A Blank Slate

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The first place I decided to strike my shovel with was a rectangular plot of land at the back end of my property. It was an area 75′ wide by about 40′ deep and sat about 3′ higher than the rest of my backyard. It was a blank slate- all grass and a handful of old raspberry shrubs. I wasn’t 100% sure but it seemed like the area got plenty of sun. I spent the winter and spring doing some of the things I outlined in my previous post and began sketching out a landscape plan for what I wanted to see. You can check out the sketch below. If it’s not clear, what you see is a planted “island” surrounded by a grass walking path with additional plantings towards the fencelines. I wanted to add a pond with a stream as well so you’ll see the start of the stream in the upper center and then it flowers in a counter-clockwise arc before it spills down into a pond at the base of the cinderblock retaining wall.

The various abbreviations on the sketch represent plants I intended to plant at that location. For example, “SF” stands for Sword Fern; “S” stands for Salal and so on and so on. I not really a great at drawing so this little method of letter abbreviations worked for me. After some additional time making some more tweaks to the sketch, I duplicated the sketch digitally and ended up with the following plan. The second page in the PDF lists out the various abbreviations and what plant it represents.

I’ll admit that it was a pretty ambitious design but I didn’t know any better at the time. Now that I had some sort of plan, it was time to get digging. I decided to start work with the center island planting. Here’s one of the first photos which shows my initial plant layout:

I used the orange flagging to represent the perimeter of the island planting area and the green flags was the location of each major shrub/tree. You’re mostly looking at Shore Pines (Pinus contorta) and Tall Oregon Grape (Mahonia Aquifolium). There’s also a few 1 gallon Salal (Gaultheria shallon) at right center. The last thing I’d like to point out is that the post sizes vary from 1 gallon, 2 gallon, and 5 gallon pots. This is something to keep in mind as we review progress over time. In my next post, I’ll talk about the actual work of clearing, prepping and planting the island. Thanks for looking!

-Steve