Bigleaf maple

The only native oak of British Columbia and Washington and the principal oak of Oregon - a slow-growing, deeply tap-rooted deciduous tree with deeply lobed, rounded-lobe glossy leaves and a broad, rugged, rounded crown. It is the keystone of the Pacific Northwest oak savanna, providing acorns and cover for deer, small mammals, and birds. Notably drought-adapted: it wants dry summer soil and resents irrigation.

The western counterpart of eastern flowering dogwood - a small deciduous tree of the Pacific coast with horizontal, tiered branching and a rounded-to-conical crown. Its showy spring "flowers" are actually a tight central cluster of tiny purple-green true flowers ringed by six large white petal-like bracts (eastern flowering dogwood has four). Elliptic dark green leaves color yellow to orange to red in fall, and the 1/3-inch fruits ripen to showy bright red or orange that feed songbirds, squirrels, and deer.

Subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) is the narrowest conifer in western North America and, for most gardens, the wrong tree. It is a timberline species: the US Forest Service silvical account puts its climate at a mean July temperature of 45 to 60°F, with more than 24 inches of precipitation of which much falls as snow, on ground that is frozen or under snow for a large part of the year. Bring it down the mountain into a hot summer, a humid one, or a polluted one and it sulks, thins and dies, and it does so slowly enough that people keep watering it. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it a spire-like evergreen of 30 to 50 feet with stiff horizontal limbs branched to the ground, and that spire is the whole ornamental argument - a crown so narrow it can be a fifth as wide as it is tall, which is a snow-shedding adaptation rather than a nursery selection. At and above treeline it stops being a tree at all and grows as krummholz, low sprawling mats scoured by wind, and reproduces by LAYERING: a branch pressed into the ground roots and becomes a new stem, so a single tree can leave behind a ring of clones that mountaineers call an atoll. Two honest problems follow it down into cultivation. It is slow and, for a conifer, short-lived and structurally weak - thin bark, persistent dead branches, easily windthrown - and its pest list is serious: balsam woolly adelgid (Adelges piceae), introduced from Europe and the most destructive insect on this species in the Cascades, and the western balsam bark beetle (Dryocoetes confusus), which together with Armillaria root rot drives the mortality complex that has killed subalpine fir across large areas of the Rockies. Like every true fir it carries its cones UPRIGHT on the upper branches, dark purple ripening brown, and those cones never fall whole - they shatter on the tree and leave a bare central spike standing on the branch, which is the single quickest way to tell an Abies from a Picea at a glance.

A Pacific Northwest native small maple of understory + woodland-edge habitats producing rounded palmate leaves with brilliant red-orange fall color + a delicate multi-stemmed shrubby-to-small-tree habit. Native to the Cascade + Coast Range forests; thrives in cool moist Pacific Northwest conditions where eastern maples struggle. Among the most graceful native ornamental small trees for shaded gardens.

Western redcedar is the great cedar of the Pacific Northwest rainforest. Silvics of North America says it is the only Thuja native to western North America, and Flora of North America maps two separate ranges: along the coast from southeastern Alaska to northwestern California, and inland in the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia to Idaho and Montana. Despite the name it is not a true cedar but a giant arborvitae of the cypress family, the western counterpart of American arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis). In the wild it often lives 800 to 1,000 years, and Silvics records a Washington tree 178 feet tall; in a garden NC State Extension expects 50 to 70 feet tall and 15 to 25 feet wide. It wants cool, moist air and steady moisture at the roots: NC State says it will suffer in hot, humid climates and does not tolerate drought or dry winds. Its soft, very durable wood is a major timber, and Flora of North America notes that Northwest Coast peoples built lodges, totem poles and seagoing canoes from it.

Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) is the western counterpart to eastern redcedar, and the two are confused constantly - with good reason, because where their ranges meet across the Great Plains they hybridise freely and intermediate trees are genuinely hard to name. Start with the caveat: Missouri Botanical Garden has no species-level page for it at all, only cultivar entries, and the species is the wrong plant for a hot humid climate. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is blunt about it - drought and salt spray are fine, high humidity and high night temperatures are not - so this is a plant for the dry interior west and the plains, not the Southeast. What it offers there is unusual. It is a narrow, slow, drought-hard tree of dry rocky foothills, 30 to 50 feet on a good site and often far less, with shredding red-brown bark, blue-grey scale foliage, and high tolerance of caliche and limestone - the mirror image of the acid-soil hollies in this batch. It is dioecious like them, so the waxy blue-black cones appear only on female trees with a male nearby, and those cones are cones rather than fruit, taking about 18 months to ripen. It also lives an extraordinarily long time: the Jardine Juniper in Utah is over 1,500 years old and a New Mexico specimen counted 1,888 rings. The hard restriction is cedar-apple rust, for which it is an alternate host - do not plant it near an orchard.