Author: admin

Yesterday was an exquisite weather day in Seattle–sunny and not hot, it lent itself to getting a lot done outside. I took advantage of that weather and planted out some of my native plant seedlings into a new part of the garden in the front yard. First, some Puget Sound gumweed plants (Grindelia integrifolia) went in, then a few Oregon sunshine (Eriophyllum lanatum), some western columbine (Aquilegia formosa), bigleaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus), and a few Douglas aster (Symphytotrichum subspicatum). My prized stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) got planted out, as well. The baby Garry oak trees I started in tennis ball cans were planted out, too. This new sub-garden is at the northwest corner of the native plant garden near the street. My hope is that it will bring a lot of pollinators to the front yard where we can enjoy them more, as can passersby.

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The rains have started finally after about three full months of no precipitation. All of the native plants appear to have survived, although the annual seeds I planted early in the spring didn’t prosper. I’ve started Gilia capitata seedlings late in the summer to winter over and hopefully fill the front of the garden with some vivid color.

Below are a few insect visitors that visited in the last few weeks. Even the moths that are duplicates never look exactly the same–so much variation in the same species.

Below are some photos of the native plants in the front yard.

The native plant garden is in a quiet phase right now–no flowers or fruits and the growth has slowed or stopped altogether above ground. I have given the garden supplemental water by using the hose and hand watering each plant or group of plants. It has been such a dry spring/summer that I didn’t consider it wise to leave the native plants to their own devices this year. Next year, however, I imagine they’ll do just fine without supplemental water.

When I’m working from home on the weekends, I take breaks and transplant native seedlings. First, I transplanted all the red elder seedlings that sprouted in the seed pots I set out last fall. There were about 35 seedlings, so that was exciting–I can keep one or two and give the rest away.

The other seedlings I potted on are from more recent seed pots of Phacelia capitata. My belief is that these plants will do better from an autumn sowing. I may have been a bit premature planting them in August, but everything has grown very slowly for me this year so I think the timing might be alright. These are annuals. The goal in starting them now is to get big transplants to set out once the rains start in the next month or so. Assuming they overwinter strongly, they should produce robust plants that bloom early and often next spring/summer. I potted 60 of these seedlings on so far into pots and have dozens of others that I may stick directly in the ground.

I continue to enjoy the native pollinators on the Douglas asters–dozens of native bees, flies, and others, some too tiny to identify. This is also a great time for moths. Here are some more that have come around in the last week.

Insects are such a huge part of the food web I’m trying to build in my garden, but they can be hard to spot. Doug Tallamy, whose brilliant Homegrown National Park movement I am devoted to, finds hundreds of caterpillars on his oak trees. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen a caterpillar all year in my yard. I haven’t had a lot of time to look for them, though. But I know they are there because moths and butterflies are showing up every day during the summer. I see more and more moths out in the garden as I water or just wander around.

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The Douglas asters just started blooming about two weeks ago and might be my favorite native plant. When the sun is on them, about half the day, they attract a bevy of native pollinators. The star of the show so far is a new butterfly, the gray hairstreak. I saw one sitting on an aster flower. A big chunk had been bitten out of the back of its wings, but it seemed fine. Scientists believe that the bright spots and hairstreaks cause predators to mistake the tail for the head and attack the wrong end. It seems to be working. Some bird got a mouthful of butterfly wing, and the butterfly lived to pollinate my asters and mate and hopefully lay eggs somewhere nearby. We’ve lived here almost 26 years and I’ve never seen a gray hairstreak butterfly before. I’m chalking it up to planting native plants.

This was not the first gray hairstreak butterfly I have ever seen. Coincidentally, I was visiting friends Brian and Dean in Happy Valley, Oregon, and they have a few native plants in their new garden. Sitting on a blue lupine was a gorgeous little butterfly. Turns out that was my first gray hairstreak. And less than a week later, I saw one here at home.

While out gardening today I saw two woodland skippers, too. They weren’t on the native asters, but they were in the garden–close enough for me!

The most fun thing about those asters is standing nearby and watching the buzz all around those plants as native bees and other pollinators flit around.

