Bainbridge gardeners urge others to ‘go wild’ in their backyards.
When designing her backyard landscape, Carrie West drew upon the green-thumb know-how of the world’s foremost garden guru.
You may know her as Mother Nature.
“Nature takes care of itself,” West said, while walking through the sculpted forest spreading from her kitchen door. “I brought nature into my backyard, and now nature’s working for me.”
For West, who lives on two eastward-sloping acres in Eagledale, no garden design is more sustainable or more ‘green’ than the one that was already there. She uses no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. She waters little and lets dead leaves and snags sit where they fall.
“Most of my plants don’t usually don’t get affected by bugs or disease and they need very little water because they come from this area,” she said. “I don’t have to fuss with them. I garden the easy way.”
Native plants grow in deep green tiers around West’s New Sweden Road home. First comes a ground cover of salal, Oregon grape and other low-lying shrubs where small birds scamper in search of seeds and bugs. Alders, Indian plum, dogwoods and honeysuckle form a middle level under big leaf maples, cedars and Douglas firs.
“It all works together,” West said. “The alders provide nitrogen, which provides good soil for the conifers. The big leaf maples shade the cedars, which don’t like to grow in full sun. These levels of plants are also what wildlife want – like woodpeckers that you see on the firs. They bounce off and down to the different stories of plants.”
West’s garden is a favorite hangout for island wildlife. A family of deer moseyed along her driveway, just below a dead tree riddled with woodpecker holes. Nearly 30 bird varieties have been sighted on her property, West said, including her favorites – owls, hummingbirds and robins.
“That’s why I planted this snowberry bush,” she said, touching a fragile bush laden with fat, white berries. “When the snow comes, tons of robins come out of nowhere because they have nothing to eat and they don’t go to bird feeders. I think I counted 40 robins on this bush. I was happy I had something for them.”
Humans have also taken notice of West’s garden. In 2005, she earned first place in the Earth-friendly Gardens contest sponsored by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Tilth, an urban gardening nonprofit.
West’s garden is one of 6,000 certified as a “backyard wildlife sanctuary” by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. West is in the process of earning a similar certification from the National Wildlife Federation. The organization, through the work of local volunteers, aims to certify 200 island homes, five schools and five businesses.
“How people take care of their home property makes a big difference in how people, in a larger sense, provide input on policy (or) planning decisions on how we develop or don’t develop,” said Russell Link, a WDFW wildlife biologist and author of “Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest.”
About 35,000 acres of wildlife habitat are converted to housing or other suburban uses each year in Washington, according to the WDFW. As forests and other wild lands make way for grass lawns and flowerbeds, so too comes an increase in pesticide and herbicide use.
The Bainbridge-based Natural Landscapes Project reports that about 5 billion pounds of pesticide are applied annually in the United States. Bug and weed-killing chemicals are ingested by wildlife and trickle into waterways. Eventually, these toxins find their way back to the people that unleashed them. A 2002 University of Washington study found that nearly all of the preschool age children tested in the Seattle metropolitan area had pesticide residues in their urine.
“What we’re trying to do is not only protect habitat, but also educate,” said Connie Waddington, a volunteer with the NWF’s backyard habitat project. “We want to bring this to schools, especially. Educating kids about the importance of this means they’ll then tell their parents, who will then maybe do their backyards in this way.”
Sakai Intermediate School has already received its WDF certification. Odyssey Multiage Program, which neighbors Bainbridge High School, is working with the WDF to make its campus more wildlife friendly.
Over 80 island homes, including West’s, are registered with either the WDFW or WDF programs. Increasing the number of yards displaying signs from either project “shows the community the importance of protecting wildlife habitat,” said Waddington.
For West, it also lets people know that they don’t have to spray chemicals, grow copious amounts of grass or water every day to have a beautiful yard or garden.
“My yard is not (from) Sunset magazine,” West said. “It’s 75 percent native. It has a lot of shade with not a lot of big, flowering plants.”
West’s yard has a lawn, but it’s been reduced to narrow stretches between billowing plots of Oregon grape and salal.
“Moss grows in the grass, and so do wildflowers, but I don’t mind,” she said.
West is proud of one feature few suburban gardeners would likely even consider: a backyard bog.
“It’s a miniature one,” she said, stepping over the slab of stone that spans the winding patch of mud and wetland grasses. “It’s low and shallow so it allows bees and butterflies to get water.”
Despite it’s status as one of the island’s most earth-friendly, West’s garden, like any forest, isn’t without its problems. Aphids have eaten into a prized hemlock, making oozing white cysts along it’s needled branches.
To cure the affliction, West enlisted the help of a natural aphid killer.
“I brought in wasps,” she said, pointing to a roofed box tacked to a fence post near the hemlock. “They’re attracted to these. The wasps lay their eggs in the aphids. The eggs hatch and eat the aphids from the inside.”
Other natural techniques are less gruesome, but no less effective.
On her garage wall, West has posted a shelf of paper tubes that attract nesting mason bees. The bees, in turn, help pollinate West’s garden.
“Our apple trees weren’t producing,” she said. “Then we introduced the mason bees and got tons of apples this last summer.”
West is a dedicated composter, recycling food waste into rich soil, chock-full of worms and nutrients. While many of her plants get a compost infusion each year, she prefers a hands-off approach, letting nature do most of the work.
“When leaves fall, I leave them as mulch, which means good soil,” she said, taking hold of a brown layer of dead leaves and other decaying debris. “Birds like to scratch around in it, which means the dirt gets aerated and fertilized by the birds at the same time.”
After 14 years of living on her two-acre property, West has put only a third of an acre under cultivation.
“When we moved here, it was clear-cut,” she said. “It was a blank slate. But it made sense to rebuild what was already around. Now I get to interact with nature where I live. It’s peaceful and it feels nurturing to provide habitat when so much habitat is lost.”
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Green By Design
This story is the fourth and final installment in a series on sustainable design on Bainbridge Island.
Gardener Carrie West offers her services as a “garden coach” for those wishing to make backyards more hospitable to wildlife. She can be reached at 780-0193 or carrie@bainbridge.net.
Call Connie Waddington at 842-9483 to volunteer with the National Wildlife Federation’s backyard habitat program.
For more information on backyard habitat programs sponsored by the NWF and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, see http://wdfw.wa.gov/wlm/backyard.
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Nature’s way
Putting Mother Nature to work in your garden can start with a few easy steps:
1. Plant native trees and shrubs. They’re drought tolerant and already adapted to living in the Northwest. Leave snags and other plant debris that are valuable to wildlife.
2. Add a bird bath, bird house or small pond to attract birds and other wildlife that can help your garden grow.
3. Cover openings under eaves and other places around the house that can attract nesting sparrows and starlings. These non-native birds often out-compete native birds, such as robins.
4. Keep cats in check. Cats often prowl garden areas in search of birds and other wildlife.
5. Get your neighbors interested. Several adjacent yards with good wildlife resources can replicate a small forest.
Source: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
