A small favourite? I'm going to cheat. I love the glorious, latesummer clusters of pink to purple, butterfly-attracting flowers of Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium spp., Zone 4), but it's hardly a small plant. Growing wild beside the province's lakes and rivers, Joe Pye weed often reaches 1.8 metres tall, and in rich garden soil can grow as high as three metres. But if you shear the plant in mid-June, you'll have a small(ish) native plant with spectacular blooms. I've clipped the sturdy, upright stems at the halfway point for the past two years and I've had a much more manageable-but just as lovely-show. The bonus is that after the flowers fade, the dried, brown seedheads are also dramatic. ative plants adapt well to our prairie landscapes, others not at all. Unfortunately, among the least adaptable are some of the most coveted by Prairie gardeners: the prairie UIy (Lilium philadelphicum var. andinum) and the yellow lady's slipper orchid (Cypripedium calceolus). As the late Henry Marshall, plant breeder at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Morden Research Centre and originator of the Parkland rose series, once remarked, Few gardeners have any concept of [lady slippers'] requirements, and planting them in a garden often means a quick death. A keen observer, Marshall advocated looking closely at a plant's natural habitat before digging. His motto: If you can't duplicate, don't dig. ourite small native plant? I'd have to say it's the ubiquitous creeping evergreen shrub, the bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, Zone 3). I'm always amazed at its vast range of habitats across the province, from James Bay to the U.S. border, from the top of Mount Albert right down to sea level on the Mingan Islands, from the dampest peat bogs to dry rock faces, from the eternal shade of the conifer forest to the burning sun of the Sept-Îles' sand dunes. But given bearberry grows in every Canadian province and territory, it's hardly exclusive to Quebec. It's a mat-forming shrub with branches that can lengthen by about 30 to 40 centimetres each year. The bell-shaped, white to pink flowers turn into bright red edible berries in the fall; if the wildlife doesn't get them, they last through winter. The small, spoon-shaped leaves are shiny, dark green in the summer and purplish green in fall and winter. I plant it as a groundcover under spruces where nothing else will grow and let the everspreading branches cascade from a 1.5-metre wall. Bearberry is a truly remarkable plant and a no-brainer to grow to boot-everyone should have one.