The photos are of Texas sweat bees, a jewel of a species of native bee. There were several types of hoverflies on the flowers yesterday, but I neglected to get their photos.

The most disappointing native plant I’ve grown this year has to be Collomia grandiflora. The disappointment is deeper because the plants got off to a great start and they grew beautifully and strong in pots. I planted them out into the native plant garden and they continued to grow and developed large heads of flower buds at the apex of each stem. And then they didn’t open.

Meanwhile, an errant Collomia seed landed in one of my patio pots and grew on its own and did beautifully!

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Another fun thing happened in Happy Valley. Dean and I were wandering around and I was noticing more and more Garry oak trees or Oregon White Oaks. We went to a park near a golf course that had HUGE old specimen trees, hundreds of years old, and rife with acorns. I picked some off the ground and Dean made a note to go back in the autumn and harvest some.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

I was thrilled the last few weeks to see that two of the pots of red elderberry seeds have germinated. They are just tiny plants right now but they have a bright future.

These wee ones will grow into deciduous shrubs that may top out at twenty feet tall. They will produce bright red berries. Interestingly, the seeds inside the berries are poisonous but the berries themselves are not. Indigenous people removed the seeds and used these berries as food and as medicine. In modern times the berries have been found to have cancer-fighting abilities and are also used in sinus sprays.

Another dichotomy this plant presents is that its flowers have a mild sweet fragrance but its leaves, when crushed, have a pungent unpleasant smell. These plants love a moist area and are mostly found in riparian areas from sea level on up. They bloom typically in April and the berries ripen in late June or July.

Please see more about S. racemoa here and here. I will plant one of my seedlings in my own garden despite the anticipated size. They aren’t something you see in people’s yards at all so it seems critical to introduce one to the neighborhood through my native plant garden and to introduce more when I give the other seedlings to neighbors.

I was extremely sad today when partner Leon came in and let me know that the neighbor to the North of us was having her entire yard sprayed for bugs! This is just devastating because I’m trying so hard to invite nature back into the neighborhood. I think I’ll drop a copy of Doug Tallamy’s book off on her patio–who knows, maybe it will make a difference.

To offset the sadness, the universe sent me into the greenhouse and there, while puttering amongst all the plants, I was startled when a bird flew out of the giant hanging Coelogyne cristata orchid near the back. Taking a quick look, I saw this:

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The bird was a female dark-eyed junco and she was sitting on her nest with two eggs! I’m so excited to add them to the list of breeding birds in the yard this year. We have the nesting spotted towhees near the front door, and now the juncos, who may well be starting their second brood of the year.

I’m hopeful that our yard will provide enough bugs and seeds the the juncos and towhees don’t have to venture into the poison zone next door!

I noticed that the big leaf maple saplings that I keep along the driveway in a pruned, shrubby state, are becoming part of the food web.

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I am guessing this is leaf-cutter bee damage, but it cold be other critters, as well. I’m just so happy that the critters are dining on the buffet that is growing here.

This scene caught my eye with the evening light:

I just love the way these native grasses catch the light. They light up so much! I hope the skipper butterflies and other bugs find them as attractive as I do.

Over the last two weekends, I’ve planted a few more plants out in to my native plant garden. I planted the wonderful Garry oak that my brother bought for my birthday.

In his new book, The Nature of Oaks, Dr. Douglas Tallamy says that these trees may not produce their first acorns for seventeen years! He also mentioned that they are wind-pollinated, so another tree needs to be close by. I plan to plant one of my seedlings from the failed Garry Christmas promo alongside this 4-foot sapling so that they can grow together and pollinate each other. Won’t it be great if I live to see the trees’ first acorns?!

At the same time, I planted a Lewis’ mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii), three Achillea plants, and a native iris. Today, I planted out a bunch of my home-grown seedlings–about 15 Aquilegia formosa, and six Sidalcea hendersonii.

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As I planted these plants in my weird little prairie, I was really enjoying the blue lyme grass flower stalks.

And overall, the garden is growing well this year.

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My favorite “Ifyouplantittheywillcome.org” moments today involved birds. A hummingbird swept in within two feet of me and picked a spider out of a web right outside the greenhouse. Also, while I was potting some native seedlings into larger pots,I spotted this in the greenhouse, which tells me more of “them” have come! Hurray!

