Pattie Relosky’s Garden Tour
Location: Swissvale, PA
Date: Saturday, July 20th
Time: 10am
Limited space! (12 attendees)
From Pattie:
I have been interested in native plants since the 1980’s, when I lived in Chicago and was involved with prairie restoration. I bought a house there in 1989 and started gardening with mostly natives. I have been gardening on my small city lot in Pittsburgh since the summer of 2015, when I returned to this area (I grew up in Donora) after retiring. I have a wonderful setup for a gardener: part-shade in the front and very sunny in the back. The front is my woodland garden. The back garden dates from 2018. We did a small addition to the house in 2017. We then had Nine-Mile Run Watershed Association install a rain garden in 2018 to take the run-off from the addition, and it has been interesting to watch its evolution since then. The majority of my plants are native–before the garden tour I hope to do an inventory and figure out the actual percentage, for my own information and to share with tour participants. As time goes by I am increasingly interested in creating habitat for insects, including having some areas where I never remove the leaves and leaving cut stems for native bees to nest in. I garden for myself, but I am looking forward to sharing my garden with like-minded people!
