My vision for the front of Tony & Leon’s Homegrown National Park is for it to have grasses and meadow/prairie plants. Today, I planted the beginnings of that meadow with about sixteen Elymus glaucus (blue wildrye), ten Deschampsia cespitosa (tufted hairgrass), seven Sidalcea malviflora (pink checker mallow), fifteen Achillea millefolium (yarrow), and five Asclepias speciosa (showy milkweed). All of these were grown from seed sown this spring or later.
This was the first rainy day in a while and there is more precipitation coming, which seemed like the right time to plant. Some of the seedlings are puny. I think with the rain and sun and cool nights they will see in the next few weeks, they will get stocky and ready for a long winter rest before coming back as wonderful food web ingredients next spring. Most of them are partial to moist soil, so I will have to watch that. I expect some butterflies and other pollinators will find the flowering plants delicious, while woodland skipper caterpillars will hopefully make a meal of the grasses.
It likely wasn’t ideal to plant these plants into an area with bark-mulch, but I feel like the only way I can keep weeds down while they get established is with mulch. We’ll see if they can adapt to it, since this obviously isn’t a typical meadow environment.
In addition to this miniature meadow, I planted out the one snowberry seedling I have. This is about two years old and not healthy looking at all. It can only do better in the ground. I believe it is Symphiocarpos albus and I gave it plenty of room. These plants can get tall and wide. They make ideal scrub for birds to hide in and the berries provide a snack for very hungry birds late in winter (when they’ve already eaten all the more tasty berries).
I also planted out two other seedlings–Anemone multifida. I put them on the shadier side by the maidenhair fern and the trilliums. They grew pretty well from seed–maybe they will bloom in the spring.
More seedling news–the Geum macrophyllum seeds that I pulled off my one plant are sprouting madly It will be fun to have these mixed in among the other native plants and shrubs. I’ve read they can be a bit aggressive, but I think I can control them pretty well in my tiny garden with all that mulch.
My next project for the IfYouPlantItTheyWillCome website is to add a roster and gallery of all the species I’ve seen here in the yard the last 25 years. It will be fun to see how the numbers increase in the next few years as Homegrown National Park evolves.
I was excited to subscribe to this magazine several years ago, but very disappointed in a few things. The main disappointment saw the editors missing the opportunity in every issue to tout the benefits of native plants and the importance of restoring food webs throughout the country. In addition, the magazine doesn’t take a strong enough stance (for me) on horticultural chemicals.
This month, though, the magazine has started to redeem itself by featuring a couple of articles on native plants.
Like so much of the mainstream horticultural writing, the articles are focused on different areas of the US, but there are good ideasthat can be adapted to our area.
I also did a search on their website (see HERE) and found quite a few articles about native plants.
There’s an amazing gallery on Camano Island (Matzke Fine Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden) that I visited on Labor Day. The sculpture garden is this great garden that incorporates native components with some ornamental non-natives. Having read that nettles are a host plant for some amazing butterflies, I spotted a stand of these stinging natives and approached warily. Sure enough, many of the leaves were eaten. On closer inspection, I saw one culprit–a large black and yellow caterpillar.
My insect app identifies this as a Fire-rim Tortoiseshell Butterfly larva.
I just ordered nettle seeds, along with Oregon grape (Mahonia repens) and some other natives. Will I have a tortoiseshell caterpillar in my yard one year? I sure hope so!
Of the dozens of native plants I purchased from Seattle Native Plants, only one small one passed on–an evergreen huckleberry. All the others are growing well.
Here is one of the surviving evergreen huckleberries. I really like the reddish new growth and compact nature of this shrub.
The plant I thought would be the most challenging, the maidenhair fern, has surprised me by staying green and healthy despite likely receiving more sun than it would prefer. The leaves are fantastic and the patterns they make with sun and shadow.
Another plant that is doing really well is the osoberry shrub. It has grown well and added some strong new starts from the base.
Another plant that is doing well is the largeleaf avens. It has set a lot more seeds, which are beautiful under the macro lens.
