Author: admin

I started to call this post “My Little Meadow,” but I’m sensitive to the concept of owning land and resources. I recently read this in The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species, where author Carlos Magdalena quotes Jean-Jaques Rousseau:

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe hi, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

So the little meadow that nature and I started collaborating on in September of 2020 has grown and changed and inspired me to do more.

Above is the meadow on the day it was planted out in native plant garden.

Above are the same plants this week, with the grasses still providing a show in mid-winter.

This native grass has grown exceptionally well and bloomed well this year and also went to seed. Many seedlings are popping up around the original plants, which is great.

The camas bulbs mixed in have also done well so far.

Other seedlings that were mixed in with the grass have taken much longer to establish. Yarrow plants are clinging to life but not thriving here. And the seedling checker mallows seemed to have disappeared, but then returned again during the summer. The conditions there may not be moist enough for them. I noticed when I was looking at the plants this week that the checker mallows have sprouted and are growing pretty quickly in the winter (see below). Surprising. I’ve tried adding bare stem biscuitroot to the planting, too. They seem to have disappeared. It is possible they will resurface in the spring.

We have a lovely, sunny day in Seattle today and I will go out and pull some leaves off of the native seedlings so they don’t get smothered. I don’t trust the Norway maple leaves from the neighbor’s tree, as their roots are toxic to seedlings and I wonder if the leaves might be, too.

There are over 20,000 species of fern across the globe. We think of them in moist, dark woods, but they have evolved to live in virtually every ecosystem, including aquatic environments and even deserts. Seattle has some beautiful native fern species and I have a few in my native plant garden already. But they don’t multiply quickly or easily.

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While there are no quick ways to propagate ferns, there is a way to obtain a bunch of new plants by growing them from spores. The reproductive cycle of ferns is fascinating and complex compared to reproduction from seeds. I planted tropical fern spores almost two years ago and they are finally large enough to pot on separately. It took a lot of time but there are dozens of sporelings in one small terrarium. I am hoping for similar results from the sword fern and lady fern spores I ordered from an Etsy seller.

Here is an excellent site highlighting ferns native to this area.

While ferns don’t rate highly on the lists of butterfly/moth larval plants, my belief is that their role in ecosystems and food webs is critical and not fully understood. Bracken ferns are known to host ten different butterfly/moth species. I’m hoping to introduce bracken ferns to my native plant garden soon. I found some dead fronds in a lot nearby so there is a healthy population there that should allow me to dig up a division and drop it into my own garden. This species is considered invasive by some. I’ll take my chances. It grew in both yards of my childhood homes, unassuming and never overreaching.

My fern aspirations won’t lead to a patch the size of the Oregon sword fern forest below, but I look forward to having a native ground cover that includes a variety of these beautiful plants.

I found a seller on eBay who features native seeds so I thought I’d try another batch as part of my January native seed starting efforts. I planted them up in an organic cactus/succulent mix today in the hopes that good drainage will suit all the seeds over the very wet winter and spring. Varieties include native vine maple, rhododendron, devil’s club, aspen, white pine, trillium, salmonberry, thimbleberry, strawberry, and two kinds of huckleberry. There were only a few seeds of each type. We’ll see what comes of it all. It felt good to get them planted and we’re expecting a bunch of rain the next few days. They’ll be able to start absorbing water (they seemed pretty dry, which had me worried).

My home office, which is our extra bedroom and my workout room, has gotten a bit dreary because it now is the place I drag myself at least several days a week to perform my job. By utilizing the desk to also plant native seeds, the space gives me more joy again and less anxiety.

After all the snow and ice disappeared I was afraid of what kinds of plant damage would be revealed, especially among my potted plants. But the cold doesn’t seem to have impacted the native seedlings. For example, the young Gilia capitata and Aquilegia formosa seedlings seem fine, although the weight of the snow may have bent or broken some leaves/branches.

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I started the arduous task of removing invasives today, as it was a beautiful, spring-like day. I started with a non-native, but non-invasive plant by cutting back the old camellia shrub. The wood is so hard it will take me several months to get it cut all the way back–it has an interesting, serpentine network of branches that each need to be cut back to the ground.

I plan to cut this way back to the main trunk so it can start growing again as a small bushy shrub and not the giant thug it has become.

Around the same area, some true invasives are popping up. The worst of the maleficent marauders are Daphne laureola seedlings. The spurge laurels really love this particular part of the yard and there are large plants as well as bunches of seedlings springing up where berries have dropped.

Luckily, the small plants are easy to pull, so I plucked these out today. I’ll tackle the bigger plants in the coming weeks.

European holly, though less prominent in my garden, is an aggressive invader that birds drop all over the place. I usually pull them out when they are little, but it is so easy to miss them and then be faced with a bigger shrub that is tougher to eradicate. Here is one that popped up behind the camellia, already my height!

