First Skipper in the Yard, Native Plant Update and Propagation

It has been an incredibly dry spring and summer. Somehow, Seattle isn’t considered to be in a drought–maybe because we had such a deep snowpack in the mountains over winter. But we had several days over 100 degrees and one record hot day of 108! While some of the foreign ornamental plants have been showing signs of stress, the natives look fresh still. I have been hand watering them every few days, but just for a few minutes to be sure they make it. Honestly, they don’t seem to need it!

I’ve been watching the Verbena bonariensis in my parking strip garden for skipper butterflies for the last month, to no avail. They usually show up there first every year. But over in the orchard garden today on a domestic blackberry, I was tickled to spy a woodland skipper who posed nicely for me. The main reason I have introduced native grass to the native plant garden is to provide larval food for skippers. I don’t think they’ve found my grass yet, but maybe this cutie will.

There have been a fair number of moths showing up around the house lately, too, some native and some not–but all spectacular to see.

I’ve seen an Admiral butterfly and a Swallowtail in the yard this week, too, but they didn’t stick around for photos.

Here are how the plants in the native plant garden look today.

Red-flowered currants with Dicentra underneath. Also, the native hazelnut is in the upper mid-right and the osoberry is in the far upper right.

Despite all the heat and a long time between rain showers, the maidenhair fern looks great.

The four Trillium ovatum plants all flowered this year. They will be dropping into dormancy soon.

Geum macrophyllum has tripled in size and bloomed quietly and set a LOT of seeds. I am spreading the seeds around to see if some will start on the bare ground. I have a few babies in pots, too.

The thimbleberry plant must be happy–it is sending out several stolons with baby berry plants, some at a considerable distance from the mother plant. I’ll be digging these up in the autumn and giving them away.

You can see more thimbleberry offshoots here as well as the mother plant. And a native rose in the upper left.

The three little Douglas aster plants I put in last year have spread impressively. Last year, they topped out at about three feet tall when they bloomed. The tallest ones this year are closer to six feet tall! They are forming buds now.

Just a few of the native annual seeds came up, but there are some lovely flowers. These are Gilia capitata, I think, but not looking at all like what they will look like when they are well-grown. The blue is breathtaking, though.

Collomia grandiflora is a strange one. The plants appear ready to bloom bountifully, but they’ve been like this for weeks and no flowers. I’m starting to wonder if they have some trigger like daylight hours or temperature that will cause the flowers to start opening.

A volunteer seedling Madrone. I’m going to transfer it to another spot in the native plant garden where it will have room to grow.

Last autumn I planted out a few seedling Asclepias speciosa and thought they had disappeared, but I spotted this one today. I’m not clear if this plant is locally native. I want it, though–I’ve always loved this plant family.

The bare ground of the native plant garden has proved fertile for Douglas fir seedlings. My friend Staci wants me to pot them all up and pass some to her and some to other restoration projects. I’m excited to do that and it gave me the idea to throw native seeds all around the bare ground to let them start naturally.

A dozen or more baby Douglas fir trees in a small space!

I took red-flowered currant cuttings today (8 of them) and set them on a shady shelf in the greenhouse. There were certainly more shoots available on my stock plants, but I want them to have a chance to get taller and flower more.

As noted in the caption above, my other propagation efforts this time of year involve me scouring the neighborhood for native plant seeds, pocketing them, and throwing them onto the bare ground in the native plant garden.

The two seeds I’ve found most so far are Oregon grape (Berberis aquifolium) and osoberry, (Oemlaria cerasiformis). There are a bunch of these shrubs around the nearby high school and public pool building. Every day, I go for a walk and when I get home I empty my seed-filled pockets into the native plant garden. The salal seeds will be ripe soon, too–there are a bunch of those on that property, as well. Then snowberries will come on in the autumn.

The Oregon grape plants are gorgeous this time of year.