🌱Native Habitat Island

What's it all about?

Restoring native habitat is an idea which environmentalists have been promoting for years.  Our suburban landscape with its exotic trees and fancy flowers is a wasteland for native species which evolved to feed on local berries, leaves and seeds.  Many insects cannot feed on the ornamental cultivar plants in our backyards, and when the insects disappear, so too the birds.  Our neighborhood, and the world at large, faces a massive die-off of native plants and animals, caused in part by people’s drive to convert natural habitat to lawns and gardens.

The solution is to bring back the plants which bring back the insects which bring back towhees and bluejays and flickers.  The native habitat movement, as described in Douglas Tallamy’s book Nature’s Best Hope, hopes to replace millions of manicured lawns with eco-friendly habitat. 

History

The Riveridge Native Plants Island is a small patch of land in the turnaround at the west end of 13th Street.  It was nicely landscaped when the subdivision went in 50 years ago, maintained for a time by the county, then turned over to the city, and it fell into disarray.  It became an eyesore, overgrown with English ivy and invasive Himalayan blackberry briars.

A group of residents obtained a grant from the Watershed Alliance of SW Washington.  They brought in an excavator and razed the island, then dug down to remove stubborn ivy roots, and added 10 cubic yards of rich soil blend.  They replanted with native species to create a habitat amenable to local birds, insects, and pollinators.

The Riveridge Island was planted on October 23rd, 2021 and sports a variety of healthy shrubs, flowers and a large nurse log.  The many volunteers who worked on the Island invite you to drop by. We hope it will become a conversation piece for the neighborhood, a showplace for Riveridge, and eventually a refuge for all manner of native species.