For the sake of maintaining your sanity and general mental order, I hope that you do not, like me, belong to every mailing list in the Portland metro area. If this is the case, though, and you are the recipient of umpteen regular emails and publications informing you of various community events, you may have noticed that there is a movement afoot in Portland and the surrounding areas to make our urban environments more compatible with wildlife. I have to admit that when I first came here, this idea sounded a bit strange. Sure, I could see how great it would be to have a clean city with nice parks, and for the Willamette to stay clean as it flowed through downtown Portland. But the idea of setting aside “green spaces” and planting “naturescapes” seemed foreign, and seemed to conjure up ridiculous images of elk grazing the parking strips of Southeast Portland, the elusive northern flying squirrel gliding from rooftop to treetop in the dark of the night, the golden-mantled ground squirrel… well you get the idea.

Then I had an awakening. A long, slow, mildewy awakening. In the course of a year spent planting trees and standing up to my ankles in muck while the weather sometimes seesawed between downpours and sleet, I came to understand the value of native plants and small greenspaces in the city. I saw firsthand some of the benefits to water quality, even of small streams and backwaters, and to wildlife, if you consider birds and bees “wildlife,” and I think we all should consider them so.

One of the fringe benefits of my above-mentioned AmeriCorps service also turned out to be free native plants. Understandably, the offer of free plants to take home and stick in the ground angered some of my co-workers at the end of a cold wet day spent planting those same plants. Eventually, though, I grew delirious enough to accept some of these offers, and managed to take a few elderberries, a couple of cedars, and one native alder home without my co-workers noticing. I even managed to muster the will to plant them one Saturday.

To my utter amazement, every one of these plants grew like weeds. Within six months, one of my elderberries, having already displayed huge white clusters of flowers and grown 7 feet in one season, was swaying with the weight of branch tips covered with tiny blue berries. A few of these were eaten by my roommates and I during moments of abject hunger, but most of them were voraciously downed by a flock of beautiful red-brown birds that visited the plant every day until the berries were gone. These birds turned out be cedar waxwings, a native bird. That was it – I was hooked. One of my roommates and I planted the entire yard with plants we got either for free or for 50 cents a piece from the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District (their site has a good conservation library and a naturescaping site). Virtually all of them took off and grew like mad (until we moved out of the house and the landlord completely re-landscaped, tearing all of them out and replacing them with soul-sucking Arbor vitae, but that’s another story).

When my wife and I bought our first house a couple of years ago, one of my criteria was to have a respectable sized yard that was something of a blank slate. We found such a house, and I jumped into naturescaping with renewed gusto (and a much more mature understanding of where one should and should not place a Ponderosa pine that could eventually grow 200 feet tall and weigh who knows how many tons).

Among the many helpful community and government resources, I found several awesome retail operations. First and foremost among these is Bosky Dell Nursery in West Linn. Incredibly knowledgeable and helpful, these folks also have a selection of plants that I find mind-boggling. I also found a respectable selection of natives on the sprawling grounds of Portland Nursery. Finally, I discovered a company called PlantNative that specializes in the selling of native plants and the installation of naturescapes that sold me several species I saw nowhere else (most notable among these was the mountain huckleberry, which are surviving but not yet thriving in the harsh climate of my side yard).

Putting all of these resources together, I managed to put together a respectable area of plants that my wife, with unending surprise, finds also looks pretty nice. This summer, as I stood holding my two-month old daughter among the plants that have already grown beyond my height in two years, I noticed one big green katydid, the likes of which I had never seen in Portland, clinging to the side of one of my vine maples. So there you have it – wildlife habitat, the urban way.

----------

In addition to the benefits he has already witnessed it provide to native insects and birds, Chris Stockner’s naturescape provides excellent summer resting grounds for his family’s cats.