The High Desert Horticultural Center empowers communities across Central Oregon to create beautiful and sustainable urban landscapes using plants native to the east Cascades and sagebrush-steppe.  By providing educational classes, nursery production and demonstration gardens we are inspiring and enabling our communities to go native!

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What does a Sustainable Native Plant Landscape Look Like?

Urban native plant gardens are seamlessly integrated with the natural environment and sustain all the ecological functions critical to the health and welfare of our native species and urban populations. The world right outside our front doors is humming with life, resilient to unpredictable weather, simple in its need for care, good for our health, and absolutely beautiful.

Benefits of a Native Plant Landscape

• Biodiversity  - A diversity of native plants in your garden makes it resistant to pests, disease, and weeds, and it provides visual interest and robust habitat for native fauna

• Resource Conservation – Native plant gardens require less water and don’t require fertilizer or pesticides

• Pollinator Habitat -  Pollinators have co-evolved with native plants and they provide the best balance of nutrients for native species as well as appropriate habitat to support their whole life-cycle

• Human Environment – Native plant landscapes move beyond sustainability and begin to regenerate the important functions that landscapes provide for us – clean air, clean water, aesthetic quality, or a sense of place and community