About Sparrowhawk Native Plants
We're a New Kind of Nursery
Instead of a traditional brick-and-mortar nursery, we offer online sales of premium-quality native plants, with neighborhood pop-up events in Portland, Oregon and surrounding communities each fall and spring for picking up your order. Each pop-up is hosted in partnership with a different community organization that gets a percent of the proceeds.
Through this innovative model, you're planting in the right seasons for our climate, scoring unbeatable prices, supporting insects and wildlife, all while giving back to your community!
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Our Community Partnership Program
Each pop-up event is hosted by a different community organization. Each partner organization typically provides a location, publicity and volunteers to support the pop-up. Together, we work to bring you an organized, convenient pick-up experience. In return, the partner receives a portion of the proceeds (up to $5000). To date, we've given back about $200,000 to community partners! To find out more about becoming a partner, check out our Community Partner Program page.
Our Plants
At Sparrowhawk, we partner with licensed and accredited growers that share our passion for local ecology and for how the planet, and its plants, should be cared for. We are currently partnering with Champoeg Nursery, and Seven Oaks Native Nursery to grow our inventory on contract. This means we co-create an exciting line up of plants about a year in advance that they specifically grow for us. Seed packets are from Willamette Wildlings. 100% of our plants are neonicotinoid-free. About 90% of the plants are grown from seed, which promotes genetic resilience. Additionally, we prioritize growers and species where the seed stock originated in the Willamette Valley, thereby supporting diversity of regional genomes. Each year, we aim to spread about 80,000 native plants into the community. These plants will fight climate change, provide essential support to insects, birds and wildlife, all while making gardeners generally gleeful!
Land Acknowledgement
The yards and gardens we steward rest on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes. Native peoples have made their homes, cultivated their communities, and have cared for the lands along the Columbia River for tens of thousands of years. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, future—and are grateful for their ongoing and vibrant presence.
We also acknowledge the systemic policies of genocide, relocation, and assimilation that still impact many Indigenous/Native American families today. As the descendants of colonizers and perpetual guests on these lands, we respect the work of Indigenous leaders and families, and pledge to make ongoing efforts to recognize their knowledge, creativity, and resilience.
The Owners
Sparrowhawk is fiercely women-owned and operated by Nikkie West and Tracy Cozine. Nikkie and Tracy met working for the Backyard Habitat Certification Program in 2015 and immediately hit it off based on our shared love of native plants and gardening for a better planet. Over the years, we also learned that our region would benefit from better access to a diverse assortment of native plants. We began brainstorming a private-sector solution that could scale-up and skillfully meet the momentous tide of enthusiasm for habitat gardening, while staying based-in, and for the benefit of, the planet and the community. We eventually manifested Sparrowhawk in 2019.
Grow With Us
At Sparrowhawk we believe that gardening can be revolutionary. We believe our yards are the landscape of an uncharted future - a future that is rooted in community and support for all living things. We believe that anything is possible as long as we preserve the ecosystems that sustain us.