The last few weeks saw me spreading native plant love in a modest way with friends. I gave eighteen Lupinus polyphyllus seedlings to our friends Stacy & Eric to plant around their restoration project up in Kenmore. I also gave nine Aquilegia formosa seedlings to friends Louise & Philip over in Broadview who have a great garden and a lot of hummingbirds. I also passed one of my Ribes sanguineum cuttings to my boss, Annie. Lastly, I had a bunch of native trees and shrubs delivered from Seattle Native Plants to a friend who was looking to fill some space in his barren Shoreline backyard.

We’ve been seeing spotted towhees around the garden the last two years. I attributed it to my more natural gardening style. I’m leaving a lot of leaf litter and branches and debris all around and the towhees love scratching in that “mess.” One human’s mess is a bird’s buffet! I’ve seen the towhees around my window feeder, too, but they are too big to get in/on it–they just scratch around or I will set out some sunflower seeds where they can get at them.

Most recently, we’ve noticed these birds very close to our front door. As we watched them, they seemed to be diving into some ground covers just about twelve feet from our front door. We had the driveway power washed two weekends ago and I assumed that if the towhees were thinking of nesting there, the noise and water spray only three feet away would scare them. But it didn’t!

Interestingly, the nest was placed among non-native ground covers (Geranium macrorrhizum) right on the ground, but very well hidden under a heavy covering of leaves. I’m excited that our yard has enough fauna to support this soon-to-be family of six! When I start feeling down and worried that nature can’t mix with humans, surprises like this towhee nest put me back on track.

How lucky we are to have Camassia quamash as a native plant in Seattle. This spectacular bulb has a short bloom period but it makes a huge impression.

“The quawmash is now in blume and from the colour … at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.”  Meriwether Lewis, June 12, 1806

Here are some camas in my native plant garden being visited by a native bee just today:

And here are some camas blooming among the grasses in my mini native prairie:

I purchased these camas as bulbs from Europe so they are not likely the locally evolved strain, but my hope is that they are close enough genetically to benefit local fauna. In addition to these purchased bulbs, I have about twenty seedling plants of great camas that I started in the last year. I can’t wait to add more of these fantastic, easy plants to my garden and to share some with neighbors and friends.

I watched a great slideshow featuring native plants of the Olympic peninsula. Many of the plants listed are the same ones native here in Seattle, so it was great to see and hear more about different kinds. There are some new plants added to the list for my little prairie and my woodland, for sure. Find the video HERE.

My strange little prairie garden is growing on me, with the blue lyme grass really filling out and the camas bulbs shooting up around them. There are Collomia grandiflora around them, too, and a few Sidalcea and Achillea that were planted last autumn. It is a fun little experiment.

In the coming months, I plan to add some Lupine and columbines. There are some bulbs I identified in the above-mentioned video that I’d like to add, as well, including death camas and Brodiaea. It might be tricky finding seeds for those, but at least I know what to look for now.

A friend wanted to go up to Sky Nursery just north of my place this weekend. I thought it might be a great time to check out what native goodies I might add to my collection. Boy, was I wrong! There are so many problems with these big nurseries. First, there is no way to know whether systemic pesticides have been used on the plants, so I simply won’t buy them. HERE is a video explaining the dangers of neonicotinoids, if you aren’t aware. Adding plants that have been treated with these chemicals has a high potential to kill pollinators, rather than to help them.

Second, Sky obviously isn’t focused on local native plants. This label was on an oak tree in the paltry native plant area:

Not familiar with this oak, I looked it up–it is native only to California. So, not very useful to local Seattle fauna.

Third, while there were some true Seattle natives–Oregon grape and blue elderberry–just look at the price on this elderberry!

When I got home, I immediately placed a big order with Seattle Native Plants, where gallon-sized trees and shrubs are only $9.00! And 4″ pots are $4.00. And I know they aren’t using chemicals on the plants that would harm the creatures I’m trying to attract!

Here is one of my $4.00 fringecups blooming after a year in the garden. Worth so much more than I paid for it and safe for pollinators!