If You Plant It, They Will Come

While on a walk today on First Hill in Seattle, I was enjoying the dry day and observing spring unfolding in a warmer area of the city. This is a very urban neighborhood, mostly paved over with very commercial-type landscaping of non-native ornamentals. There were very few native plants anywhere around but then I stumbled on this:

Of course, the flower show will be short-lived with this currant–just a few weeks. I’d take two weeks of this native’s beauty over six weeks of plastic-looking camellia flowers every time! And so would hummingbirds and native pollinators.

Seattle endured snow and cold this week. The plants all knew it was coming, of course, but the humans were shocked.

In the past week, I’ve added a couple of gift plants to the garden. My brother provided me with two strong fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) divisions. My attempts to grow this plant from seed didn’t get far. These big, healthy divisions will jumpstart my efforts. I planted one in the corner of the native plant garden between the Douglas aster clump and the native grasses. I planted the second division several yards away behind the grass.

In addition, friend Staci dug up a bracken fern ( Pteridium aquilinum) from her wild yard at my request. I popped that into a bare spot away from everything. These ferns can spread and I’m looking forward to that!

Here is how the winter garden looks as of today–several views.

Three isn’t a lot to see right now. Even the Osoberry hasn’t bloomed yet and is just starting to unfurl. The red-flowered currant shrub buds are really swelling but it will still be at least a month before we see flowers. The tall Oregon grape has buds almost open, as well. What do the hummingbirds eat this time of year?

I’ve had a couple of new bird species this year already. We have a Townsend’s warbler that feeds at the suet feeder frequently. Such a beautiful bird! In addition, I saw a yellow-rumped warbler this last week. There is a fox sparrow that is hanging around, too–quite dapper with its chestnut cap. The usual suspects are coming around a lot, including Bewick’s wrens, spotted towhees, black-capped chickadees, chestnut-backed chickadees, red-breasted nuthatch, and bushtits. I hear Steller’s jays and American robins every morning but not in our yard. A northern flicker was hanging from the suet feeder the other day–an amazing bird!

Despite the cold weather some of the native seeds I planted in the winter have sprouted–the lupines and the Oregon sunshine, in particular. The 20-degree cold hasn’t fazed them at all.

The Phacelia seedlings started late last summer, however, appear to have given up, half after the first major cold snap/snow and the rest died this week.

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.