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.
“If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.” -Vincent van Gogh This is the second post in a short series about the importance of plants in the arts. The first post was Plants in Poetry and looked at the various ways plants were used as inspiration, symbolism, morals and as an appreciation of [...]
Plants are beneficial for a lot of reasons such as providing habitat and food for wildlife. However, lest we forget, plants are also important to humans, not just for food and shelter, but for the arts. In the first of a short series of posts I’m going to look at some of the arts in [...]
Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest It seems that any time I talk with somebody about landscaping for wildlife or make a book recommendation, this is the first one I mention. There is simply no better book for this region, and in fact this book contains information useful for nearly every region when it [...]
Over at my blog, The Metropolitan Field Guide, I’ve been running a wildlife plant profile feature for awhile examining native plants and their value to our wildlife. I thought I’d share a roundup of the plants which I’ve profiled so far with all of you here. Broad-leaved Stonecrop While you may not always associate succulents [...]
Just what exactly is in a name of our flora and fauna? Quite a bit as it happens. I’ve long been very interested in the names of things. My first trip outside of the country was to Finland where I bought my first foreign language bird guide. I had a great time looking through the [...]
For anyone with an interest in botany and horticulture, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens in London is like the holy grail. Started in 1759, this garden is now over 250 years old and is full of history, research, conservation, wildlife and a massive collection of plants. The entire garden is now 132 hectares (300 acres) in [...]
As a naturalist there are certain pieces of equipment which are necessary; a pair of binoculars, a couple of fields guides, a notebook for example. However, how many of you would have listed a hand lens as one of those necessities? I never even thought of it until I read Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from [...]
Recently, I attended my third community wildlife habitat tour here in the Puget Sound region. This area is lucky to have a great number of National Wildlife Federation Certified Community Wildlife Habitats including some of the oldest. There are 30 active communities in the Puget Sound, 12 are certified, some registered while others are active [...]
Hedgerows are low-cost, high-impact design elements which can be used along pathways, rail lines, power line easements or roads to create habitat corridors in cities, connecting a network of habitat patches together. Homeowners can coordinate to create long, connected hedgerow corridors to provide somewhere for small mammals, insects, pollinators, spiders, birds and herptiles to move around safely, nest [...]
Planning a garden on a balcony is often a challenging prospect, but using native plants can both help, and cause further frustration. Balconies are a very different environment from the places native plants usually grow. In addition to the usual challenges of balcony gardens such as using containers, reflected heat and sun exposure, the weather [...]
