Imagine this- what would your neighborhood look like and feel like if everyone started to think of their yard as habitat and not just decoration? Think of the birds, the wildflowers, the lizards and butterflies... imagine how much we could transform our neighborhoods and turn them into parks. Instead of leaving to seek nature in the dwindling open spaces, we could look out our windows and delight in the diversity of animals and plants that we have welcomed into our homes.
That is our mission. That is our dream. We are converting our yard into a backyard/frontyard park and bringing nature into our home.
I am Brooke... a self proclaimed nerd and master of none, but a tinker of all trades. My background is as a biologist with my overly advanced degree in Evolutionary Biology. I am a zealot for wildflowers and this is my grand experiment.
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| I am always my most happy when I am outside. I used to race bikes professionally and one of my favorite parts was training in the spring with the wildflower displays. |
My husband and I bought this house in Feb of 2013 and it had a very neat and tidy yard with a lush irrigated lawn and surrounding shrubs nestled in wood chips. The house had been remodeled to fit into the mould of the average consumer... nice (water intensive) yard, granite counters, coffee colored walls, crown moulding and an "elegant" (?) black front door.
We LOVE our house. Every day we wake up overtly proclaiming how lucky we are and reveling in every moment... but it has been fun to give the house our stamp and convert it to be more "us". We are decidedly not average in our taste and the lipstick on the house has been slowly changing to reflect our personalities more and more. Our walls are now shades of yellow, we have wood slabs for shelves and a bookcase, a lichen covered oak tree branch as a lamp and a planned down oak branch on the wall as a coat rack. We have an elephant vertebrae from the 1970's that I inherited from my great aunt and collections of odd things from various parts of our lives. We painted our front door a shocking shade of orange to match those of the poppies that grow in the hills- screaming to the world that we welcome them in. And we have a Buddha head who wears a tiara.
See, I am a stay at home mother with twin toddlers (highlight of our lives!) who were born in May of 2012 and I cannot sit still. We do not have a TV and I don't read as much as I would like- so any moments of free time or (more importantly) energy are devoted to "projects". My power tools are some of my prize possessions and I love having things to work toward and things to learn. I love to build, I love to create, I love to learn, I love to explore. This is my latest big project and one of my friends encouraged me to blog and share my experience. So here goes! Our story.
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| Me with our daughter: Wren |
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| Caspar with our son: Richard |
When I was a young girl, my aunt tossed a packet of wildflower seeds (not native) on the side yard of her house and I was mesmerized by how beautiful her wildflower garden was. I grew up in southern California in the midst of a concrete jungle, the only open space being lawns and beach. I had not see the hills alive with wildflowers until I was much older, but my soul screamed for nature. This small wildflower garden was a marvel to me and I have always dreamed of having a home where I could do the same. When I got to college in Berkeley and took field biology classes, my jaw would drop at how the hills presented the same garden on a grand scale! The native wildflowers were even more magical than any of the ones that my aunt had planted.
Caspar (my husband) and I rented a tear-down hovel in Palo Alto before moving here and it was the first time in my 35 years that I ever lived in a place where I could dig in the dirt and garden. We had a vegetable garden, wine barrels over-flowing with flowers and on the side yard, I ripped out lots of ivy to plant my wildflower garden. The place we rented was best described as "funky" and more appropriately described as a bit of a $@*% hole, but we loved it immensely. As the wildflower garden really started to take off and become spectacular, however, I ran into problems with my pregnancy and was placed on bed rest, unable to even walk outside to see my flowers. People took pictures for me and brought me bouquets of poppies, baby blue eyes and flax. I missed the most spectacular, but even as the summer wore on and we brought our babies into the world- I loved every transformation of that tiny wild garden.
When the owner of the house sold it and we had to move, we were beyond lucky to land here. We live in Redwood City and our back yard butts up to a 40 acre park where deer and occasional mountain lions live. The oak trees bring in birds and we have already found three species of salamander, two species of lizards, a gopher snake in addition to wood rats, moles, raccoons and a plague of squirrels.
My grand dream of a wildflower garden started with our hillside- I raked up the tons of wood chips, pulled out the newly planted shrubs that were destined to be rat habitat and did my best to solarize the hill and kill weeds (placed black plastic down for two months). I then put out some landscape cloth for erosion control and planted 43 different species of native wildflowers and grasses. It is truly a grand experiment to see what will do well in the mottled shade/sun and what will establish to stabilize the hill. I know to expect that some species will dominate and many will disappear.
We had not planned to take on the front yard for a few years, as it was a big project and we saw no hurry. Then the rains of October didn't come. The rains of November didn't come. The rains of December didn't come. January was looking dry and talk was of the worst drought on record. I had been irrigating the back hillside to try and establish my seedlings and was watching the blue skies and sunny weather with a dark foreboding of what it would mean in the months to come. Drought. Water rationing. Dying hillsides and stressed wildlife.
We made a decision. We didn't have to do the whole front yard all at once. We could do the conversion to a native garden in stages as budget and time permit. This year, we could take out the lawn and start our meadow so that we will stop wasting water and give the neighbors a chance to start thinking as we were: lawns are going to die this year. Lawns will be ripped out. It is our hope that instead of just giving up and putting in fake lawns (as are common in our neighborhood- sigh) that they will choose to think of their yards as habitat too.
We have started and Phase I is now complete. We have a bigger vision for the yard but are starting by making a meadow as our grand experiment for the front lawn- we have posted a sign to inform our neighbors what we are doing and hopefully pique their interest in doing the same or similar. There are SO many wonderful plants that do more than decorate: ones that only sip the tiniest of water and bring hummingbirds flocking. Ones that are hosts for butterflies and others that put on different dramatic displays throughout the year from greenery to flowers to beautiful fall colors. All natives. Better yet- those natives host insect communities that then feed birds, lizards and other amphibians. There is far more going on in a native garden than simply meets the eye. Many of these plants can look beautiful wild and free and many can be pruned, shaped and disciplined to fit into the mould of the most disciplined of formal gardens. We want people to put California Natives on their radar and figured this was the best time to do it!
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