Thanks for visiting my blog and welcome to my new adventure: IF YOU PLANT IT, THEY WILL COME, with a goal of covering 25% of my yard with highly productive native plants, and at the same time spreading the word on local biodiversity to get my neighborhood, in Seattle, Haller Lake, to increase native plantings to 25% of private and public lands.
My inspiration for this work comes from the brilliant Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. You can find an excellent video of Doug explaining what he found and how we can start to heal our world HERE. His books are available on Amazon.com–Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, Updated and Expanded and Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard
Implementation in my own yard will involve growing and adding native plants amid the myriad alien ornamentals I’ve already planted. Over time, I will eliminate many of the aliens and replace them with natives, too, to maximize the benefit to local fauna.
Some of the fauna I want to see more of include birds, but also these bugs that I saw near the house in the last year or so:
The first garden I’m looking to improve with natives is my Memory Garden, the parking strip garden I planted just two years ago with a cottage garden theme. I’ve ordered a bunch of seeds for perennial Seattle natives and will get those started