Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Debbie Roberts is a landscape designer, garden coach, freelance writer, educator and Accredited Organic Land Care Professional who gardens on a woodland acre in southwestern Connecticut (zone 6). Debbie’s blog A Garden of Possibilities features plant profiles, insights on garden design, book reviews and musings on her efforts to continue to create a wildlife-friendly garden that the deer will not feast on. Debbie is also a member of a select group of international garden and landscape designers, The Garden Designers Roundtable, who blog monthly about various garden design topics. Follow Debbie on Twitter, @deb_roberts.
On a bright, sunny Saturday morning in April, I had the privilege of touring the garden that Sara Stein chronicles in the book, Noah’s Garden: Restoring The Ecology Of Our Own Back Yards. I was excited to see the garden that shaped the way many of us on Team NPWG view gardening and the role [...]
An essential component of creating a wildlife-friendly garden is how you maintain your garden, regardless of whether your plants are native or non-native. Most wildlife gardeners know not to use chemicals in their gardens, to employ a light hand during fall clean up, and to remove invasive plants. But many don’t consider the impact that [...]
Recently, I attended a symposium where current research findings on the link between Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) and Lyme disease were presented. Over the past few years we’ve learned that this highly invasive non-native shrub is not only impacting our regional ecosystems, it’s also indirectly affecting our public health. While Japanese barberry is considered invasive [...]
One of the most difficult aspects of creating a native plant wildlife garden can be finding the actual plants. It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing — will mainstream nurseries carry native plants before there’s a sustained call for them? Fellow NPWG team member Ginny Stibolt recently wrote about that issue in her post on the importance of supporting the [...]
One of the most challenging aspect of designing a wildlife garden is figuring out sequence of bloom, always having something blooming in your garden, not only for color and interest but also to provide food sources for local wildlife. While trees and shrubs are the backbone of any garden, those that flower do so for [...]
Winter is one of my favorite seasons in the garden. The garden has been put to bed and about all I can do is sit back and enjoy my garden. I spend a lot of time during the winter observing my garden and reflecting on what worked and what didn’t. Winter is for planning and [...]
Recent events have shown us how powerful the effects of water can be after a major storm. While I’m certainly not advocating that a few well-placed bioswales or rain gardens could have saved the NY and NJ metro areas from Hurricane Sandy, we do need to start talking more seriously about managing storm water on many levels, including in [...]
The inspiration for this post about looking back and giving advice to my beginning native plant and wildlife gardener self comes from an article entitled ‘To my 15-year-old self’: Things I Wish I’d Known, written in recognition of the International Day of the Girl. In the article, well-known women look back and give advice to their 15-year-old [...]
It’s that time of the year again…time to do fall clean up and get your garden ready for the winter. But when it comes to fall clean up in a wildlife-friendly garden, what you don’t do is as important as the fall chores you actually do perform. One of my favorite parts about maintaining a [...]
Like most gardeners, my garden is composed of some plants that I inherited when I bought my home, others that I bought before I really knew much about plants and still others that I purchased in my ongoing efforts to create a wildlife garden. And like many native plant lovers, my garden is a mix [...]
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