Another childhood memory plant, our neighbor, Mrs. Hardy, had a large Mahonia shrub on the property line when I was growing up. As kids, we believed that the berries were poisonous. They were good for coloring our various potions and mud pies. I remember finding out the hard way that walking barefoot anywhere near an Oregon grape is a bad idea–the leaf thorns become extra agressive after the leaves fall off and dry.

I added one Oregon grape to my new native plant garden in April 2020. It is a decent-sized start, at around three feet tall, and blooming-sized.

My future plans for Oregon grapes are to keep an eye on its spread and enjoy the flowers and fruit in the coming years.

Foxgloves are growing wild around Seattle and I grew up knowing their name and seeing them in all the abandoned fields and old gravel roads when we’d venture on walks or drives. The wild one here is Digitalis purpurea. I have grown that and hybrids of it in the garden here for years, including the quick-blooming “Foxy” strain, and a mix that I recently got from Chiltern’s in England.

I put some seedlings from the Chiltern’s mix in the memory garden last year. They didn’t bloom fully, as I think they were too young, but they will bloom big in 2021. I hope they don’t block any of the flowering bulbs that are planted underneath.

My future plans for foxgloves are to pretty much ignore them. As non-native invaders, I’ll let these bloom and then eliminate them. There may be a few seedlings to deal with down the road, of course, but these plants haven’t been weedy for me, just pretty and polite.

Another great native plant, fringecup is a fun understory plant in our local forests and clearings. It has fresh-looking foliage and interesting, cup-like flowers that grow in tall spikes in the summer. I added a couple of these plants to the native garden in April 2020 and they have done well.

My fringecups set seed this year and I left them on and tossed some around–it’ll be interesting to see if any germinate. I’ll probably purchase some seeds, regardless, to get some more of these growing–they are a fun native that add a bit of elegance to the garden.

Back in the 70s when I was just a kid, I remember stores selling piggyback plants in the houseplant section. Later on, when we moved to Kent and I had access to an undisturbed forest to wander in, I found these plants growing on the forest floor! It still fascinates me that a temperate plant like Tomiea can be grown in houses.

Now that I’m focused on native plants in my own yard, the piggyback plant is back in my life. I added one plant to the garden last year and it has grown well. I never paid attention to the flowers of these plants, but I saw blooms this year and the flowers are intricate and beautiful.

My future hopes for this plant are to pull some babies from the leaves or divisions from around the plant and spread them around the native garden. I might pull one into the greenhouse as a stock plant to produce lots of babies in the future, as well.

I’ve been growing culinary sage for about fifteen years in the garden. It grows easily in my yard and doesn’t ask for anything–that’s why it has lasted this long. Several years ago, I took a bunch of cuttings when I pruned the original mother plant and I later planted the cuttings in another garden.

The plant has attractive leaves with a greyish bloom and nice texture. They set some blue-purple flowers in the summer. Of course, the fact that we can pick our own sage leaves and add them to any recipe comes in very handy. We use them a lot over Thanksgiving!

Future plans for these plants are to keep them trimmed and enjoy their nice contrasts and distinctive flavor.

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.