The Backyard Biome

After months of random shrub transplanting and weed clearing, I realized I needed a methodical plan for transforming our backyard—or at least some method to my madness.

First, I needed to determine what kind of habitat we would create. Three variations appealed to me: woodland garden, backyard wildlife habitat, and an edible landscape. Ultimately, I chose the trickiest path: to merge all three.

An edible woodland habitat, then. Could it be done? Doesn’t wildlife habitat connote wildness, as opposed to a cultivated garden? And an edible landscape—by that I mean edibles for us—would have to be shared with wildlife. Could I grow enough berries for jam and still share with the local birds? It was a daunting prospect.

I decided the transformation would begin on two tracks.

Hardscaping

This comprises both the costly structural work and the grunt labor. I divided the initial work into three projects:

1. building paths, 2. moving stacks of firewood, and 3. replacing all retainer walls.

The latter task will be stretched over several years, or as long as it takes to put together the funds needed to replace each of five existing walls. Currently our retaining walls consist of nasty, goo-oozing, and rotting railroad ties. Soaked in creosote, possibly leaching arsenic and the gods only know what else, our railroad retainers are slowly slouching toward the back of our house.

When they were first put in place, I have no idea. But most now lean forward from the pressure of our sloped property, and in places, there’s evidence of termite damage. A more immediate danger: they’re subject to husbands standing on them so that they break off and crash onto the patio. Uh huh.

Identifying Native vs. Invasive Plants

Of key importance for backyard wildlife is a native habitat. Native critters depend on native plants for food, and native plants need native insects for pollination. Being native is not necessarily the be all, end all, however, as the microclimate, soil, and insect populations may have altered as the area gradually became suburbanized. Those factors will have to be considered in plant choice.

A quick plant identification primer:

• Native: Indigenous plants that are adapted to the area’s climate, insects, and soil.
•  Exotic: Any plant introduced to the area by human activity.
• Invasive: Plants that become naturalized and then reproduce quickly, displacing native species. These are notoriously hard to eliminate.
• Noxious: A legal term for hard-to-control invasive plants that are highly competitive and destructive.

Obviously, I do not want any noxious plants, nor do I want invasive species unless I can somehow keep them from leaving the yard. I also will have to control rampant-growing native species such as the mahonia aquifolium and Pacific trailing blackberry that have been spreading like mad.

After doing an initial inventory of our backyard plants, I found three Class A and one Class C noxious plants: 

Scotch broom, shiny geranium, and spurge laurel, all Class A noxious plants.

Turns out our noxious plant list is shorter than I expected. The spurge laurel and Scotch broom have only just started to spread, and the shiny geranium, while rampant, is easy to pull up. Eradicating the Class C noxious English ivy that nearly covers an entire tier, however, will be an onerous task.

Next up: photos of our existing native plants.

It was the way the autumn sun sent shards of light through the forest, illuminating patches of flora still flourishing in the understory. Western hemlock, Western red cedar, and Douglas fir stood like sentries, guarding the back entry to the property that adjoined a narrow greenbelt between the house and the disused high school sports field. A rough path trickled through the woods to pool at an expansive patio that bridged the forest and what was soon to be our new home.

 While my husband Paul did another run-through of the house, captivated by the huge finished basement (the future media room/man cave), I roamed the back yard with our dog Lucy. She treed a few squirrels as I perused the plant life: red huckleberries, salal, Oregon grape, tangles of Pacific trailing blackberries. Everything was native, the forest left mostly untouched by previous owners. Such true Northwest flora in my own backyard! It thrilled this transplant from SoCal’s nature-girl heart.

We hadn’t even planned to enter the real estate market yet. But it was the tail end of the housing bubble, and the price for a half-acre-plus property in the beautiful little town of Edmonds, a short jaunt north of Seattle, was amazingly within our budget. We put in a bid and got the call saying the house was ours that same night. Within weeks we were leaving our respective little starters behind and moving into our enchanted forest.

Flash forward to early February 2006. A gale hit the region, carrying an average peak gust of 46.8 mph, with a high of 52 mph in our vicinity. Sleeping in the basement that night, I woke to an ominous thud, and later, a crashing clatter. Waking to find three trees down and our large chimney cap on our front steps was nothing compared to looking through the skylight just as another huge tree plummeted toward our bedroom. It missed the house by mere feet and crashed into our north fence, splintering not only the fence but a nice Western red cedar in its path. The trees that fell were shallow-rooted Western hemlocks that, we were to learn, were infected by Heterobasidion annosum, a basidiomycete fungus that rotted the trunks from the inside.

The wind gods were not finished with us that year. In December came the infamous Hanukkah Eve windstorm. Hurricane-force winds ripped up trees, downed power lines, and caused 14 deaths in the greater Seattle area. Peak gusts averaged 55.2 mph and topped 66 mph in our neighborhood. We lost power 27 hours (nothing compared to five days for some) and three more trees.

The following December brought another windstorm, which took out our south fence, which made me think that the wind gods had a thing for symmetry.

Since then we’ve “weathered” a few more windstorms (and more damage to one fence), but nothing like that cyclone of destruction between 2006 and 2007.

I began several times on a plan of restoration and repair. I never followed though. In 2008, we cut up downed trunks and stacked or gave away a hell of a lot of firewood, but the task of cleaning up what had become a backyard wasteland was just too depressing and daunting. On top of that, I had developed severe pain in my neck, shoulders, and down my left arm, which prevented me from doing anything beyond tending to my veggie garden.

In 2009 I had surgery to repair a burst disk and a bone spur on one of my cervical vertebrae. It took two full years before I could do heavy yard work without pain.  In the meantime, however, my funk about the loss of our forest lifted, as I realized we were witnessing habitat change in our own backyard: Our coniferous forest was no more, but what was emerging was a mixed-forest woodland. Growing quickly in the new sunlight were big leaf maples and Pacific madrones. The huckleberries and red-flowering currant were thriving, along with a gazillion weeds. Fascinated by this metamorphosis, I rediscovered my love of our backyard, and my desire to shape it into a woodland garden.

This blog is the story of that transformation.