by Jen Power

Created on: August 27, 2008   Last Updated: September 21, 2008

After I graduated college in Seattle, I was on the lookout for an apartment in the same neighborhood as my campus. This isn't the easiest task, but I was lucky enough to find a decent place before my boyfriend's parents kicked the pair of us out of their house.

Since my new apartment was on the courtyard, one of the things it came with was a deck with a large empty planter. The planter had held trees sometime in the recent past, but they had been removed before we moved in. I was a young and eager gardener who was lucky enough to get her hands on a piece of dirt. But what should I do with it?

My first plan was to attain vegetable self-sufficiency and grow myself a victory garden. This idea died pretty quickly the planter was on a first floor of a four story building. All shade, all the time. So what grows in the shade? I'm from Southern California originally, so all the gardening know-how I have relates to drought tolerance and species that can take the full force of a desert summer sun. It was time to do some research.

I soon found out that there is one group of plants that is ideally suited for shady, soggy conditions: native plants of the Pacific Northwest. Ok, so not every single plant likes being in damp partial shade, but a whole lot of them do. Thus began by naturescaping odyssey.

The first goal was to find out where I could find native plants. From my recollections of garden shopping in Southern California, most nurseries' stock was made up of popular horticultural species and didn't include local native plants. This is true in Seattle as well. However, I soon discovered the Washington Native Plant Society and their biannual plant sales. I had struck naturescaping gold. While they don't have absolutely every species in the native plant handbook, they have a lot of them. For the first few sales, it was hard for me to walk out of there without spending at least a hundred bucks.

After a little more research, I did end up finding a nursery that had a decent selection of native plants. I would visit whenever I got the chance, and I always left with the maximum amount of plants I could carry home with me on the bus. A little more research after that revealed the King County Native Plant Salvage Program. Jackpot.

This is a truly awesome program. King County finds a piece of land that's about to be developed and negotiates with the contractors to allow some volunteer parties on the site to salvage plants. Volunteers salvage for King County restoration projects during the morning and then they get an hour or so to pick out their own plants to take home. I must have taken home hundreds of dollars worth of plants that would have been mowed down by bulldozers otherwise.

I now had three reliable sources for native plants, and plenty of time on my hands during the fall and winter because of the crappy Seattle weather. My little dirt pit turns into a tiny plant paradise. After two years of work and planting, I have at least twenty native species successfully established. I knew I had made it when my boyfriend went from being exasperated at all the time I spent on our back porch to bragging about new garden. At one point he said "It looks like a piece of the forest floor!" That'll do, Jen. That'll do.

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