My Evolving Gardening Methods

When I started my business of going around to the yards and gardens of friends and others to take care of their pruning, weeding and planting tasks, I became familiar with the usual list of ornamental shrubs and perennials suitable for residential yards. Plants popular in the 1990s included butterfly bush, heavenly bamboo (nandina), forsythia, arborvitae, and azaleas. All nice looking shrubs, but not always easy to maintain or grow well or keep from being invasive. One of my customers was a person with a religious orientation who liked the idea of having a lot of a shrub called burning bush (winged euonymus). He wanted me to get him a batch to plant, and if I had kept working there I would have had to decide what to do about that idea. Lucky for me that was a one-season job.

People I worked for mostly wanted the same thing for their yards: low maintenance, color year around, attractive in two of three basic styles, such as billowy grasses and tall perennials, or clipped edges and neat rows of bedding plants, or with maybe a spot of "the natural look," involving ferns and false solomon's seal. But I was never any kind of garden designer. I just wanted to get out there and pull weeds and work with whatever they had in their yards to start with, and just take care of the plants the best I could by reading up on shrubs like rockrose (cistus), cornus kousa (dogwood), and abelia as I came upon them.

Looking around at the landscaping for new public buildings such as colleges, clinics, and office parks, I noticed how they were using red twig dogwood, wild strawberry and kinnikinick to fill spaces, with daylilies and daffodils mixed in. I found all the information catelogued and explained on sites such as the King County Native Plants website. There were numerous booklets, informational pamphlets on how to save the salmon, bring in the locals birds and butterflies by planting native plants.

So forward I went with the promotion of native plants in residential yards. Sometimes it worked out well, such as my favorite backyard on a wooded hillside where the owners had purposely planted a variety of groundcovers, shrubs such as leucothoes mixed with hostas, ferns, and other shade-loving plants. Batches of tall iris, catmint, primroses, and even a fritilary were planted under their firs. But despite my efforts to promote the benefits and beauty of northwest natives to my customers, many didn't want to get that involved, they just wanted colorful yards! Tulips, roses, pansies, daffodils, cosmos, iris, dahlias, rhododendron, rose of sharon, hydrangea, purple hebe, multi-colored heuchera and coral bells. Fine, these I liked working with these and the native plants could be in the background.

When I tried to introduce tall oregon grape (mahonia aquifolium) to one customer, I heard about how tired they were of that plant, spread as it was in Costco parking lots with clumps of rangy sticks poking up and with sharp leaves difficult to walk past. Good point. This native plant can take up a lot of space and isn't great for mediums-sized yards. Also often planted along with the mahonia in those parking lots and median strips is nandina (heavenly bamboo). That might look like a good solution, since the surrounding pavement keeps them both from spreading underground, but the seeds are eaten by birds. For our native oregon grape, that's ok. For nandina, no. Officially invasive now in Texas, the heavenly bamboo is one of those plants we have to be careful about, or just pull up and toss.

You have to do a lot more than just pull up and toss out to get the everlasting rootlets out from your garden beds for some invasive groundcovers that partly kept me in business trying to control. I went out with one homeowner to tackle the yellow archangel takeover of his woodlands. We may have worked for a week on that, making a dent, but I know that those little roots can live for years and years, never to be seen in leaf until some rain md light gets to its hidden spot. Another customer, one so interested in native plants he already had a wild current in his yard, told me to give up trying to get the archangel out, just make a line of control. Same for sweet woodruff, a really really bad one, too bad it's so cute. I found myself digging it out of garden beds then tossing in some adjacent woods, too late before realizing the worse mess I was making. I have other stories of field bindweed, running bamboo, and English ivy -- prolific invasives that kept my business fairly busy.

Weeding is a kind of bread and butter for gardeners. I didn't call myself a landscaper; we didn't mow lawns or trim a lot of hedges. We did some experimental and somewhat dangerous now that I think of it stone work however. Hardscape, one of my favorite parts of the business. I did a couple of simple brick jobs, lining beds, etc. But one time, my brother and I built a set of sandstone steps. That was fun.

Now, living on the edge of some wilderness areas, I'm still trying to bring more of what wants to grow here anyway into my backyard. Indian plum, salmonberry, snowberry, saskatoon berry, cascara, ferns, and lily of the valley. I plant, cultivate, propagate and/or let grow a certain number of Pacific Northwest native plants. I can't have "natural areas" or ecosystems, since a property parcel can't be an ecosystem of its own. Outside inflences being what they are these days. What I can do is encourage settings that imitate the way nature assembles, grows, and groups plants together.

These days I hesitate to give advice or recommend anything, since there is another long article to be written called "Mistakes I Have Made With Native Plants." I think it would be safe to say plant all the flowers you want, and don't forget the flowering vegetables and trees and vines, bulbs, and rhizomes. Get some mason bees, some leafcutter bees to pollinate and bring out your butterflies. And for the groundcovers, the backdrops, the fillers in, use just local plants if you can, ones that don't invade, are not too hard to grow, or take too much care. Don't made gardening a chore. And unless you are like some of us who's favorite hobby is wandering outside and digging in dirt, save your time for your rose pruning, your indoor orchid tending, or your fine embroidery stitching done while sitting on the couch, by the window.