I took some time with the macro lens to capture some pollinators around the garden today. I am amazed at the variety of bugs that are coming to the garden already! I can’t wait until I get the native garden filled in more and attract even more of them. They are like little jewels darting around the late summer flowers.
The above gallery includes hoverflies, a furrow bee, and a flying sweat bee.
My top objective this weekend was to get the rooted native plant cuttings and seedlings moved on to their own pots. I was able to do that yesterday. I’ve got five strong cuttings of the red flowering currant, three well-rooted Cornus sericea, about ten yarrow seedlings, ten Erigeron specious, and ten native hair grass.
I am continuosly impressed with the native trees in Woodland Park. Here is another Big Leaf Maple with a sculptural trunk.
One common feature of the native gardening books I’ve read is that the authors encourage readers to take time to really observe their gardens and the creatures that make their homes there. I’m trying to be more patient and get out with the macro lens at least once every week to better understand what creatures are supported by my garden. This week, I found a thick-legged hoverfly and an unarmed leafcutter bee and they held still long enough for photos.
Thick-legged Hoverfly
Unarmed Leafcutter Bee
I’ve had an annual tradition of gathering seeds from ornamental plants starting about this time of year and potting them up and watching them germinate in the spring. This is something my siblings have done with me, as well. This year, I’m focusing on native perennial, shrub, and tree seeds. I pulled some service berries off my Amelanchier alnifolia and potted them up this weekend. I also took seeds of the largeleaf avens. There are snowberries nearby that I’ll grab this week, too. And brother Tim is scouting for some elderberry seeds for me. I already have enough rose seedlings, since I’ve been starting those for years. We’ll see what else might germinate in 2021.
I had posted earlier photos of the fireweeds at the former Sam’s Club parking lot.
About two weeks ago I was walking home through that parking lot and thought to stop and see if any seed pods were ripe. What I didn’t realize is that ripe fireweed seedpods burst open with cottony seeds. When I saw that, I grabbed a bunch of them and took them straight home. I put them on the top of a pot with fresh soil, thinking they might germinate next spring.
But look! I went in the greenhouse today and they are already sprouting like mad!
There are at least 30 little seedlings already! If I can keep these growing, I plan to plant a swath of them in the native plant garden. They are amazing! I also brought another big handful of seeds home today and spread them around the native plant garden. Well, I wanted to spread them, but I was holding all the seeds in one hand and when I got home I pretty much just had a big wad of cotton! I pulled it apart a bit and dropped it around, but I don’t hold out much hope that those seeds will have a chance.
I started a great new book on Kindle, called “The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife” by Nancy Lawson. You can find it on Amazon here.
Here are some passages that I like so far:
My heart was mostly in the right place, but my head was steeped in the marketing ploys of the Landscaping Industrial Complex, not to mention long-ingrained cultural sentiments that divide the world into endless false dichotomies: beneficial insects vs. “pests,” acceptable garden plants versus “weeds,” order versus chaos. Feeding a multi-billion-dollar industry hawking all manner of poisonous potions and outsized tools is a constant stream of cynical advertisements that prey on our insecurities and cater to our basest fears. From their warlike parlance, we learn that animals are out to get us, that plants are messy, that humans reluctant to unleash weapons of mass destruction on denizens of the natural world–especially insects–are freaks of nature themselves.
I hear you, Nancy Lawson. Too few people remind us, as you have, that beauty can be measured in a trillion ways, and what is beautiful for some of us is a garden that serves wildlife first and humans second. It might seem wild and messy, but it will be ALIVE! Truly ALIVE!
She goes on to say:
At a time when our fellow inhabitants of the earth increasingly depend on our mercy and ingenuity to survive, our default has instead been to kill and destroy. We live in an era where the artillery of choice is so accessible, the reaction to nature so thoughtless and automatic, that dying bumblebees now fall out of trees by the tens of thousands, poisoned by insecticides for the sake of aesthetics. One-third of native bumblebee species are imperiled, with at least one possibly already extinct. Monarch butterfly numbers in the eastern United States have plummeted by more than 90 percent in two decades. A third of all North American birds–432 species–are at risk of extinction and in need of urgent conservation action. Worldwide, populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish have declined by 52 percent. More than 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators, especially bees and butterflies, are in danger of vanishing from the planet, too.
