Native Loveliness

I had last Friday off.  Working 56 hours in 4 days gets you that.  It was kind of a nice day.  Despite the fact that I was physically exhausted from the four days prior, I had to get out of the house and enjoy some sun.

While I was messing around in my backyard doing this and that, I had an epiphany.  I had been wanting to create a native plant garden somewhere in my backyard ever since we moved in.  I love native plants and have been collecting them and keeping them in pots for the last several years, which is not really good for them.  I had a place for this garden mapped out for a while, but was feeling a bit underwhelmed by the location and overwhelmed by the work it would take to prep it.  Then I found the perfect spot.  It got a tiny bit of sun but was mostly shady (perfect for native woodland plants), was not being used for anything else, was on a side of the house that needed some love, and was relatively bare of stuff to make prepping the bed easier.  I jumped at Shawn for his approval as soon as he came home from work, and 3 hours later, we had a native plant garden that we were super proud of.

Before...

After!!! From left: red and evergreen huckleberry, wood sorrel, and deer fern, sandwiched by bunches of vanilla leaf. The mulch is stuff we found on Craigslist for free.  It's arborist's mulch, made mostly of Douglas fir.  It smells really nice.

Vanilla leaf!  It smells so good. We had a huge patch of it that we split into 4 sections.

Red huckleberry, a little sunburnt, but it should get better in its new shady spot.

The only problem we had was the wrist-thick holly roots that we had to battle and dig up while prepping the bed.  (That's a whole other project: English Holly murder.)  But it really was an easy project and super fun and super rewarding to finally get those poor plants in the ground.  It is directly underneath the bird house Shawn built so this little corner of our property is prepped to be a little native natural haven.