The Joys of Wildlife Gardening

I'm a suburban girl.  I grew up in a sedate suburb of Los Angeles.  I encountered some creepy crawlies in our first home because it was a new development being carved out of what was a previously undeveloped cluster of hills.  So we had to watch out for rattlesnakes, I saw a tarantula once, and there were lizards and other things around.  When we moved from there to the long-since-developed flatlands, I hardly saw any animals that weren't pets or pests. I'm not sure why (perhaps it's that I find animals inscrutable and thus unpredictable) but I'm scared of most animals.  I had bad experiences with dogs because of a number of irresponsible dog owners that would let their large aggressive dogs roam around the neighborhood free to chase and nip at little kids coming home from school.  I've tried to overcome my fears and have had some limited success.  Though I'm not a stereotypical nature girl, I'm environmentalist in my politics.  So in gardening it's important to me to provide habitat.

As for my own habitat, I like edibles.  So my very first focus is on planting fruits, vegetables and herbs.  But where appropriate and possible, I plant native plants.  And some non-natives that act as good companion plants.  When I moved into my present house, the large backyard consisted of 3/4 lawn.  The remaining 1/4 consisted of 4 large raised beds (which were picked clean of vegetation), hybrid tea roses, a couple fruit trees that had not been cared for and two pecan trees. I knew I wanted to significantly change this yard. Although I wasn't truly aware of it at the time, this yard was largely devoid of life. The animals I remember seeing then were Argentine ants (exotic, have no natural predators), aphids, scale, thrips, slugs, snails, what I call "McDonalds birds" because they're so successful in urban environments (the house sparrow), raccoons and possums.  These are all animals that have done quite well in urban and suburban environments in California.

I spent a lot of time researching the fruits I wanted to grow as well as herbs with medicinal and potherb value.  I also worked with a couple fledgling landscape designers to incorporate native plants.  We reduced the lawn size by half and replaced the lawn with Pacific Sod's No-Mow mix, which I'd seen and fallen in love with at Mountain View Cemetery.  The diseased and ill-formed plum and lemon tree were cut down.  The pecan trees which couldn't bear fruit in such a cool environment were cut down, allowing sun to finally reach the raised beds they'd shaded and also reducing any possible allelopath effect they could have on surrounding vegetation.  In went apple, pear, plums, apricots, peaches, citrus, mulberries, feijoa and loquats.  Out came the roses and in went strawberries, native flowering currants, wintergreen, native "wild ginger", fruiting currants, blueberries, brambleberries, native buckwheat, native Erigeron, sweet violets, etc. etc.  And, mostly importantly, because I'm disabled and unable to hire help often, the yard often gets out of hand.  It's not a tidy garden.  So despite initial heavy mulching, there are weeds.  And welcome volunteers such as love-in-a-mist.

The front yard changed from a couple hybrid tea roses, loads of juniper hedges, a large jade plant and a passionflower to native flowering currents, native and non-native grasses, salvias, cornflowers, honeywort, alyssum, California poppies, ageratum, larkspur, love-in-a-mist, native galias, chrysanthemums, native bushmallow, Lavatera bicolor...and a couple roses because I ended up getting over my disdain for them.

I think the first sign of life was sighting a soldier beetle.  Then after about a year of being here, I FINALLY saw a ladybug.  A welcome sight! Then hummingbirds started visiting the salvias and perching on my mulberry tree.  I'd never seen a hummingbird sit still before.  It was wondrous.  Such a tiny jewel of a bird. Fiery skippers became regular visitors to the Erigeron glaucus.  Honeybees regularly worked the borage, joined by yellowfaced bumblebees. For reasons I haven't yet divined, wasps like hanging around the dilapidated park bench I got off Freecycle. They occasionally light on other plants, as I found out when I leaned against one of my potato plants and got a painful sting in the upper arm!

Now, after about 3.5 years of living here, I'm seeing more new visitors.  While clearing overgrown weeds and brush last fall, I spotted what I thought was a snake (yikes!) but turned out to be a California Slender Salamander. I was surprised and happy.  Though I'd like a pond, I don't have one.  I don't even have a bird bath.  Yet I saw something I associate with watery environments.  I started seeing new birds that I still haven't been able to identify.  I spotted a cute stubby grassshopper.  A Northern Checkerspot butterfly. This week kicked it into overdrive with a sighting of two breathtaking visitors on the same day.  One was a butterly I've not yet ID'd.  It was the size of a fiery skipper and keeps its wings open like that, looking like a triangle as it perched.  It was a delicate pale yellow with a pale iridescent blue body.  I gaped it it with my mouth so wide open it threatened to drool.  Over the drift of volunteer borage in my raised bed, I saw a jewel red dragonfly.  Red body, red eyes, red wings.  I'd never seen such a thing in my life.  It was a sight to inspire Lalique.  And again I marveled at seeing such a thing when I'm not particularly close to any of our ailing creeks and a mile away from the San Francisco Bay.

I find myself thinking of investing in guides to local birds and butterflies just so I can keep track of what I'm seeing.  Great herpetophobe that I am, I found myself looking into introducing snakes such as garter snakes into my yard.  I've longed to find room for a pond and work with an acquaintance who's an amphibian expert to see about introducing native frogs. I want to get someone able-bodied to help me build a barn owl box for a little natural rodent control.  Yes, I still leap and scream when I see a snake in the wild. Yes, I'm still afraid the big fearless raccoons that rule the roost in our nocturnal environment.  But I'm happy to see the wildlife and to encourage the return of diversity to our urban/suburban landscape.

The key is getting rid of that lawn monoculture and planting a variety of plants from groundcovers up to tall trees. And even more important is not to be too tidy.  I think the animal kingdom loves the fact that gimpy ol' me cannot possibly keep this place as weed-free and manicured as I aspire to.