Somehow, I had never heard of the Collomia genus until I started researching native plants. This gorgeous annual is a native to the Seattle area. I started some from seed in 2020 and planted them outside, but because I got a late start, only one of the plants got buds (in November!) and I haven’t seen an open flower, yet, though I imagine on a sunny, warm day there might be a true blossoming.

I already ordered more seeds for these natives and my plan is to get them planted much earlier so they will bloom before winter! I’m hoping the local polinators will enjoy these phlox relatives.

“Creeping woodsorrel” is too tame a name for this marauder. It creeps, yes, but it also runs, jumps, and flies! This is the worst weed in my greenhouse, and I recently found a patch of it growing outside near the sidewalk, too. The seed capsules explode when ripe and send the seeds high and low and to considerable distances. And digging them out of pots is almost impossible without completely uprooting all contents.

Oxalis is one of my favorite plant families. There are some amazing succulent and bulbs in this group and just generally small plants with beautiful flowers. This one, when seen out of its maleficent context is also attractive. But when it is shooting seeds all over the greenhouse, it isn’t pretty anymore. Pretty poison.

My future plans for this plant are to wipe it out completely with some diligent manual removal.

We planted this cultivar on one side of the arbor in the woodland garden about twenty years ago. It wasn’t a great choice, as it didn’t seem to thrive on the shade there and never really filled out. But it survives. This Lonicera is a tough customer. We planted another all-green variety in a blank spot in the same garden just his year.

Future plans for this plant are to take some summer cuttings of the variegated parts for tonsai use.

Known as cherry laurel, and in my family as laurel hedge, this plant has featured in my life since I was a kid. At the home I grew up in, there was a long hedge of this plant separating our driveway from the property next door. Those hedge plants grew tall and wide and I got to attempt to prune them once in a while–a bigger job than I could ever really handle.

When we bought our house in Haller Lake, there were cherry laurel plants in our neighbor’s yard to the west of our house, including a hedge-like planting along our property line and some large shrubs at the northwest corner of our property. The neighbor allowed us to build a fence replacing some of the laurel shrubs. We eradicated the laurels and built the fence. And then we kept eradicating the laurels as they grew and molested the fence. It took a couple of years, but we won.

And this year, the other plants in the northwest corner had to be pruned because they are enormous. P. laurocerasus isn’t classified as a noxious weed in King County, but it really should be–birds spread them through their cherry-like fruits, and they require very specific eradication techniques when they invade native ecosystems.

Birds have dropped a few laurel seeds in my yard and now there are a couple of plants stubbornly hanging on in the Douglas fir bed. I prune them down to nothing every spring, but they just keep coming back. I need to dig them out entirely.

My future plans for these seedlings is to tackle their roots and really get eradicate them once and for all so I don’t have to worry about them ever going to seed and spreading further.

I’m not sure which species of dock I have, but I have a few areas of the garden that this deep-rooted perennial weed call home. Forever. Beause they are pretty tough to get rid of.

The worst part is that I really appreciate them as a plant. Their foliage is strong, and the spikes of flowers are not showy, but the seed heads make up for that–they can have remarkable color and form. Alas, they maleficently maraud so I need to root them out over the rest of my life.

Pulling them is extremely challenging, as the roots are deep in the glacial clay around our garden, and breaking them off just results in stronger regrowth.

There are native Rumex species, but most of them are invaders, and I’m sure mine are aliens. They do get eaten by something, though, as you can see from the above photo.

Future plans are dig, dig, digging until they are gone, gone, gone.

Yes, it is early to be posting this, but I am taking the giant leap that the same plants I found blooming in the garden today will still be blooming four days from now.

It is always fun to scan the garden for late flowers around Thanksgiving, and then again on Christmas day.

Here’s what I found today…not all of them are flowers, but worth showing, anyway:

Any native plant garden that I maintain needs to have berries. I pretty much love all berries and I assume that wildlife loves them all, too. So, I added thimbleberries when I started the native plant garden this year. There are two pots of them and they were pretty wimpy to start with, but they have grown strong throughout their season and still have leaves on them now.

I already love the fact that creatures are eating away at the leaves of these plants–they are already part of the food web. I just hope they have enough energy leftover to keep growing and get to flowering size in the next year or two.

My future plans for these berries are to keep them watered and fed until they are fully established. Then, I hope to be able to peel off divisions frequently to keep them contained and share them with neighbors.

I’m not positive of the identity of this laceleaf maple in the woodland garden, but it looks a lot like Pung Kil and, in November of 2020, it is putting on a brilliant show on its branches and on the ground.

Growing next to Bloodgood, the two complement each other while the leaf shape/texture and timing provide some distict contrasts.

There aren’t any future plans for this plant other than to keep it irrigated in hottest, driest summer. It doesn’t ask for anything else and it gives a lot with beautiful spring foliage, nice color and shape all year, and a brilliant autumn finale. The tree even looks amazing in the snow!

The common name of “creeping” buttercup doesn’t capture the voracious way this plant eats up territory. It should be renamed Smothercup. And if you ever make the naive mistake of thinking that the garden is asleep in the winter, this maleficent marauder will prove you very wrong. It uses the fall and winter to spread by stolons across large swaths of the garden so that when you step out for your early spring clean-up, you have yards of buttercup to eradicate.

I will say this positive thing about this invasive weed–digging out these plants provides so much pleasure. No other weed gives me this much satisfaction. It has to do with the way the plant grows–there is a thick wad of white roots at each node or under each main plant, and prying them up and pulling them out, you know you actually have removed the weed–it isn’t like a taproot that breaks off and resprouts. Once they are gone, they are gone. But, for me, they are never quite gone.

My future plans for these plants are to do a better job of eradicating them early so I don’t have as much of a problem through the year. Specifically, they need to be dug out from the garden in front of the greenhouse and the bed near the fence in the orchard garden. One of these wet but warm days I will rip the all out and feel very proud and satisfied.

This compact version of the golden striped bamboo has lived in our yard for over twenty years. The plant got moved to the Douglas fir bed right under the big tree and despite the dry shade there, it has survived. It never quite looks its bushy, vibrant best, probably due to the dryness.

My future plans for this plant are to get a few small divisions of it, as I think it would do well under the taller bamboos in the woodland garden.