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.
Last summer, my late husband Richard and I were preparing for a week-long stay at The Nature Conservancy’s Carpenter Ranch in northwestern Colorado, where thanks to the support of the Terra Foundation, we had a working residency designing a sculptural interpretive garden. Betsy Blakeslee, the ranch’s facilities manager, emailed before we left to ask if [...]
Sometime last spring, my neighbor began feeding birds by throwing out whole buckets of stale white-bread rolls on his front yard. I was dismayed, but helping my husband live well with brain cancer took most of my time and attention, so I ignored it, hoping he’d realize it was a bad idea and quit. He [...]
When my late husband and his family moved to our small town in the Southern Rockies from Arkansas in the early 1950s, my sister-in-law remembers their father paying the kids something like a nickel a day to clear their new front yard of “cactus and weeds” to make way for a lawn. Forty-some years later, [...]
This time of year, when straw-colored bunches of fine-textured native grass wave over a thin layer of snow in my yard, along with silver-gray and chocolate brown seed heads of last year’s wildflowers, people often ask me how I maintain my eye-catching “unlawn.” “It’s easy,” I say cheerfully, “I pronghorn it.” And then I grin [...]
I’ve been outside today, working in the yard and soaking up sunshine–both very welcome after some incredibly difficult months. I spent October and November caring for my sculptor husband, Richard until his death at home from brain cancer, and then plunged into end-of-the-year, after-death paperwork and organizing the celebration of his life. All of that was important [...]
Feeding birds is a huge industry in this country: the 46 million U.S. residents who identified themselves as birdwatchers in 2001 (the most recent comprehensive national survey of wildlife watching) spent almost $2.9 million dollars on bird food, feeders, nest boxes, and bird baths. We all love to see birds close-up. But is feeding birds [...]
When my husband Richard and I began restoring our formerly blighted industrial site more than a decade ago, we had no plan, no budget, and no real concept of how much work lay ahead. We did have a vision of healing the place and restoring a thriving bit of wildness right in town, and a [...]
A my husband Richard and I helped our formerly blighted industrial site regenerate, we took great joy in seeing our patch of land and its block of urban creek come back to life again. We celebrated each native species as itreturned to weave its part in the pattern of the living community. Helping our place [...]
After my husband Richard and I bought our dream place, the half-block-plus abandoned industrial property we have spent the past 14 years “greening,” we seeded much of the yard around our house-in-progress with a blend of native grasses and wildflower species that our native-seed suppliers thought might survive on our difficult site. My hopes for [...]
After my husband Richard and I bought our dream place, the half-block-plus abandoned industrial property we have spent the past 14 years “greening”; after we got a handle on the weeds and began restoring the adjacent block of channelized urban creek, I turned my attention to landscaping the yard of the house we hadn’t even finished [...]
