From Bare to Beautiful: Local Couple Wins Beautification Award for Native Garden Transformation
From City of The Dalles:
By Amie Ell
The Dalles, Ore., April 8, 2025 — Linda & Kenny said, “We bought this house at the beginning of the pandemic, and the front yard landscape was pretty bare other than a lot of candytuft and some typical landscaping bushes and trees at the top.
Due to this, the land was slowly eroded due to the significant slope. Inspired by the documentary, The Biggest Little Farm, our goal when we bought this house was to plant a lot of native flowers and shrubs all over our property, not only to stabilize the slopes and reduce erosion, but to create a more balanced and healthier ecosystem and a habitat for butterflies, hummingbirds, bees, and birds.
Using plant donations from friends and native plants from Humble Roots in Mosier, we have been adding more plants every year, and the previous brown landscape is gradually transforming into a near rainbow of colors.
We still have a long way to go as we learn what grows well in which area. One of the biggest challenges of the front yard is that the growing environment ranges from very shady due to the towering oaks to areas with full sun exposure, which, as we all know, can be very intense in the summer. The other challenge with working with native plants is that they often take longer to establish themselves so it can take years to really see our hard work pay off. However, once established, these plants are more drought-tolerant and self-sustaining.
I just finished reading Bicycling with the Butterflies by Sara Dykman, which details her more than 10,000-mile journey from Mexico to Canada along the flight of the Monarch Butterflies. In her book she describes the ways that Monarch Butterflies are threatened by many of the ways we, as humans, live and how this threatens our own future food and ecosystem, However, Sara Dykman’s story also highlighted signs of hope and change as she visited school and large city gardens filled with native milkweed and witnessed people who took out their grass lawns and allowed the beauty and chaos of natural wildflower gardens to take over.
I hope that in the next 5-10 years our yard will become one of these little patches of hope as a beautiful, diverse, drought-tolerant sanctuary. We are honored to receive this Beautification Award. Thank you.”
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