NATIVE PNW GARDEN IN PORTLAND, OREGON: TOUR
Over the past two years, I’ve been working to transform our front yard from dirt and grass into a full garden with a focus on native plants. As a gardening newbie, it’s been an interesting process - I’m still learning how to make the landscape design better and more cohesive. Read onwards for progress photos and to see where it is today.
NOVEMBER 2022: THE BLANK SLATE
When we bought the house, the yard was mostly grass and dirt. Giant chunks of broken up concrete (often called ‘urbanite’) formed a planting border near the house. I’d never been into outdoor plants, but I was excited to be able to fill our first yard with plants. I knew I wanted a mixture of edible and native plants, but I didn’t know much about either. I spent the winter searching for ideas for plants and landscaping.
Picture of our yard before we moved in.
Picture of the yard when we moved in.
MARCH 2023: PLANNING THE GARDEN
My First Front Yard Plan
I made my first garden plan using Sketchup (a 3d modeling software) to approximate the different plants I was researching. My primary focus was to find a unique and balanced mix of foliage colors of purples, cool greens, natural greens, and pink/purple flowers. Having never purchased outdoor plants, I did not understand how costly it would get or how difficult it was to anticipate the future size of plants! My original plan was about ⅓ native, ⅓ herbal, and ⅓ ornamental plants. Here’s my first aspirational plan. I went to some local nurseries (Portland Nursery, Sauvie Island Natives) to purchase my plants. At Sauvie Island Natives, I saw some natives were marked with ‘PPL - Portland Plant List’ and the owner who checked out my plants asked if I was pursuing backyard habitat certification (which requires PPL plants). I said no, as I wasn’t planning to. Ultimately, the next year I would regret this decision.
To prepare the yard, we tilled the soil by turning over shovels of weeds to bury them underneath fresh dirt. I would later learn that this approach isn’t very effective for stopping weeds, since it resurfaces weed seeds that can last for years underground.
I eagerly planted the plants, and, they looked so impossibly small within the sea of dirt. This is where future Hannah should go back and tell past Hannah that some of these plants will get 10x larger. We ended up keeping the small concrete chunk retaining wall at the step near the sidewalk, since there was some nice sedum (a cute succulent) growing on it, and it helped us reduce how much we needed to plant.
This was the first time planting the yard.
A few weeks later, we ended up getting some free sod from a coworker, some free rocks for a border off Facebook Marketplace, and got some dark bark mulch from Home Depot. At this point, you can see how the green sedum trailed over the small retaining wall. The garden is starting to look polished!
The yard grew over that summer, and we lost our Japanese maple and rosemary bush from an ice storm that winter.
MARCH 2024: REMOVING THE GRASS
When we got the grass sod in 2023, my spouse (Andrew), said that he didn’t think we needed it. (Hindsight: he was right!) All summer 2023, he cut the grass with dedication but struggled at the edge near the rock border. The grass cuttings would spill over onto the mulch area and looked messy. I decided that the grass had to go, and in its place I would put the pathway from my original inspiration image. I transplanted some sedum around the pathway to give some nice contrast and a low ground cover.
Before ripping up the sod.
After putting in the new pathway. I know the steps are falling apart!
MAY 2024: NATIVE PLANT FANATICISM
Around this same time, I started looking for more plants to add to the garden. I was researching native plants, then I ended up becoming a fanatic devotee. For me, it clicked when I found out that many native bugs and butterflies (whose numbers are declining) require specific native plants for their life cycles. For example, the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly require specific native lupine species to host their larvae. My own front yard could be a mini restoration project and a way to express my thankfulness for the world we live in. Although I didn’t read any of Doug Tallamy’s books (Bringing Nature Home, Nature’s Best Hope), I listened to some of his talks, and I would recommend checking him out for a good introduction to why native plants matter.
I’ve let go of some of my uptight design desires that are not conducive to native plants. I originally wanted evergreen plants, purple and pink flowers (only), and plants with purple/red leaves. It turns out that these priorities were too limiting, at least when you’re prioritizing native plants in the Pacific Northwest.
As part of this, I decided to sign up for a Backyard Habitat Certification (the same one I denied the previous year), which is a Portland metro region program that supports the creation of urban natural habitats. For a small fee, you can have a program staff member assess your yard and provide a list of improvements you must make for certification. There are silver, gold, and platinum tiers, with increasing requirements for native plants and landscape practices. In addition to having a number of native plants, you have to remove certain invasive plants for every level. Now here’s where the Portland Plant List comes in. For a plant to count towards your ‘native’ plants, it has to be on the Portland Plant List, which means that it has historically been found in the Portland Metro region (this would be considered a plant that is ‘locally’ native). It turns out, I had quite a few plants that were native to the state of Oregon, but were not native to the Portland Metro region - bummer! I had already discovered this issue prior to my assessment visit, but I wish I knew when I purchased the plants.
After the initial visit, it was already summertime, which is a dry season in the Pacific Northwest. Since it doesn’t rain most of the summer, we mostly let the plants grow and don’t plant again until fall.
FALL 2024: ADDING MORE NATIVES
I picked up some native plants from Sparrowhawk Plants to add to my collection and removed some non-natives. Here are some photos with the current plants. I find it so helpful to see photos comparing different native plants in a garden setting, so I’m hoping this helps others.
Front Yard
Currently, I’m focusing on removing weeds and reestablishing the sedum around the pathways. The native California poppies continue to reseed themselves heavily, so I am relocating California poppies from the main yard into the sidewalk strip (not pictured). I’ve learned to enjoy the orange poppies, but I still would prefer to keep orange out of the main yard design.
My plan for next year is to hopefully enjoy some new native plant growth from seeds I planted this fall, continue to carefully edit the plants, and to start moving on to other areas of the yards. My yard doesn’t look as good as I want, but I have to remember that I’m just a beginner who’s starting from scratch. Let me know in the comments about your front yard garden plans!
HERE IS MY CURRENT PLANT LIST:
SMALL PLANTS
Sea blush (native, seed, 2024), Blue Globe Gilia (native, seed, 2024), Farewell to Spring (native, seed, 2024), Pearly Everlasting (native, seed 2024), Douglas Aster (native, seed 2024), Self-heal (native, 2024), Cascade Penstemon (native, 2023), Tall Western Penstemon (native, 2023), Broad-Leaved Penstemon (native, 2024), Yarrow (native, 2023), Nodding Onion (native, 2023 & 2024) Big Leaf Lupine (native, 2023 - not shown in pictures), Rose Checkermallow (native, 2024), Henderson’s Checkermallow (Oregon native, 2023 - not shown in pictures), Hairy Honeysuckle (native, 2024), Kinnikinnick (native, 2023), California Poppy (native, pre-existing with the house), Douglas Iris (Oregon native, 2023), Iris Tenax (locally native, 2023), Thyme, Silver Ice (non-native, 2023, not shown in picture), Gray Santolina (non-native, 2023), Sea Pink (Oregon native, 2023), Sedum, ’Plum Dazzled’ (non-native, 2023), Hellebore, various (non-native, 2024)
MEDIUM
Mock Orange (native, 2023), Cascade Oregon Grape (native, 2024), Creeping Oregon Grape (Oregon native, 2023), Evergreen Huckleberry (native, 2023), Jerusalem Sage (non-native, 2023), Lavender (2023), Rhododendron ‘Misty Moonlight’ (non-native)
BIG
Red flowering currant (native, 2023), Douglas Spirea (native, 2023)
