Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
A plant ecologist who has studied grizzly bear habitat, wildfire behavior, and sagebrush communities, Susan J. Tweit grew up rescuing wildflowers from development sites and picking up roadkill to stash in the freezer for study. After "evolving" into an award-winning writer, speaker, and teacher, Tweit began collaborating with her husband, sculptor Richard Cabe, to design "living landscapes" that restore our connection to nature in our everyday landscapes, from industrial areas to city parks and private gardens. She writes for magazines from Audubon to Popular Mechanics, and is the "Whole Life" columnist for Zone 4 Magazine . Follow her search for a whole and mindful life on her blog, Walking Nature Home, and check out her books and landscape restoration work on her website.
In February, a principal with a small family foundation that provides seed funding for conservation issues approached me with an idea. She had been invited to join the board of The National Audubon Society, the nation’s oldest conservation group focusing on birds. She proposed to revive the wildscaping project she had begun for Audubon Colorado [...]
With much of the Southwestern US, including the valley where I live, in drought–a historic, multi-year, drought showing no signs of breaking–I’ve been thinking about lawns. Americans are in love with our turf grass monocultures, so much so that we cultivate an estimated 46 million acres of lawn around our homes, schools, and parks–an area [...]
Winter’s long days and short nights, when my garden is resting, are my contemplative time. Lately, I’ve been contemplating words and how they affect what we believe in and do. (I’m a writer trained as a plant biologist, which makes me fluent in two languages, English and Science.) Words are powerful abstractions. They can [...]
“How can I attract wildlife to my yard?” asked an attendee after one of my recent talks. My answer: “Cultivate untidyness.” Untidiness does not mean littering your yard with old tires or trash, or letting invasive weeds take over; it means letting at least some of it remain natural– “messy” to some eyes. The compunction [...]
Give yourself and your wildlife garden a present that costs nothing this holiday season: join the Citizen Science movement. Your observations can provide crucial data for scientists studying the big questions that affect our gardens and our planet. In the doing, you’ll be joining an online community of like-minded folks you can trade information with. [...]
“Do you want to design a wildscape at a power plant?” asked Connie Holsinger, a board member for Audubon Colorado. “Xcel Energy asked us to add wildlife habitat to Cherokee Generating Station. It’s on the bluffs above the Platte River in industrial northwest Denver.” It was 2005, and I had just just won an award [...]
Several years ago, my editors at Audubon Magazine assigned me to write a story on native bees that took me to California to interview Professor Gordon Frankie, an expert on urban bee populations at the University of California-Berkeley. Dr. Frankie had become interested in studying urban bees after he was asked to identify bees from a census [...]
About eight years ago, not long after my Rocky Mountain Garden Survival Guide was published, I got a call from a board member of Audubon Colorado, the state chapter of The National Audubon Society. She was spearheading an effort to produce a book about “wildscaping,” landscaping for wildlife. She had hired a writer, but wasn’t [...]
As advocates of gardens based on native plants and wildlife habitat, as gardeners passionate about restoring nature nearby, we’re not in the mainstream. So it’s critical to stop now and then, and remember the heart of why we do what we do. Especially in these times when global climate change is already causing tremendous instability [...]
Here in the south-central Rocky Mountains, we’re officially in “severe” drought. In the first six months of this year, we’ve racked up a whopping 2.5 inches of precipitation, less than half of normal. An inch and a half of that came in a ten-day period in May after highs in the 80s and howling winds [...]