And here is some good news:
Because our continent is vast and diverse, there’s no single prescription for creating habitat for wildlife. But the tenets of nurturing a humane backyard are universal, and learning to follow them is about unlearning and having the courage to question everything you thought you knew about gardening. In my own yard, I still make mistakes, usually when I’ve listened to a so-called expert instead of my own heart. My garden’s not perfect, and neither are the gardens of the people profiled in this book. But that’s part of the point. Perfection is a human construct, a poor substitute for the natural exuberance and resiliency that makes a house a home–not just for us, but for all species. The cavity-nesting bees would certainly be happier if we didn’t cut down dead stalks where they could lay their eggs, and the birds would approve if we didn’t scoop up the leaves and all the tasty seeds and insects hiding there. We don’t have to control everything, and we can’t anyway. So why not give nature a try?
One of my favorite insects, since I was a little kid, is the skipper butterfly. I remember twenty years ago my sister Cate grew a plant called Verbena rigida. When I planted some in my garden, it was like magic. Out of nowhere, skippers arrived for the very first time. And when those plants eventually died out, the skippers disappeared along with them. Now, in the memory garden, I have Verbena bonariensis, which seems attractive to pollinators, but I haven’t seen skippers on these plants. But I was out there on one sunny morning last week and one skipper made an appearance. I was on my way somewhere, so didn’t get the macro lens. The bug group on Facebook suggested I grow native grasses to increase skipper numbers in the yard, as the caterpillars feed on native grasses. I do have a bunch of native plants to set out in the native garden–hopefully, they will be attractive to these busy little bugs with the orangey-brown wings. Read more about Woodland Skippers here.
You may recall that I started cuttings of my native shrubs about a month ago. I decided to check them today to see if any of them are rooted. The salmonberries and thimbleberries don’t look so great, but the red-flowered currants are looking excellent!
Based on appearances right now, I should end up with six new currant plants that can be given away this autumn!
I noticed the salal plants at Ingraham High School, just a block away, were full of over-ripe berries. I helped myself to a handful and threw them all over the new native garden in my yard. It will be interesting to see if any of them germinate and grow–a fun, free experiment.
One of the challenges I’m facing is coming up with a small or medium native tree to plant on the corner of our property in the new native garden. One contender is the Cascara, Rhamnus purshiana. I found one growing near Twin Ponds here and the leaves were impressive.
I found a good description of the tree and how to grow it HERE (also an excellent website resource and blog). It appears to be a great plant for fauna.
Other contenders are the black hawthorn, Crataegus douglasii. I think it prefers a wetter site than I can provide, though, but I may try it, anyway. Maybe drier conditions will keep it smaller than its ultimate thirty-foot height.
Acer glabrum, the Rocky Mountain maple is another option. I’m a big fan of maples and this one stays pretty small.
Malus fusca, the native crab apple is also a contender. I’ll probably decide this autumn and get a tree planted when the rains return.
While taking a mental health break from the home office, I walked over to Ingraham High School and happened to look up in time to see a large bird carrying an even larger stick. It was an osprey, a bird I’ve never seen so close to our house. I’ve heard that a pair nest near Haller Lake, which isn’t far at all from Haller Lake. The bird flew with its stick from one light pole to the next a few times. Eventually, the stick was dropped–luckily I wasn’t standing below the bird just yet! The bird stayed there for a while, though.
I posted this video to the Western Washington Birder Group on FaceBook and they suggested the osprey was looking to start a new nest. I hope it can find a better place to nest than that playfield! Forgive the low-resolution phone video, but it is fun to see, anyway, this amazing fishing raptor so close to Homegrown National Park!
When walking past the native garden after a long day of work I spotted a gorgeous little flower! This plant was started from seed this spring, so it has been quick to bloom. It is Jacob’s ladder, Polemonium pulcherrimum. The plant is too small to be showy, but the individual flowers are spectacular!
