Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Kelly Brenner writes The Metropolitan Field Guide, a blog for ideas, thoughts and resources for the design of urban wildlife habitat. She earned a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon. Kelly has studied and watched wildlife from a very young age in the great Pacific Northwest and from that has nurtured her passion for creating, discovering and encouraging habitat development in the urban environment. In addition to the blog, The Metropolitan Field Guide can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Kelly also manages a community blog called Seattle Urban Wildlife Experiences. For fun, she enjoys traveling and taking photographs which can be found online at Kelly Brenner Photography.
Every city has parks, however not all parks are created equal. Many are used primarily for recreation, others for dogs, but some are devoted to nature. Seattle is lucky to have a lot of parks, over 400 of them (counting open spaces) and the largest is over 500 acres. Following are five of my favorites [...]
Finding native plants can be hard work. Here in Seattle, there are a handful of nurseries which carry a few odd native plants. There are native plant nurseries, but nearly all are by appointment or wholesale only. The awesome Washington Native Plant Society has plant sales, but they’re not very often. So if you’ve been [...]
If you are looking for a good book, one that will completely alter the way you view plants, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz will fit the bill. You’ll never look at, or touch a plant without thinking about how they sense the world, including you, again. The [...]
Perhaps you live in the city, or you’re visiting for a conference, family or vacation. We’re all nature fiends here and we need our nature fix. Even those who are not self declared nature fiends need their nature fix, they just aren’t aware of it. Worry not, it’s not as hard as you might think to find [...]
The beautiful Strahov Monastery, which sits on a hill overlooking the city of Prague, was one of my favorite stops when I visited a couple of years ago. While the two ornate libraries are the main attractions (and rightly so, they’re absolutely gorgeous) there is a single bookcase which contains some fascinating books for plant-lovers and the curious. It’s [...]
When I was studying Landscape Architecture at university, I had a professor who was infamous for several sayings. One of the most prolific of his sayings, which any student could nearly be guaranteed to hear during a design review, was ‘the landscape as time’, or more briefly, ‘landscape time’. He spent four years drilling this [...]
Here in Seattle we had a very long and very dry summer. It seemed that fall would never arrive as we enjoyed 70 degree days into October. However, the seasons will not be stopped and fall came upon us nearly overnight as the sunny, warm days gave way to cool, clouds and rain. As we [...]
My family recently started house hunting. We’ve been apartment dwellers for years, but the situation is right for us to purchase a home since, among other reasons, we’re planning on staying in Seattle for a few years. Plus we’re tired of our rent going up every year. Over the last few months I’ve discovered how [...]
I confess, I’ve never been very good with plants. This despite having a fair grasp on their workings; having taken horticulture and plant classes while getting my Landscape Architecture degree. I figure this just means I have to work harder at keeping them alive. Nearly three years ago now, we moved to an apartment in [...]
For the last post in my series of plants in the arts, we’re going to look at the importance of plants in children’s art. The rest of the series included various arts starting with Plants in Poetry, then looking at visual arts with Plants in Paintings:: Vincent van Gogh and Plants in Design. I have a [...]
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