Designing a Mixed Garden for Pollinators, Native Plants, Edibles, and Year-Round Color
A garden that’s always changing
People often say, “I swear something’s different every time I come here.” And they’re not wrong.
Things keep growing, shifting, blooming. Paths change, beds expand, more grass gets ripped out. One season a space is full of grasses, the next it’s overflowing with flowers and bees.
The garden never looks quite the same twice.
From overgrown pasture to living landscape
But here’s the funny thing: this place didn’t always look like a garden at all.
When we first moved here, there were brambles taller than us, overgrown trees, rough old pasture, and more invasive plants than we knew what to do with. It wasn’t a blank slate — more like years of untangling.
Slowly, bit by bit, we started shaping it into something more intentional. Something that could hold habitat, food, beauty, and people all at once.
Opening the garden to the public was a huge step for us because this space has never been about perfection.
It’s been about slow transformation. Or as Emily’s brother Ryan likes to call it: Radical Patience.
There’s no shortcut to building a garden like this. Just years of planting, editing, observing, composting, experimenting, and learning what actually wants to thrive here.
Pssst… that’s still happening.
Some years it feels like we own the farm, and some years the farm owns us. Being a two-person team that doesn't use sprays or pesticides, is a lot of physical work. But it’s worth it.
Radical patience in the garden
This is a working nursery and an evolving garden. You’ll see established spaces, experimental areas, young plants going in, old plants getting moved, and corners we’re still figuring out.
As a habitat space, you’ll also notice stick piles, birds, butterflies, bees… and yes, some weeds. That’s part of it.
Time in the garden is a little bit magic.
What a working Oregon garden looks like
One of the things we hear all the time when people visit is: “Oh, I didn’t know that was native.” We love that moment because it opens the door to a bigger conversation about what this garden actually is.
Our nursery is fully dedicated to Oregon native plants. That’s the heart of what we grow and sell. But the gardens themselves are intentionally mixed.
Native plant nursery vs. mixed garden
Early on, we thought we wanted to grow everything — herbs, berries, pollinator plants, natives. And honestly, we do love all of those things. But running two businesses while raising two small kids taught us pretty quickly that we needed focus.
So we decided the nursery would specialize in what we felt most passionate about: Oregon native plants.
The gardens became something different. A place where all the things we love about plants could live together.
Native plants blend alongside herbs and edible gardens. Drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants grow near pollinator beds. Fruit trees, habitat patches, experimental plantings, and ornamental borders all overlap and support each other.
Because in real ecosystems, diversity matters.
We plant for bloom succession so pollinators have food throughout the seasons — not just one big flush of flowers. Some areas are planted densely with natives so bees can move efficiently between plants without traveling far.