I previously posted some of the beautiful flora from Lower Woodland Park, but this time it was a silent hunter that grabbed my attention. This was my first ever sighting of a barred owl! It may have been a juvenile–it was pretty tame and let me get close enough with my cell phone to snap these pics! How amazing that an owl (and maybe a breeding pair) live less than five miles from my house! I hope our neighborhood will host more fantastic birds like this.
Barred owls are one of those rare animals that are extending their range–they never used to be here. They started as an eastern-based species, but spread west in the Canada and now they are spreading along the west coast. This appears to be a natural dispersal–not due to any human introduction, but likely related to the impacts of humans on the weather, environment, and other species.
The NextDoor gift certificate giveaway for Seattle Native Plants Nursery continues to find native plant enthusiasts and those who are willing to try natives for the first time. In addition to the 24 certificates of $25 and $50 already issued to neighbors and friends, there are 16 people now on the waitlist to receive $25 certificates in early August! If an average plant from the nursery costs $7.00, that means 228 new native trees, shrubs, and perennials will get planted in our neighborhoods! What a great start to our Homegrown National Park, North Seattle edition!
The seedlings I so carefully planted last week, pots and all, in my clever attempt to save shelf space for my propagating efforts, has attracted some fauna. Likely a raccoon has been digging up the pots and turning out all the seedlings. I can’t be sure as to why, but there might be worms around because I’ve been watering the seedlings once in a while. Whatever creature is digging them up just grabs a couple of the pots each night and leaves them lying empty on their sides where once there was a precious seedling. So, when I say, “If you plant it, they will come,” I imagine there will be other surprising ways this manifests–I certainly wasn’t expecting raccoons to dig up my potted seedlings. Good to know the bandits are around, though.
Years ago, one of my first attempts to go native was to nurture a little cherry seedling that popped up in our yard. It turned out to be a native bitter cherry, Prunus emarginata. I had read that it would top out around 20 feet, so we planted it next to the driveway. I had read an inaccurate article because P. emarginata do not stop growing at 20 feet. So, it climbed up to 35 feet and appeared to want to keep growing. Later, I read that they grow to 45 feet tall and are not long-lived and tend to topple easily in storms–not the perfect tree to have next to the driveway where vehicles are parked. I have seen these trees in natural areas and they seem much taller and bigger than online sources suggest.
Chunky bitter cherry trunks in a natural area by Twin Ponds in Shoreline. The biggest trunk is about 18″ across.
Our bitter cherry tree was already suckering rambunctiously throughout our yard, including under the driveway and coming up on the other side! It was beautiful, though, with cinnamon bark and bright, healthy foliage, with noticeable white spring flowers. I never saw cherries on our tree–maybe the birds got them all. We decided it had to go to prevent more suckers and a tree on top of our house, our car, or our trailer. So, we paid a guy to cut the tree down and we kept the wood and took it up to our cabin for firewood.
Now that I have read a lot more about growing natives, I discovered that I can keep trees like this small and they will still benefit wildlife. And lucky for me, there are still a bunch of suckers from that first tree around the garden. I let them grow a bit and then prune them off so they become low, leafy shrubs.
One of my bitter cherry suckers, cut down to about five feet tall. These trees can grow ten feet in a year if given a chance.
I haven’t seen a lot of food web activity on these plants, but I’m optimistic that keeping them around is making a difference.
As I worked around the garden this weekend, I noticed two Western tiger swallowtail butterflies, at least three cabbage white butterflies, and this giant beauty, an eight spotted skimmer dragonfly that landed near the front porch and patiently allowed me to get close enough for some photos.
I find inspiration in most gardening books, but especially in those dedicated to native plants. Barbara Eisenstein’s “Wild Suburbia: Learning to Garden with Native Plants” has some gems right in the first few chapters. The book is specifically about California natives, but much of the advice is applicable anywhere.
