Wetland Garden/Rain Garden Guild

For the wet, mucky, or downspout-soaked corner — or a new pond edge: ten plants that love wet feet.

What Is a Guild?

A guild is an idea borrowed from nature and from permaculture: a community of plants chosen to support one another. Instead of a lonely row of a single crop, a guild layers a central tree or shrub with companions that feed the soil, draw in pollinators, cover bare ground, and yield food — each sharing light, water, and nutrients the way a small patch of wild woodland or meadow does. Plant one, and you're not just gardening; you're starting a little ecosystem.

The Wetland & Rain Garden Guild

Two of these plants prefer to be submerged (Wapato and Cattail), and the pond-lily is fully aquatic; the rest simply tolerate wet, waterlogged ground. The guild takes the beautiful native Pacific Crabapple as its centerpiece, rings it with wet-loving berries, and fills in with edible spreading roots and vigorous marsh vegetables. Put the aquatics in the pond, the rest around the edges — or grow the whole thing in a rain garden.

Plants in This Guild

• Pacific Crabapple — centerpiece wetland fruit tree
• American Cranberry — wetland berry
• Black Gooseberry — moisture-tolerant berry
• Great Yellow Pond-lily (Wokas) — aquatic — edible seed First Food
• Wapato (Indian Potato) — submerged edible tuber — First Food
• Cattail — marsh vegetable ("nature's supermarket")
• Panicled Bulrush — moist-loving edible root
• Pacific Silverweed — spreading edible root
• Northwest Territory Sedge — wetland grain sedge
• Pacific Waterleaf — wildflower green
• Springbank Clover — nitrogen-fixing edible root

These are the plants we'd reach for — mix, match, and add your own. See each plant's own page for full details, and the Planting Guide tab for how to lay the guild out.

Ecology & Design

Wetlands are among the most productive habitats on earth, and this guild puts that abundance to work: wokas seed and wapato tubers were canoe-harvested staples of the Klamath and other peoples, cattail offers food in every season, and the sedge and silverweed bind the muck.^1, 2 Springbank clover fixes nitrogen along the shallow edge.³

References

1. Turner & Szczawinski; The Klamath Tribes, Restoration Plan for Wocus (wokas as a Klamath First Food).
2. Pojar, J. & MacKinnon, A., Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast, 2014; Moerman, D., Native American Ethnobotany, 1998.
3. USDA NRCS Plant Guides (nitrogen-fixing natives: Ceanothus, Shepherdia, Lupinus, Trifolium).