This isn’t a traditional garden picture but March in the Pacific Northwest is a challenging time everyone who loves the outdoors. It’s cold and damp 90% of the time with a few brief stretches of sunny weather that give us all spring fever but send pollen counts into the double digits. Instead of a photographing the wet and weedy mess of a garden we have today I thought I’d post one last shot from our front yard before the excavator got to work digging out stumps and moving rocks boulders. This photo was taken about 10 months after the Public Utilities District cut down our large cedar trees and shows how aggressively the native ferns and salal expanded with additional light, water and space to grow.
Posted as part of Alisa’s weekly Travel Theme: Garden.
Northwest Frame of Mind 
This could be our own backyard Lisa. Good luck with your garden and new landscaping as it begins to take form,
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Thanks Bruce, I’m guessing a lot of folks in our corner of the world can relate to this kind of garden space. 🙂
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Those were some giant cedars! Love how the various textures are so vibrant in this photo.
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Thanks Nancy! They were huge and we didn’t know until they came down that the centers were starting to rot..
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they were big…that is for sure
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Yes they were. At least now we don’t have to worry about them falling on our house!
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which is a very good thing
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Looks the same here, except the stumps cut down here are out back in the woods, and were dead trees ready to fall down.
The complex owners have tilled up the back strip for gardens for us again and some planting is is already going on.
Have a good week coming up and that is a great shot.
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Thanks Ruth and it’s nice to hear your complex owners support gardening. 🙂 I hope you have a good week as well.
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Great photo of the rings left from the magnificent cedar. Here we use the inside as a planter if its not stump ground. Everything looks so green and vibrant !
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The insides would have made great planters if we had left them in place. 🙂
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Great shot. It looks like huge old trees….
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Thanks Amy, they were pretty big.
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I love the free-form shape of the stump in the foreground, and all that GREEN! Do you miss the stumps? I think I would have left that one there for a planter … it’s gorgeous!
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I was tempted to leave one but unfortunately the ground was a solid mass of roots with more 10 stumps in the front yard. We couldn’t dig down far enough plant anything new with them in the way and if one came out they all had to move… The green was pretty though!
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Sitting here on the north side of this little mountain listening to the rain and my daughter in Seattle grudgingly considering buying an umbrella.
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Today I gave up on the umbrella and went for a baseball hat and raincoat with the hood up. It’s still raining…
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Nature abhors a vacuum – I love how the new growth is already filling in the stump!
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I liked that part too! I actually transplanted some of the salal into our backyard. Hopefully I can move it back to the front later in the season. 🙂
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NICE 😀 😀
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Thank you!
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Interesting they have grown so fast. As long as the growth is outdoors, not indoors. 🙂
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Good point. 🙂
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Lovely old trees. It’s amazing how quickly nature takes over! I look forward to seeing how the landscaping takes shape this year.
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Thanks Jude, I can’t wait for the sun to come out and give our new plants the chance to spread and grow.
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I love that stump picture.
–Bob
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Thanks Bob. 🙂 Lisa
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Wow, that’s a huge tree stump. Beautiful.
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Thanks Milka, it was a huge tree and a lot of work to get the stump out of the ground!
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I was counting the rings, Lisa 🙂 Lovely shot 🙂
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Thanks Jo! I believe they were around 70 years old maybe a little younger. Our neighbor grew up on the land when it was a family dairy farm and he told us there were only few trees on the property when he was little because the main industry in town was a cedar shingle mill.
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Doesn’t seem much of a reward for them after surviving all those years, Lisa. But I suppose it’s a clean ending!
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You captured the grain of the cedar real well. Nice photo !!!!
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Thank you. :). I wanted one last photo before they were completely gone.
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It’s a tough time for gardening here as well. We’ve had sun for the last week, but today the snow has returned… Iæve planted some stuff inside and I’ll move the plants out on the balcony as soon as the temperatures allow it.
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Oh, sorry to hear about your late snow. 😦
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I think I’ve counted 39 rings in that stump.
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You’ve got sharp eyes. 🙂 The house was built in the mid 1960’s so the tree could definitely be around 40 years old.
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