The California Native Plant Society (CNPS) is on a mission to save California’s native plants and places using both head and heart. CNPS brings together science, education, conservation, and gardening to power the native plant movement.
Each chapter of CNPS is unique and has its own priorities based on chapter member interest. The El Dorado CNPS chapter has been active since 1993. We’ve provided field trips and a newsletter right from the start.
Our El Dorado Chapter is committed to protecting wild places and promoting the use of California native plants in gardens and public spaces. We provide; general meetings about many areas of interest, spring and fall plant sales, field trips to special places in our county, Second Saturday events, community outreach and speaker events, and several volunteer opportunities at native gardens and other events.
We like to get our hands dirty! We jump in to pull invasive weeds and help with restoration projects. Our members have also planted and continue to maintain a mostly native garden at the Placerville library.
Our native plants sales have provided hundreds of plants over the years to those in our community who understand the importance of providing habitat for local wildlife. Our first in-person plant sale was April of 1994. Since then, we continued to provide native plants to the public at in-person and online plant sales. Our plant sales have become so popular, we’ve changed from a single day in-person sale, to a multi-day online sale every spring and fall. Plant pickup dates, times, and Placerville location are provided during the sale.
We’ve also provided many free presentations and a few native garden tours to the public over the years. We act as native plant watchdogs for county development, in order to ensure that protections that have been put in place are followed. Over the years, we’ve provided several grants to local schools for native teaching gardens, and have donated natural history books to the county library.
Early supporters of the chapter included community standouts George McDuffy, Don Smith, and board members Annie Walker and Sue Britting. For more on a couple of our early county native plant mavericks, read our fond remembrances of Don Smith and G. Ledyard Stebbins.
