I went to a native plants sale at a local nature center the other week and came home with a highbush blueberry, which now lives in my backyard. It's the little guy on the right. Blueberry is a really excellent native plant--they're a host plant for many species of caterpillars, the fruits are edible by both birds and people, and it has wonderful fall color. Highbushes can make berries with just a single plant, but they'll make more and bigger ones if they can cross-pollinate. There are other people in the neighborhood who have them, but I think we'll try to get a second one eventually (this one was the last one left when we bought it). It should get pretty tall, six feet or more, which is why I wanted to post a picture of it now, when it's just a little guy.
The slightly taller plant on the left is a couple of summersweet suckers that came from the other side of the redcedar you can see in the background, like growing between the redcedar and the fence. I have no idea how that bush is planning to grow crammed down in there in complete shade. We'd rather have one further out in the yard, so we dug up two of the suckers and made an attempt to transplant them. We'll see how it goes! We had a summersweet at our old house and it was a really lovely plant.
Out of frame to the left of this picture is my vegetable garden, which grew one million pounds of zucchini this year. I'm eventually hoping to put a pollinator garden in this area, to attract plenty of friends to pollinate my veggies, and this is my head-start on it.
