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Nov 10 2025
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Dahlias Demystified: From Origins to Overwintering

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Gardening No Comments
By Angelina (Alexia) Demiroska, BBG volunteer writer If you have been in a dahlia garden before, you might’ve found yourself wondering if you were a victim of false advertising. Are these flowers that look so different from each other really all dahlias? The answer is yes. The Dahlia is native to many regions of Mexico. The Nahuatl name given to it was Acocoxochitl (roughly translating to water cane). Some suggest that dahlias were useful in Aztec agriculture, but supporting evidence…
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Jun 14 2023
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The Mighty Gunnera

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Gardening, History, Nature One Comment
The Mighty Gunnera By Cecilia Ayres   The Bellevue Botanical Garden is home to several Gunnera tinctoria plants. With their giant, serrated green leaves, thick, spiky stalks, and vibrant red flower spikes, they are easy to spot. The leaves can grow to be four feet across and stand at eight feet tall in the right conditions. These unique features are not only stunning, but characteristics that date back to the Cretaceous Period—yes, gunneras were around in the time of dinosaurs!…
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Jul 16 2021
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Plant Awareness Disparity & Our Snap-It Challenge!

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Nature, Youth Education No Comments
By Kate Sorensen What is “Plant Awareness Disparity”? Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD) is a term proposed by Kathryn Parsley to replace an older term: “plant blindness.” To summarize her proposal, there is a disparity between how Euro-centric people notice plants in their environment versus how they notice animals. This disparity is based on attention, attitude, knowledge, and relative interest towards plants. She wrote: “The disparity between how often people notice plants compared to how often people notice animals is what…
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Dec 23 2020
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Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Resources No Comments
Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation By Cynthia Welte  In the first blog article on botanical names, we looked at how plant names are constructed. Now … time to get brave and say them out loud!  A note on my phonetic spellings: the Æ or æ symbol is an “a” as it is pronounced in cat or Seattle. Accented syllables are in all caps. This isn’t in any way official but is how it makes sense to me. Plant…
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Dec 16 2020
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Intro to Botanical Names Part One: Understanding Names

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Resources No Comments
Intro to Botanical Names Part One: Understanding Names By Cynthia Welte  Those of us who work closely with plants are frequently asked why we use the long, hard-to-remember scientific names instead of simpler common names. To illustrate why, what comes to mind when I ask you to picture a cedar tree? You might be thinking of any of a dozen conifers. But if I’m talking about Thuja plicata, there is only plant I could mean: the Western red cedar (also…
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Nov 05 2020
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Ethnobotany at the Garden

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Youth Education 2 Comments
Ethnobotany at the Garden By Barb Williams Ethnobotany is the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous (native) plants.  The native plants sprinkled throughout the Bellevue Botanical Garden remind us that us that the Coast Salish people lived in this area for thousands of years and skillfully developed a plant technology to support their daily needs. Maidenhair Fern Containers were necessary to hold and carry a multitude of items. Native Americans discovered that…
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