother Nature does, but you can take measures to protect your trees from damage during wind, snow and rain storms. Proper tree care can minimize hazards during storms. Trees that are pruned regularly tend to be more resistant to storm and wind damage. Neglected trees are much more likely to fall or shed limbs during storms.

The USDA recently unveiled new plant hardiness zone maps, the guide many gardeners rely on to figure out which plants grow and thrive best in a particular location. The maps give you the historic average annual coldest temperatures for a particular area; nurseries and seed producers often include these zones on plant tags and seed packets to indicate how hardy a plant is. Use this handy online tool to enter your zip code and find out your new zone.

Our Ecoyards’ office in West Seattle is now in zone 8B; that means the average annual coldest temperature for a past 30-year period were between 15 and 20 degrees F. According to the old hardiness maps, our office was located in zone 7B, where the average coldest temperatures were between 5 and 10 degrees. Gardeners will likely be able to plant a few more things that they previously weren’t able to, or at least push their luck a bit more. But by and large, the changes aren’t likely to be too drastic. There are a lot of plants such as aster, green beans, asparagus and peonies grow great in both zones 7 and 8, so we won’t be pulling out plants or rearranging the planting lineup too much. As gardeners in the Northwest know, each garden and landscape can have its own micro-climate based on the amount of sunlight it gets, whether it’s sheltered or exposed, is south-facing and so on. The hardiness maps are just a good “rule of thumb” guide.

The most interesting aspect of the new maps may be that they indicate that temperatures are warming across the U.S. As The Associated Press points out in this article:

The government’s colorful map of planting zones is being updated for a warmer 21st century. The official guide for 80 million gardeners and a staple on seed packets reflects a new reality: The coldest day of the year isn’t as cold as it used to be. So some plants that once seemed too vulnerable to cold can now survive farther north. It’s the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has updated the map and much has changed. Nearly entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are in warmer zones.

The new map relies on weather station data from 1976 to 2005, compared to the 1990 map that used statistics from 1974 to 1986. Experts say that increased accuracy in weather data will be really useful for gardeners and others.