Day 171: My thicket.

Just got back from the garden design module of my Sustainable Gardening course. I have a 200 sqft space to work within and I think I'm going to focus on my thicket.

I have this bramble-y mess just outside my dining room window. It faces east, so it gets the morning sun. It's mostly blackberry disaster, with diseased bitter cherry trees, salal, oregon grape and clusters of oceanspray. The previous owners tried underplanting it with perrenials but they chose the wrong plants for the conditions and pretty much everything died. The birds love this space to play and pick and forage, and the view from both the dining room and our living room windows is perfect for watching them.

My plan is to remove all the blackberry and the diseased cherry. In its place I'll plant native twiggy dogwood with its bright red stems and pinky-orange leaves in fall, native mock orange with deliciously fragrant white blooms in June, indian-plum with early white dangley flowers that fruit into teeny tiny bluish-black plums. I'm on the fence about native saskatoons and red-currant, and the bright yellow, early blooming forsythia (which isn't native). There will still be some cherry, which displays the palest pink blooms in the spring. And underneath it all I'll naturalize some bulbs for that hit of early colour before the foliage appears.

The point is, I'm going for a full-on, could be found in the forest thicket, that will please the birds and blend in fairly seemlessly. I"m thinking of having a secret sitting spot in the middle, or a laying down and looking at the sky while birds flit all around me and children cannot find me spot.

But, that will be a surprise.