Welcome To My Forest

My new 'Gold Rush' Dawn Redwood is safely tucked into the sunny edge of the forest. I had to cut down or pull out 50 to 60 sapling trees to make room for one redwood. I picked a spot away from any future small house building and away from any utility lines, but in a prominent enough location that as it grows it will pull you into the forest.

In these parts whenever you make a sunny hole in the forest, the trees will immediately attempt to fill it back in. The forest had already crept back up to the edge of my clearing. Many of the small trees were already ten plus feet high.

Now a big chunk of them are gone. At least for now. They will make every effort to come back. You can see the top of the redwood tree poking up on the right. I planted it down slope a ways.

The gift of the redwood was just an incentive to get started on something that was already in my mind. Now that the larger front garden has become a garden, I can contemplate expansion. I want to run a path from the existing garden all the way around the back hillside to the stream and forest on the opposite side of the driveway and cozy cabin. I don't plan to plant much at this point. Yea that will work out just fine. Mainly it is to have a nice path through a tidied and edited forest and better access to all the native plants down there.

The new path extension will run some where below the redwood tree. All the editing was going to happen with or without the redwood tree.

Once I make a nice path and tidy up the mess, there won't be so much incentive to relocate interesting native plants that live deep in the forest. The path wasn't going there so I fetched some of what I think to be Speckled Wood Lilies, Clintonia umbellulata for the garden.

I couldn't help myself. I moved a Showy Orchis.

The Green Fringed Orchid needed company. My garden is going to be quite the botanical treasure trove.

I noticed something else interesting today. One of the cold hardy camellias was sprouting from the base. It's alive. Then I went and looked. All six of the cold hardy camellias are sending up new growth. I weeded around all of them to get them a bit more light. Good thing I don't have the kind of garden where dead twigs have to be pulled. I just let things rot in place, so I never bothered to remove them.

It's still a failed experiment though. I'll let them be, but what good is a plant that is going to freeze to the ground every four years and never reach blooming size? Maybe they will surprise me.

Did you notice the big leaved plant in the pictures of the 'Gold Rush' Dawn Redwood? I didn't cut down all the sapling trees. I knew this was a magnolia tree. I know where the parent tree is. After much searching and being nearly lead astray by Magnolia macrophylla, which would have been an extreme rarity up here, it was ID'd as Magnolia fraseri.

I left four of them There is another closer to the cabin and I am bound to find more when I tidy and edit the forest along my new path. My list of winter projects has begun.