If You Plant It, They Will Come

Today was a perfect Seattle autumn day–bright sun and cool temperatures, bright foliage, and a gusty wind. Today I endeavored on the last lawn-mowing of the year, tackling the one patch of lawn that we have left–about 1000 square feet right in front of the house.

First, though, I raked leaves up and spread them all over the native plant garden. In addition, we had some big branches cut from our Douglas fir tree and I spread those around so they covered all the areas of the native plant garden that are currently without plants.

Then, I mowed the lawn for the first time since summer. As I mowed, I was thinking about how we can change our landscaping fashion. How did we land on the fashion of lawns surrounding our homes in the first place and what about them is so appealing to us? And how do we make the change to appreciate vibrant, interesting landscapes filled with native plants and animals over lawn space that is virtually useless to nature?

Here is an article about the lawn subject that I found online.

When I read books about native plant restoration, inevitably the authors write at length about the perceived pressure imposed by neighbors that factors into our inability to change our landscapes to whatever it is that we really want–especially native gardens. I feel somewhat immune to this pressure because I live in a neighborhood where folks have different levels of garden skill and interest and different levels of concern about the neatness of their yards, so there are many yards/gardens that would be considered messy or even trashy. I’d have to work pretty hard at it to have our yard stand out as an example neighbors would find offensive.

One approach for people who are susceptible to peer pressure is to explain to them what your native garden means to you. I put signs up explaining my Homegrown National Park project and now neighbors speak to me about it knowingly and voice their support. I can be unapologetic about the “mess” because that untidiness is the ultimate goal.

Lawns, it seems to me, are not just about status, but are about control–our control over nature. Letting go of that control can be difficult. My garden right now is the tale of two landscapes–one lawn and one native plant garden. And when I looked at them after I finished mowing the lawn today, it seems obvious the most beautiful one, the most interesting one is the native plant garden–the one with brightly colored fallen leaves gamboling in the wind, with evergreen boughs and young shrubs and trees and herbaceous plants. The lawn is a brilliant green, but that’s really it–otherwise, it is dead space. Despite its vibrant color, it provides little shelter or food for anything.

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Meanwhile, look at the glorious tapestry that is the new and very young native plant garde n.

The great news is that we don’t have to give up our lawns entirely, though we do need to start maintaining them in more environmentally friendly ways. If we just replace half of our lawns with native plants, that’s enough to make a HUGE difference to native fauna and sequester loads of carbon. In the end, you can be right AND have a lawn.

We had some big lower limbs trimmed off our big Douglas fir tree last week. I asked to have the trimmings left so I can spread them around the native plant garden below and around this tree and let them decompose right in the garden. In addition, the Norway maple across the street has dropped a bunch of leaves in the street. I plan to move those to the native plant garden. They aren’t native leaves, but they will add nutrients to the soil in that garden and places for decomposers/detritivores to hide and do their work.

I was pondering how smart and uncomplicated nature is while humans have made things very ridiculous and complicated. Specifically, I was focusing on the idea that most natural resources should stay put, not move around. For example, trees have evolved to create their own perfect environment. They grow leaves that use the sun to make food to help the tree grow and reproduce. Then, they drop those leaves which compost into nutrients for the very same trees, at exactly the right time. And while they are performing those processes to ensure their own success, they also impact hundreds or thousands of animals and plants. They create shade. They provide food with their leaves and their bark and their roots, and their seeds. They provide shelter. They sequester carbon. Trees are phenomenal!

The native Douglas asters that I grew this year bloomed well through the late summer and early autumn and set lots of seeds. I pulled a few and will try to germinate them. I left the others, hoping that the birds will find them and also that some will find their way elsewhere in the garden and germinate. We’ll see if that happens. With all the bark on the garden, I’m not sure the seeds will find a friendly place to grow.

Back in late spring I started a batch of Collomia grandiflora seeds. They were placed in the native plant garden in summer, but most of them faded away, probably due to lack of water. However, one of them has done well and now, in early November, has flowers. These are really beautiful native annuals and I will grow them again, but start them earlier. The flowers aren’t open in the photos, but you can get a sense of how the plant grows and the flower color.

Indigenous people of eastern Washington used these plants as a laxative and fever treatment. The leaves have been used to cover berry baskets. I’ll get them started much earlier next year so I can really enjoy their flowers and attract native pollinators.

I’ve been noticing the tension between our cultural landscaping norms and the best practice nature landscaping practices toward which we are all hopefully migrating. For example, Leon asked me the other day, “Is that grass in your garden SUPPOSED to be there?” Because I have planted a bunch of native grasses in the midst of my neat and tidy bark-covered native plant garden. All the sudden, the garden isn’t quite so tidy and that is a cause for concern. Not for me, of course, but likely for anyone who worries about neat and tidy gardens.

It makes sense–we’ve spent generations developing traditional gardening practices, and one of the simple things gardeners have sought to do is remove grass from garden beds. Autumn clean-up is another practice that gardeners have developed and followed. Still clinging to that neat and tidy ethic, gardeners scour the late-season beds and take away everything that has fallen or passed its aesthetic prime with no thought to the plants and animals that might be affected.

One of my favorite podcasts, A Way to Garden hosted by Margaret Roach, featured a Doug Tallamy as a guest this week telling us exactly what we should and shouldn’t do in the fall garden and why.

Please listen to the podcast–you’ll find it HERE. And start thinking about your garden and yard in a new way. If gardening isn’t about what humans want but about what nature needs, it is a lot easier for gardeners to answer questions about why our gardens don’t fit the traditional mold.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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Another plant that is doing really well is the osoberry shrub. It has grown well and added some strong new starts from the base.

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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.

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I am continuosly impressed with the native trees in Woodland Park. Here is another Big Leaf Maple with a sculptural trunk.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!