EricaceaeValentine's Displaced Krummholtz garden

This is a bank at the entrance to our home, above our driveway. When we moved here, it was a desolate, sun-baked tangle of St. John’s Wart, vetch, weedy grasses, Japanese oxalis, California poppies and overly hardy geraniums. All this in a bed of bark chips placed over sun hardened clay. There were a couple interesting plants amid this forgotten sliver of land, some of which were rescued: There was a rather sad rhubarb, which in it’s third year after being moved into our vegetable garden is not only the recipient of many envious looks from our neighbors, but has yielded a good 15 lbs of rhubarb in three separate harvests this Spring, and looks like it’s still going to keep going. There were some marvelously draught hardy tall white iris and some giant lily-like bulbs which I think are a hardy amaryllis.

After most of the plants and weeds were removed, I started placing boulders into the hillside. Next I planted ground covers, iris, a beautiful older deciduous azalea we found at the recycled garden, a weeping larch, and some variegated red osier dogwood. These started filling in nicely, but there was an explosion of weeds once I started watering. Because this area had been let go for so long, it had the accumulated seeds of many many years who were quite happy to have access to newly amended soil and water. Vetch was my most problematic, followed by queen anne’s lace and canadian thistle. After three years of continuous weeding, these are almost gone. The planting has evolved as well.

My weeping larch died for no apparent reason, so I was on the hunt for another accent tree. I found some stunted mountain hemlocks at one of the local native nurseries, and decided to do a grouping. This inspired the beginning of the alpine direction for the garden. I added a couple more deciduous azaleas, mountain huckleberries, false azalea, various sedum, cranberries, himilayan blueberries, twinflower, bunchberry, whip vine, pennyroyal, penstemon and kinnikinik, to name a few.

One of my favorite plants is the tiny grouseberry that is growing in the root ball of a couple of the mountain hemlocks. These tiny huckleberries are impossible to find in a nursery.

In its third year, it’s looking good. It’s not as far along as I’d like because I’ve had to pull up so much of the groundcovers to remove weeds. I seem to be over the hump with the weeds, and I look forward to everything filling in.