When talking about the “why” of native gardening, Eisenstein says, “Since nearly all of our wildlands have been impacted by development, we can no longer ignore the habitat value of our own back yards if we wish to preserve other wildlife species, as well as the general health of the planet.” I would add front yards to this assessment.
One of her nine reasons to plant natives is: “Feel good about being part of the solution. The environmental forecast is not good, but it feels great to know you can do something about it. One little garden may not matter much, but you can help the movement catch on so it spreads from yard to yard.” We don’t really know how much one little garden might matter in the end. It might make all the difference.
She also describes three ways for gardeners to start their relationship with native plants, a conservative, plant-at-a-time approach, an all-in, redo your whole yard approach, and the in-between approach, the one she obviously prefers, where gardeners choose appropriate areas of their yards to devote to native plants. I’m doing both the tuck-a-plant method and the native-devoted-area method in my yard.
Another excellent point the makes regarding soils is that native plants are generally accustomed to the soils in the areas in which they evolved, so there is very little need to fertilize or amend the soil at all.
In the past few days I have wandered through Upper Woodland Park near Green Lake here in Seattle a few times. The park is not pristine wilderness by any stretch, but there are some nice native trees inside.
Native yew, Taxus brevifolia
Bigleaf Maple, Acer macrophyllum
Leaves that are part of the food web are perfectly imperfect.
Three major Seattle trees showing their distinctive trunks, left to right, Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata), Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)
For people with large enough yards, these trees can make a remarkable woodland. All around my neighborhood in Seattle, large Douglas fir trees soar above the houses–most about 70 years old, including one in my yard. This tree was one of the major reasons I wanted this house 25 years ago. There are fewer Western Red Cedar trees and Bigleaf Maples around, but these trees seed themselves in my yard regularly.
I don’t have room for full-grown versions of these trees, but from a food web standpoint, Doug Tallamy tells us that you don’t need adult trees to provide food for the insects that feed on these plants. For example, in my own garden, I have two seedling Bigleaf maples that I keep pruned to less than ten feet tall. I prune them several times a year to keep foliage coming. I take a similar approach with Bitter Cherry (Prunus emarginata).
One of my favorite native wildflowers is Fireweed, or Great Willow Herb (Chamaenerion angustifolium). I purchased seeds to start this year but not one of them germinated. Meanwhile, in the deserted Sam’s Club parking lot up the street from us, dozens of these plants have sprung up in cracks and planting beds. That’s good news–they will set seeds that I can scatter around my garden and in some pots to get my own started.
Last week, I made a sign to offer gift certificates to anyone who walked by the garden and texted me. No one did. It seemed simple enough, but maybe 1) people don’t want to text a stranger and/or 2) they aren’t as excited about native plants as I think they should!
Feeling dejected and sad, I thought I’d try Nextdoor. So I posted a Free Native Plants post and almost immediately I got a response! And then another! And within two days, I had over two dozen requests for certificates! I’m so excited by this response and the kind, excited responses from neighbors who are looking to improve their communities with native plants. I was worried that my mission wasn’t relevant to people, but it turns out a lot of amazing folks have already planted natives and many others want to start now.
The realization that several of the native plant species I started this year are actually annuals, not the perennials I had assumed, forced me to get those plants out into the native plant garden today. I planted out seven Collomia grandiflora seedlings and seven Lupinus bicolor seedlings. I’m hopeful that with some warmer weather and maybe some supplemental watering, they can get to blooming size by the end of summer.
Seedlings planted today nearest the bricks: Lupinus bicolor to the left, Collomia grandiflora to the right.
Closer view of my precious seedlings.
Lupinus bicolor is very delicate looking.
I’m trying to create a baseline of insects and other fauna that come to our yard this year. We had two nests full of Juncos hatch out in the garden, one batch of black-capped chickadees, and I’m seeing a lot of native bees and insects, including sweat bees, bumblebees, a yellow underwing moth, geometer moth, and a plume moth that arrived today near our front door.
The resilience of nature is awe-inspiring. These animals are out there just waiting for humans to give them a chance to thrive!
