If You Plant It, They Will Come

As the days shorten and the political climate feels like the most dangerous version of climate change of all, my anxiety levels have risen to problematic levels. One way I deal with that is to sow native plant seeds. It is not coincidental that my seed-sowing efforts are far more intense this autumn than in past years.

I sowed thousands of seeds this past week and ordered thousands more. My plans are not clearly defined for all the resulting seedlings. This passion is born out of wanting baby plants with an irresponsibly low level of planning. But I believe I will be in a good place to deal with all those seedlings and share them with the neighborhood next year.

I placed the seeds in small pots of potting mix, labeled them, and sat them outside to experience the cold and wet weather they need to germinate. Since some packets contain more seeds than I can handle in pots, I sprinkled those seeds around the gardens. I have taken this approach in the past and have yet to have a single plant grow from previously sprinkled seeds, while many of the potted seeds are successful. It is worth a shot, though. Conditions might be just right this year. These seeds were from Elder Oaks through Etsy.

I followed up my sowing spree by ordering more native seeds! This time, they are coming from Northwest Meadowscapes. I will get those sown in the coming weeks, as well. So much to look forward to and track through the dark winter and early spring!

The hot, dry Seattle summer is well underway, and the native garden has passed from spring bloomers to summer bloomers. The spring bloomers have seeds already. I am excited to have seeds that I can harvest and grow on, but even more excited that seeds are available to wildlife and will be spread around the neighborhood and will hopefully start to find safe places to grow and thrive.

Puget gumweed is the star of the flower show right now, and truly the star of the flower bud show, as well, since the buds are so spectacular.

The fireweed brother Tim gave me is also in full bloom, and starting to form seed pods, which are beautiful/interesting, as well.

Only one of the many yarrows I planted is blooming at this time.

Lupine seed pods are magical and sculptural.

And I still love the large-leaved avens seed heads–just so intricate and effective.

The Cornus shrub in the garden has some berries. It fascinates me how many fo the blossoms end up without berries versus the few that do have berries. Maybe a second plant nearby would help more berries form.

And the Berberis of all sizes have berries. I believe these are on B. repens.

Oregon sunshine plants also have seed heads.

The Trillium ovatum plants may be setting seeds, as well. It is kind of hard to tell.

And one of the checker mallow has seeds, too.

The last seeds I noticed today were on the Collomia grandiflora plants. The seed heads on these plants are interesting and intricate. I am curious about their evolutionary function.

I was happy to see that the fireweed seedlings I started from seed last fall are growing well.

But the biggest seedling news is the success of the Aquilegia formosa (western columbine) seedlings that I started over winter. Some were transplanted months ago and today I potted on the last few seedling pots. There are more than 50 plants now, in all.

I used my macro lens to get flower and bee photos this weekend in the native garden. There were a lot of bees but I had a tough time getting the flowers and the bees in focus! Maybe next time. There are still some fun photos.

I transplanted the monkeyflower seedlings, Erythranthe guttata, into twelve pots yesterday. These are different from the one I grew last year that were much larger, but these seem healthy, despite their diminutive size.

I set up my not-yet-famous asters in a can yesterday along the sidewalk with a free sign. I started with ten of them. Four were left this morning. Not hugely popular, but I am excited that six native asters will find new homes in the neighborhood.

My favorite sight in the garden this week was a bushtit landing on the large-leaved avens that I planted in the memory garden amid all the non-native ornamental plants. I did not get a great photo but I snapped a quick one just to prove it happened. Sometimes nature seems unbelievable, especially in the city.

There are many other wonderful sights around the native garden, as well, with the lupines putting on an amazing show the native pollinators cannot ignore.

Some non-flowering natives are fun to see around our garden beds. These include the big leaf maple trees that I prune back heavily in the driveway bed and several bitter cherries that get the same treatment.

I have noticed two populations of Lonicera ciliosa around the neighborhood lately. The vines near Ingraham High School are twenty or more feet up in the trees!

Other native flowers I noticed around the neighborhood include lots of lovely bramble flowers from the low-growing Rubus ursinus.

My avid tennis playing has led to an overage of empty tennis ball cans. This year, I am recycling yogurt and cottage cheese containers and working on ways to utilize these ball cans in my native plant propagation. Today, I took Douglas aster cuttings and stuck them in the extra cans I had lying around the house. It was pretty fun! And it seems like a perfect fit.

Many native plant seeds have sprouted, including dozens of western columbine (Aquilegia formosa), hundreds of yellow monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttata), dozens of fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium), Puget gumweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium), and Henderson’s checkermallow (Sidalcea hendersonii).

I just ordered more native seeds for starting this spring/summer including lupine, pearly everlasting, madrone, and Iris tenax. I also ordered some Deschampsia cespitosa plants. I had tried to grow them from seeds and they never quite made it. The plants will be fun to mix in with the rye grass in the pseudo prairie that fronts the native plant garden.

The plants in the native plant garden are putting on a show.

The most joyful bloom, however, is one of the large-leaved avens (Geum macrophyllum) that I planted in the memory garden along the parking strip. My goal is to introduce a lot of native plants in this already-full garden in the coming years to move it towards 70% native. This avens makes me feel like this is an achievable accomplishment and I am really excited to keep the momentum going by adding dozens of asters, large-leaved avens, western columbine, fleabane, gumweed, and more.

