Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Benjamin Vogt has a 2,000 foot garden on a 10,000 foot lot in Nebraska (zone 5). Roughly 80% of his plants are native to either the Midwest or Great Plains. He is the author of SLEEP, CREEP, LEAP: THE FIRST THREE YEARS OF A NEBRASKA GARDEN (essays) and a forthcoming poetry collection, AFTERIMAGE (SFA Press, 2012). Benjamin’s poetry, essays, and photographs have appeared in several publications, including Crab Orchard Review, ISLE, Orion, Prairie Fire, Sou’wester, The Sun, and Verse Daily. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. He blogs / rants about writing and gardening at The Deep Middle. You can also find him on Facebook, and if you insist, Twitter.
After 500 folks came through my garden on an Audubon tour last Father’s Day, I was prodded to start a native plant garden coaching business. This spring, I had a table at Earth Day and at one of the largest plant sales in the Midwest called Spring Affair—thousands came through each day. At both events [...]
This is the first time my monthly post snuck up on me. Frankly, I blame it on the fact that spring was 2 weeks early, and is now 4 weeks early. I’m hand pollinating what I can reach as I walk the garden—where are the insects who were also absent in last year’s normal spring? [...]
I wrote about this on my blog, but it begs a wider audience, especially since so little of our prairie country is left. This week the Nebraska state senate is, most likely, passing a bill–LB473–that will allow the government to go on to private land and poison prairie dogs, which are being classified as noxious [...]
The 12” of snow we had last weekend has settled into our finally-arrived winter season, and now, perhaps, I will earn my garden time under this weight of cold and white. No perennial is standing, all flat and hidden. The birds peck seeds from the feeder on an elevated, frozen landscape, more in the open [...]
When I was a kid I’d gather Texas horned lizards (horny toads we called them) in Oklahoma, toss them in fluorescent beech pails, and “feed them” sticks and grass. They’d bleed from their eyes, a defense mechanism, and I’d get disinterested and run off to kick over anthills—the preferred food source of the lizards / [...]
Last week I took my cat to the vet and the nice receptionist, who after a newspaper article about moi this summer found out that I gardened, asked me what a gardener does to a garden for winter. I said a gardener does nothing. At a work-related reception [...]
I’m going to start off my semi philosophical / ranty / musing post with two quotes from Richard Manning’s book Grassland: “Our science, our poetry, and our democracy fail because they lack specific information of the plants.” “The culture of plants is the same as the culture of people.” That last one is around a [...]
This week I visited the Platte River Prairie Preserve, a series of linked and semi linked mixed grass and wetland prairies (5,000 acres) near Grand Island, Nebraska being managed and restored by the Nature Conservancy, overseen by Chris Helzer. The area is a prime migration rest stop for millions of waterfowl and other birds, including [...]
Over the Labor Day weekend I visited my parents in Minnesota. They live just west of the Twin Cities, on the northeastern edge of what used to be tallgrass prairie. They built a home on 6 acres—about 2 acres were seeded in shortgrass, and forbs like grey-headed coneflower, monarda, purple prairie clover, zizia, milkweed, and [...]
August is pouring down heat, is thick with humidity, is raining monarchs. On five foot spikes the blooms zigzag, stagger, step up the long ladder of growth, each flower placed in such a way that it might accommodate dozens of butterflies at once. The bright purple [...]
