Westwood East
Tuesday, June 4, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
This is an open-house style tour. The garden owners will be at home between 6:00 and 8:00. Stop by in any order you wish.
The gardeners’ stories:
1338 Pinehurst Blvd
We have lived here for 17 years this summer. We moved here from just a couple of miles away. The house was built in 1950 and the landscape plantings added over the years have been typical of the era. The lot is about a third of an acre. We found lots of invasive ground cover such as periwinkle and English ivy (ugh!). Also lots of lily of the valley. Big trees included silver maple, Norway maple, blue spruce (a storm took that several years ago), a black locust that bears no flowers, a mulberry that bears lots of fruit. There are four forsythia bushes and some other ornamental bushes I can’t recall the names of. We have a strong preference for native plants and with few exceptions that is what we have planted. We started with two pawpaws that bear lots of fruit every year. We planted alternate dogwood and a serviceberry and a couple of years ago added elderberries and red osier ogwood. We’ve dabbled in permaculture and like to grow things we can eat but other than vegetables and a peach tree we mostly stick with natives. We have added a few new plants almost every year. I won’t list them all here. Come and see for yourselves.
1334 Richland Ave
Removing all the grass was priority number one when we bought the house in October of 2020. In 2021 I purchased a few plants at the KAWO spring sale. A site visit from Dave Wendling (in which he suggested that I may have taken on more than is reasonable) led to a volunteer opportunity to take over the monthly newsletter from Kim Patrie. A friendship with Kim led to her helping me install a rain garden, which is a super productive and beautiful feature of my backyard—I highly recommend everyone add one. Sure enough, I removed all the lawn, and have been slowly adding native grasses between the forbs. Through my associations with fellow Wild Ones I’ve had the opportunity to keep adding and adding—digging up and accepting overflow from established gardens and gardeners, purchasing from native nurseries, and growing natives from seed every winter using the milk jug method. Thanks to the seasonality of the Michigan climate, it’s never the same garden from one day or one season to the next. I’m so excited to share it with you!
1621 Harvey Ave
I joined the Kalamazoo Area Wild Ones in March of 2009. My son was interested in insect photography and I had very few in my yard. Yet insects were plentiful in the Emma Pitcher Prairie at the Kalamazoo Nature Center. They had native plants and I did not! I’ve planted trees, shrubs, forbs, and grasses over the years. Some grew well while others either didn’t like where they were planted or the deer loved them to death. Everything changed in 2020 when a giant silver maple fell on our house and took out a giant blue spruce in the front yard. We removed two additional silver maples as they were also close to the house. Suddenly I had a sun garden, 10+ years of experience with native plants, and a clean (or so I thought) palette in which to plant. Please stop by to see the results, both good and not so good!