I saw a lot of hollies on a walk around the neighborhood today. One reason to remove invasives is that nature is really trying to recover in our neighborhoods in the spaces humans are ignoring. For example, in the ditches and the spaces outside of people’s fences, I noticed native salal and Oregon grape growing. They are struggling, however, as they have invasive blackberries and hollies growing over them, shading and pushing them out. It is the double-whammy of having removed all the native plants and then introducing invasive non-natives that make it so difficult for normally resilient plants to make a comeback.

Walking next to Ingraham High School, where there has been an intentional focus on native plantings and maintaining mature native trees, I was happy to hear and see kinglets today and nuthatches, all hunting bugs in the native trees and shrubs to the west of the school. The Oregon grape shrubs there are stunning, having colored up due to the light and cold. Their leaves are polished to an impossible shine right now–just beautiful.

Over the holiday, I was able to watch some interesting videos on YouTube.

Here is a wonderful one about native pollinators, including both native bees and flies.

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Here is a detailed video on propagating natives with plant stakes.

Here is an interesting video on native plants. The narration isn’t perfect, but the content is a good overview of native plants to the Puget Trough.

Heather McCargo, founder and promoter of the Wild Seed Project in Maine, has helped me find a fun New Year’s tradition. She suggests planting pots of native seeds during the holiday season when not much else is going on in the garden. I took her up on it today and planted nine pots of natives.

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Once I planted the different seeds (eight Seattle-native types), I put snow on top of each pot (we still have 6″ here) and set them on shelves outside to experience the weather they need to germinate next spring.

After those seeds were planted, I poured some excess seeds into one big pile, mixed them up, and scooped them into envelopes. My plan is to make native seed bombs for guerilla gardening in January and February.

I ordered some clay online to make the balls with and will see how it goes.

So much of the rewilding and restoration work in this country is focused on the Northeast and Midwest. Very little seems to be happening in the Northwest. For example, there are online nurseries for native plants, but none locally. And there are native seed bombs available on Etsy and Amazon, but not for the Northwest. My ifyouplantit focus this year will be researching how to help move some focus to Seattle.

Thanks to very wet weather, I haven’t been out in the garden much, but I’ve been reading, listening to podcasts, and watching videos to keep learning about native plants and animals.

Margaret Roach is a garden writer and podcast host whose garden vision, like my own, is transitioning over time to prioritize native plants, insects, and animals. Her A Way to Garden website is full of articles and podcasts that relate to native gardening.

This article is relevant now for planting native plant seeds. I have a batch of native seeds, including some that my brother shared with me and some that I plucked around the Tonasket cabin and some that I purchased from Etsy. I plan to sow them all tomorrow.

Joe Lamp’l from “Growing a Greener World” on PBS hosts a podcast called Joe Gardener. The podcast’s main focus is on food gardens. Joe has been great about having Doug Tallamy and other guests talk about more ecological-friendly gardening. Here is the most recent example about a botanical garden trying to balance traditional public garden expectations with providing healthy spaces for native flora and fauna.

This article/podcast is the latest one with Doug Tallamy about his book, the Nature of Oaks. But they talk about so much more and really go back to the basics of why planting native is so critical.

For reading, my sister bought me a wonderful book called Nature Oscura by Kelly Brenner. This book discusses fascinating plants and animals, provides insight into their life cycles, written in a clean, positive manner that makes for quick reading. The reverence the author shows for nature is contagious.

The last link I’ll provide is for Homegrown National Park, the new nonprofit dedicated to converting residential and commercial plantings to native plants across the US and beyond. The movement is growing, with over 10,000 people dedicating a portion of their yards to native plants. HNP is doing fundraising now, as well. Their website has some great information, including this excellent article by Dr. Doug Tallamy himself, the founder of this movement.

I was surprised to find some moths on the side of the house in late October. It seemed too cold and wet for them, but I’m realizing more and more that they aren’t as delicate as we might think.

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This is just a quick post to highlight an example of one way to welcome nature to your yard. I walked past this scene on my run this evening and it was heartening to see. It represents the main idea of ifyouplantittheywillcome.org–the idea that we need to learn to share our space with native plants. Yes, there is an investment up-front and a culture switch to appreciate how something different looks compared to what we’re all used to. But this is so beautiful to me!

The property owners accommodated this good-sized Madrona tree (Arubutus menziesii) by adding a gap to their rail fence that fits the trunk. They are repaid by the gorgeous peeling bark of the tree, a wonderful evergreen canopy, foliage that native bugs enjoy eating, and berries in the fall that are bird favorites.

Sometimes, it isn’t about what you plant. It’s about letting what planted itself stay in your yard even when it doesn’t exactly fit into your design plans!

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.