Piper’s bellflower—Courtesy of NPS

Plant Life of the Olympic Peninsula—The Beautiful and the Strange
Presenter: Patrick Loafman, Field Biologist
Wednesday, November 19, 2025  7:00 p.m.  
Dungeness River Nature Center
Free to attend

Patrick Loafman

Botanizing — it's like birding…but without the birds. Trade in your binoculars for a hand lens and join the thrill of a botanist's quest to find all the native plant species on the Olympic Peninsula—climbing mountains, trudging through bogs, and even scrutinizing weedy city lots. Patrick Loafman will share close-up photos of the rare and the strange, as well as the common, the beautiful, and the minuscule.

Patrick earned a B.S. in Wildlife Biology from Auburn University in 1988 and has worked as a field biologist ever since. He’s studied spotted owls, spotted frogs, alligators, shorebirds, songbirds, elk, and flying squirrels. He has been a seasonal biologist with Olympic National Park since 1994, and for the past ten years has focused on botany—researching and writing a field guide to the plants of Washington’s Coastal Range, which he hopes to publish soon.