Nope, the title is not a typo. Western Washington has the nickname Pacific North-Wet since we get a fair amount of rainfall in fall and winter. Not the kind of deluges you see on the East Coast where the heavens open and everything is soaked through in moments. Just a steady light rain, where you can keep your car windshield wipers on an “intermittent” setting for hours. Right now, we are still in the tail end of a second “atmospheric river” off the Pacific Ocean which has caused extreme flooding in many places. Around where we live, we are high enough that we don’t see much of any high water, but elsewhere we have made the national and international news with our floods! Hubby told me that he even saw a story on the Japanese NHK channel about our flooding (see my previous post here).

This afternoon, Hubby needed to take his car in for an oil change, and while we waited we took a walk down the road to a coffee shop so he could get coffee and something to eat. I told him that the walk back to the dealer would take a lot longer, since I had seen a myriad of photographic subjects that caught my eye, from the second we stepped off the dealer’s property.

By the side of the road, we saw a creek flowing, obviously higher than normal with all the rain.

Farther along, we saw parts of the Bellevue drainage system below-grade.

Can you say GREEN?!!

Inboard of the sidewalk was a retaining wall for a business area along the street, and it was planted with little trees. They were colorful. They even went to the trouble of adding some texture to the plain concrete wall.

The planting strip alongside the road was also quite colorful, and the businesses or the city planted interesting-looking bushes and ornamental grasses, and used fallen leaves as mulch, making a pleasant contrast in color and texture. Readers are welcome to chime in with the names of the plants!

I love ornamental grasses, and have some planted in my backyard.

Farther along was a tiny “pocket park” with a little creek, big rocks, and plantings.

Here’s what I love most about our area. Even things which aren’t green in themselves get covered by green things, if they sit out long enough.

This tree is on the dealer’s property. See the rocks in the background?

It doesn’t take much to attract mosses and lichens to the surface of big rocks. And I’ll just bet there are tiny organisms among the green mosses.

In that same little rock garden, I spotted some tiny, brightly-colored fungi. I can’t recall ever seeing this before. Does anyone know what they are?

Once we got back, we stayed outside to look at some cars, and I noticed some big concrete planters.

One tiny little white star of a flower.

Welcome to Autumn in the Pacific North-Wet!