There are bitter cherry suckers all around our garden left over from the large tree we had along our driveway for about ten years before we had to have it removed. I keep the suckers in the garden for their contribution to the ecosystem. I prune them pretty heavily to keep them under control and I watch for poorly placed new sprouts. The original tree was a favorite for its amazing bark, fresh spring foliage, and subtle flowers. The tree did not produce a lot of fruit, to my knowledge. I saw a stand of these trees at Ingraham that reminded me of our beautiful original tree.

Today was a great day for adding natives to the yard. I planted about 50 seedlings/starts today, mostly large-leaved avens, fringecups, and a few red-flowered currants. Some were planted in the woodland garden, some in front of the orchard garden, and some in the native plant garden.

The seeds that I planted over the winter are still sprouting; some are looking strong, particularly the columbine and monkey flower plants.

It looked like the Douglas asters were ready to be propagated by cuttings today so I took about 24 cuttings placed in 4″ pots. They wilted almost immediately, however, so I may not have the timing exactly right. I will try again next weekend if it appears they may not make it. There are hundreds of plants to propagate from in the native plant garden.

I took three Viola adunca seedlings to Stuart, a neighbor two doors down, who is working hard to landscape his yard with native plants. He has made a lot of progress but also experienced a lot of challenges and learning. It is inspiring to see how hard he is trying and how happy he is with his successes. He has a lot more natives than I do, including lots of grasses, sedges, Oregon sunshine, lupines, and more. Our native plant community of two yards feels powerful. He says he already is seeing more caterpillars in his garden after less than two years.

Seattle experienced a cold spell a few weeks ago, with multiple days below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I moved some of my more tender potted plants into the greenhouse. However, I let the native seed pots ride the freeze out on their shelves outside.

When I checked the seed pots, I was disheartened. The precocious monkeyflower (Erythranthe guttata) seedlings had all disappeared, apparently cut down by the cold. A few other seedlings had also disappeared.

I went out today to check things out again, and there was a bit of a miracle. There were hundreds of monkeyflower seedlings again!

I suspect the precocious seedlings died in the freeze, but dozens of dormant seeds have reacted to the springlike weather and sprouted in the last week! Nature has it all figured out–she hedges her bets to ensure that some plants survive every year.

Other precocious plants this year are the Osoberry shrubs near the high school–one is in full bloom today!

I got to experience the effect of native plants on birds as a flock of bushtits flew through the green belt and visited this shrub and other natives in the area. I imagine pollinators and hummingbirds are visiting this shrub on nice days like today.

Through the summer and fall, I ordered myriad native plant seeds and I was not tracking exactly how many. In the last month, I have planted hundreds of seeds, with the last batch planted the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I used soil from the native plant garden. I hope that the more natural soil with fungi and bugs will suit the seeds better than a sterile mix. I could be way off. Time will tell.

We have had a mild winter so far and some of the seeds are already germinating. In particular, the Erythanthe guttata seeds are up in droves.

Here are some of the other pots with seeds planted recently.

The seedlings from prior plantings are doing well, benefitting from the mild winter. The Geum macrophyllum seedlings are particularly robust, with the fringecups, piggyback plants, and violets also doing well.

I recently looked at nursery licensing in Washington and was surprised it was not as expensive as I had imagined. It might make sense as a retirement activity for me to grow native plants and organic veggie starts and sell them from the house.

By the end of August, there were extreme signs of drought in the native plants around the neighborhood here in North Seattle. Native shrubs were the hardest hit, with vine maples, osoberries, bitter cherries, red-flowered currants, and others losing leaves really early. In addition, their reproduction was affected with fewer berries and seeds than in previous years.

Then, by mid-September, we started to see a bit of rain. And then more. And then record-setting rains. Almost immediately, you could see the relief. Seedlings popped up everywhere (sadly, mostly nonnative weeds, but green, nonetheless) and the shrubs stopped dropping leaves and decided to flush them with color first, like the big-leaf and vine maple leaves below.

And it isn’t just native leaves that provide interest and color. The madrone trees are showing off with their striptease of old bark revealing new.

Douglas aster plants were extremely grateful for the rain, too. The large patch in the native garden had mostly faded and given up on blooming after a mediocre attempt, but with the rains, their bloom time extended.

My native seedlings snapped out of their doldrums, too, and started to put on more root growth. This, combined with the continued rain the forecast, motivated me to plant a bunch of native seedlings out into the native plant and memory gardens–dozens of them, including large-leaved avens, lupine, fringecup, piggyback plant, Douglas aster, and checkermallow.

And below is the plain autumn garden that will hopefully be transformed come spring/summer with the new native perennials.

The other chore that had to be tackled was planting seedlings into larger pots to winter over and be ready for distribution in the spring. Most of these were Geum macrophyllum, the large-leaved avens, which grows very well for me, both in the garden and from seed. There are more than fifty seedlings that got potted on including some piggyback plants and fringecups.

My propagation efforts continue as I gather and plant more native seeds. The native honeysuckle vines at Ingraham High School had some berries, so I snagged a few of those to see if they would grow, along with dozens of vine maple seeds, ninebark, and ocean spray. I will grab my own seeds from the Douglas asters, the large-leaved avens, and lupines in the native garden to plant this month.

Leon and I went to the cabin from July 22nd to the 24th after having car trouble and having to buy a new car in Wenatchee on the way! Some highlights were having Rafa become a great hiking dog with no leash, and seeing my very first mariposa lily, a sagebrush mariposa, not far from our cabin along Rocky Canyon Road! There were lots of wildflowers, butterflies, bugs, and excellent weather and views! It was magical, as always!