Stoker's garden

Drought tolerant garden with all kinds of Californian natives in Cottonwood.

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Background story

Several years ago the National Geographic Magazine printed a special monthly issue on Water.  That’s when I became aware of the fact that in the future, fresh water was going to become one of earth’s most precious resources and commodities.  And sure enough, places like Las Vegas are paying their citizens to transform their front and backyards to drought tolerant landscapes and Idaho has been in a drought for several years now.  This is just to name of few of the water related instances that keep cropping up in this present day and age.

So after reading that article, I decided that if and when I ever had a garden, I would get drought tolerant plants.  Two months after moving into our home in the North State, not really knowing anything about planting plants outside, Terry and I took an Adult Education class of Landscaping with Native Plants and another of Landscaping with Herbs taught by the same instructor.  The little one evening class had a field trip – at the instructors house for both classes. 

We bought our home in July 2002 and in September I planted my first 50 plants and I’ve been loving it ever since.  Terry just looks at me in surprise at my love for gardening and shakes his head with a smile but I just consider it a natural progression of my love of rehabilitating wildlife.  We have to have a place for the animals to go back into.  If they don’t have an environment suitable for their survival, we might as well not even bother taking care of them and trying to release them back into the wild.  So I consider our little plot of land a vital environment for many of our critters.

That first year they were all pretty much just little sticks in the ground and before adding the 6 layers of newspapers as our weed cloth and adding  mulch on top of that, we had to put little squares around them to even find them among the weeds they were planted among.  I had to stand guard over them when Terry mowed the weeds.  Sometimes I would have to lift up the plants to keep Terry from accidentally mowing them.  He did mow over one Russian Sage and I was furious but it grew back just fine.  They’re a lot hardier than I ever believed they could be. 

When I was first planting the plants, my neighbor would say “planting your weeds, huh?”  Now she gets to look out at the garden from her kitchen window.    The third year many of them were in the ground I looked out the dining room window on a beautiful Spring day and yelled out to Terry “I can see the plants!”  The garden is now about 7 ½ years old and every year I look out our window in amazement at how the plants have grown.

So it’s been a wonderful journey discovering the joy of gardening, meeting my best friend at a plant sale, what plants will make it and what won’t and I look forward to seeing everything grow and prosper and learning new things about plants as time goes by.  I look particularly forward to meeting all the great people that are Gardeners.