Our Douglas fir is the biggest star of the garden–really BIG! We guess the tree to be at least as old as the house (70 years) and at least 80 feet tall, with a trunk eight feet around at chest height. When we were shopping for a house to buy, I remember hugging this tree the first time I laid eyes on it. There are dozens of trees of similar age and size throughout our Haller Lake neighborhood. They host eagles who come for quick visits until the mobbing crows send them on their way. They host crows nests, bushtit nests, flocks of feeding chickadees, and dozens of other species.

There are some misconceptions about needle evergreens, and the biggest one is that they are somehow less messy than deciduous trees. A tree as big as our Douglas fir dumps millions of needles and pollen cones every year. In addition, there are thousands of cones that drop from the tree, and hundreds of branches snap off in windstorms. As much as possible, we try to tuck anything that the tree drops back under the tree so it can be nourished as it would be in nature.

My 2020 plans for this behemoth are to cut the ivy away from its trunk completely and then us it as the keystone plant in my native plant garden. It provides shade and organic matter to the shrubs and perennials underneath it. It also provides some challenging competition for water and nutrients with its expansive root system. Surprisingly, though, many plants have evolved to grow under trees like this and I’m starting to bring them in.

My daylilies never perform the way that I know they can. For example, there are some growing in a parking lot up the street that are completely covered with flowers. They are drenched in hot sun amidst warm asphalt with little supplemental water, and this year they are spectacular.

My daylilies are blooming, but nothing like those plants. They just don’t get that amount of sun.

I really need to work harder to get these plants to flower more–the flowers are obviously worth the work! For 2020, I’ll work to feed each one a bit more and water a bit more and see if I can coax a few more scapes from each clump.

As kids, my siblings and I were not big fans of these flowers because we felt their flowers smelled like dog poop. As an adult with a poor sense of smell, I think we were probably right when we were young, but the great flower show these plants put on make them worth growing. I started several from seed for the memory garden and they are blooming for the first time now. Turns out some fun wasps really love them, too!

My 2020 plans for these plant are to feed and water them a bit to try to get them to bulk up for an even better show next year. The neighbors across the street have a HUGE planting of daisies about six feet square that is impressive for a couple of weeks every July. And smelly…

Bigleaf Maple is an amazing native tree. My first recollections of this plant are in the park near our house in Kent, Washington, where these trees were part of the woodland, along with Douglas fir, Western Hemock, and Western Red Cedar.

Our nextdoor neighbor here in North Seattle had a big specimen that had been topped at one point and had sent up some big suckers from the base, one of which became a good sized tree of its own. When a new house was built on that property, the tree was killed–only a big stump remains that chickadees nest in.

Our yard isn’t large enough to host a full-sized Bigleaf Maple, but I keep a few saplings around and just prune them back every year so any fauna that is dependent on this plant’s leaves can find some in my yard.

This year, powdery mildew came early and has attacked my maple trees, but I just pruned them back and new shoots will be up in a few weeks, hopefully sans mildew.

My 2020 plans for these trees are to keep them pruned back and enjoy their impressive leaves–they can be up to a food across!

This vine came from a mail order catalog fifteen or so years ago. It didn’t come with a tag, but it seems to match online photos of “Polish Spirit” and that name amuses me, so I’m adopting it.

I planted this vine near the arbor that Jeff Tangen made for me, along with some climbing roses. The blooms come on just as the rose is waning, usually, so it is a good match.

I love taking photos of these flowers:

My 2020 plans for this plant are just to enjoy its season of bloom and keep the vine tied up as best I can inside the rose and trellis. I have propagated this vine easily in the past, but don’t have a need for any cuttings this year. I’ll prune it back close to the ground in the spring and untangle the old vines and dispose of them–that’s really all the care this plant requires.

This plant doesn’t lend itself to my usual flora descriptors–it isn’t pretty, really, or graceful, or colorful. Words that do apply are solid, sculptural, forgiving, interesting, and permanent. I’m a big fan of plants in the Gasteria family because they are different. I believe this plant was purchased about ten years ago from City People’s on Madison. It has bloomed, but not regularly.

In 2020, I plan to put this plant in new soil and feed it a bit more and hope for flowers next year and maybe some offsets.

This tree came from the Arbor Day foundation at least fifteen years ago. We’ve had it in a big pot on our back patio for most of that time. And for the first time, in July 2020, the tree was covered in blooms!

I suspect this is a US native plant, but not the Seattle native C. douglasii. It might be C. viridis. The leaves are smallish and pointed, the flowers very typical hawthorn, and oh–the thorns. There are some respectable thorns along the twigs and branches. I’m hoping for some haws in the fall to complete the hawthorn experience. The plant turns brilliant reds and oranges in the autumn, as well.

My 2020 plans are to keep this tree watered and fed through the summer and watch the autumn color show unfold.

This mint-family weed popped up in the Douglas fir garden years ago. I didn’t know what it was, so gave it the benefit of the doubt. It started spreading slowly at first, but now it has impolitely marauded about ten square feet in and around other plants.

The plant has textured, minty leaves and hundreds of flower spikes that pollinators love but humans don’t really notice that show up around July.

After all the flowers die back, I plan to root out a significant portion of this invader, leaving just a polite amount for the pollinators.

I popped a little plant of this perennial cornflower into the Douglas fir bed maybe ten years ago and it has persisted through seedlings in the same area ever since. The flowers are wonderful electric blue spiders in the spring/summer. It usually disappears right after that.

I may try to grab some seeds from the plant this year and spread them in some bare spots in the memory garden. And I’ll work to get more and better photos.

Native to this area, I was happy to realize that one of the volunteer shrubs growing in the Douglas fir bed that I had pruned back each year, but hadn’t eradicated, was this beautiful species. This plant has beautiful leaves with intricate veins, subtle flower umbels, and white berries in the fall.

My plant first appeared six or so years ago, but I pruned it very heavily until this year. It is showing its potential now, as I embrace it as a native Seattle shrub.

I may have to make more room for this robust grower in 2020. Likely, in the fall, I’ll rearrange my native plants to give them all more room to spread out. I’ve also taken cuttings in late June that appear to be doing well–I expect they’ll root and be ready for potting on in another month.