Native flowers at SeaDance Ranch

When we purchased it last year, the west half of Sea Dance Ranch was a monoculture of European Beach Grass with a smattering of shore pines, sitka spruce, beach peas, sword ferns, huckleberry, salal and vetch  The Beach grass has prevented many natives from establishing in the newly created dunes.  Over the past year we have mown down with our brush mower about 3 acres of beach grass and started scattering native seeds including beach peas, yarrow, pearly everlasting, foxglove, beach daisy, Douglas aster, goldenrod, two varieties of milkweed, echinacea, black-eyed susans, penstemon, trout lily, Oregon iris, quamash, native hyacinth and a native grass mix.   Most of these I "bombed" onto the property by mixing the seeds with damp soil and throwing them by the handful around the environment.   These will be important on supporting the adult Oregon Silverspot Butterfly when and if it gets reintroduced to the peninsula.  It will also support native pollinators that are in short supply.

For more on the impact of the European Beach grass I have excerpted this from OSU extension service:

"The European grass has been dominant since it was first introduced to the area around the turn of the 20th century, to help stabilize blowing sand on the coast. “It did its job extremely well,” said Sally Hacker, an OSU associate professor of zoology and expert on marine and estuarine communities. “Without it, the sand would cover towns and roads.”The European beach grass did so well that by the 1930s it had spread along the entire Oregon coast, and created an extensive “foredune” system, large protective sand hills found in front of almost every sandy beach in Oregon. These dunes can provide significant protection for homes, roads, towns and other infrastructure, and serve as a barrier against flooding during major storm surges and perhaps even tsunamisWhile the foredune system created by European beach grass is good for coastal landowners, it is not so good for endangered beach plant species and the federally-threatened Western snowy plover, scientists say. As more sand accumulates in growing stands of beach grass, the land behind the dune tends to get “terrestrialized,” or turned into wetlands and forest habitats.“The willows and other trees and larger shrubs you often see behind the dunes are an indication that wetlands are being formed in the mini-valley behind the dunes,” Hacker said.As that process advances, beach habitat disappears, taking with it the plovers’ critical nesting grounds. The beach grass also has eliminated many native plant species that support other endangered species including the Oregon Silverspot Butterfly"