Skip to main content

Back to Blogging: Trilliums Under the Steps

 Posting again first time since 2017.  Watershed Plants needs an easy to use blog format. This would work, and what I started in 2009 was it, still doing now. 


Trilliums under the stairs at the Bothell house. Now is the time to transplant some of the bulbs.Its not very hard, I've done it before, it works, so why not?  Because trilliums are so precious, so fragile, and if you pick one it will die for seven years.  No, its if you ever pick one you will kill it forever and never will you ever see such beauty again.  Something like that was the story when I was young and once in a great while I observed an actual trillium in a forest, and was told in no uncertain terms that such a flower was never to be picked.  I can't actually hear one of my parents saying that, and I sure don't remember any trilliums ever blooming in the backyard, though they could have been around somewhere. So maybe it wasn't from my parents or other adults around; it was more like true general knowledge. 

So when I found trilliums coming up under the front steps of a house we moved into in 1994, when our son was age 3, daughter age 11, and I was so busy driving to work and daycare and back and so on that I may not have even noticed the trilliums at first -- but when I did see them, it was just one of those wonderful events that sometimes happen and you just let it be.  Do nothing, and see what will happen.

I did nothing and they kept appearing year after year.  Didn't water them, didn't rake, weed, mulch, plant or dig around, just did nothing and let the dappled shade, the needles and cones from the firs, and the dampish nothern side of the house create the place where trilliums would grow.

Opps, I just remembered.  That porch and steps was not the same when we moved here in 1994.  My husband rebuilt the stairs and added the porch, maybe the trilliums didn't show up until after that. When was that anyway?  


Popular posts from this blog

RAIN GARDENS AND CISTERNS/ Seattle Rebates

News from City of Seattle Rainwise Program Starting in 2010, the City of Seattle will offer rebates to property owners to disconnect roof downspouts from the combined sewer system, and direct that runoff into cisterns or rain gardens. The rebates will be targeted to neighborhoods where downspout disconnection can help reduce combined sewer overflows during big rain storms. These two one-day classes will prepare contractors and design/build professionals to work with owners to locate and size rain gardens or cisterns on their property, and to install those systems so they work well and meet the City's requirements for rebates on construction costs. These classes are required for contractors who want to participate in Seattle's new RainWise rebate program. Rain gardens and cisterns are two of the Low Impact Development methods that are coming into local stormwater codes in many towns around Puget Sound, creating a new business opportunity for landscape, irrigation, plumbing, and ...
Read more

Rain Garden Project

Rain Garden - Modified Dug a hole, not too big, reading thru the Rain Garden Handbook and trying to follow every step. But my space is more of a drainage area on the way to other drainage areas, but still it can be a sort of a rain garden.
Read more

No More Buying Cheap Salmon

Economical shopper that I am, I rarely buy salmon if its over 6.00 a lb, and I haven't asked recently where it comes from, but odds are its raised in a crowded pen on the edge of a body of salt water, mixing with the oceans. My daughter tells me what's wrong with farmed salmon. Not only does it lack much of the nutritional value of wild salmon, the farmed salmon & their diseases are moving from the farms to the open waters, directly threatening the wild species. Read more about it at Save Our Wild Salmon and Why Wild Salmon , a very informative site from Trout Unlimited. So far, I've learned: -- Its good to eat wild salmon if its caught responsibly, encouraging that fishing industry -- Not good to eat farmed salmon of any kind, shouldn't support that industry --There is no more salmon farming in Puget Sound, or anywhere in the US. It was outlawed due to disease in the fish and other factors. --Salmon is farmed on Vancouver Island, and in northern European...
Read more