Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Ursula Vernon lives in North Carolina where she gardens for wildlife with her cats, her boyfriend, and a beagle, and is still astonished when anything comes back at all in the spring. She is also part of the team at Beautiful Wildlife Garden.
Ursula is a freelance writer, artist and illustrator. She is best known for the webcomic Digger and the children's books Dragonbreath and Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew, and a fantasy novel entitled Black Dogs. Ursula is also the creator of the Biting Pear of Salamanca, a work which became an internet meme in the form of the "LOL WUT" pear. Ursula's cover for Best in Show won the 2003 Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Published Illustration. She was nominated for the 2006 Eisner Awards in the category Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition for her work on Digger.
If you asked me to name my top five native plants, I would probably hem and haw and spend a lot of time counting on my fingers. One of them, however, would make the list with no problems—the fantastic genus Agastache. More commonly known as hyssop or hummingbird mint, boasting a dozen species, the odds [...]
Ten days is a long time to be separated from one’s garden. But I had a road-trip of great family necessity, so I set off two weeks ago, armed with my TSA-approved shampoo bottles and a couple of bags of beef jerky, to make the long drive from Phoenix to Atlanta. It was a grim [...]
Okay gang, today we’re going to talk about terroir. This has nothing to do with terror, terriers, or anything else in that genre. Terroir is a French word, which translates rather loosely as “the sense of a place,” and is used to describe the effect that climate, soil, other local plants, geography, etc has on [...]
Okay, I give up. I admit defeat. I tried to go dormant in winter like a good gardener—like a sane gardener—but the garden will not let me. Sure, the main plants gracefully died back to stems, but they grew a suspicious fuzz of green around the base almost immediately. The lettuces finally succumbed to frost, [...]
Well, it’s nearly New Years, and you know what that means—time for the plethora of Greatest Hits, Year in Review, Dire Predictions, and so on and so forth, and mine is no exception. Time to review how the year went in my home base, Squash’s Garden! Stuff Got Done I had a busy year. I [...]
One of the real knockout plants in my garden this year has been…this thing. I bought it at the local botanical garden, under the name “Plowman’s wort.” Okay, fair enough. It’s a native plant, it gets big pink compound flowers, I’m all for it. I bought it about this time last year, put it in [...]
Today is October 29th, which is the feast day of St. Narcissus on the Catholic calendar. My Catholicism is so far lapsed now that I can see a nun without flinching*, but I was amused by the coincidence, as I have lately been planting bulbs. (St. Narcissus, it must be said, has nothing at all [...]
A few days ago it was 87 degrees. The next day it was 65. I got up the morning I wrote this and it was gray and misty and cool enough to require a jacket. I sat on the front porch and drank coffee instead of iced tea. The signs have begun appearing all over [...]
So I have this theory. My theory is that what you call something is very important to how you feel about it. Actually, this isn’t just my theory—marketers have known this for a very long time. The noble filbert got no traction at all outside the Pacific Northwest, but you can get hazelnut coffee anywhere. [...]
It’s bloody hot in my garden right now, and gardening is increasingly difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I still DO it. Things are on sale! I can get a flat of ground covers for six bucks! Who am I to resist this? It’s just that I come in dripping with sweat and consume vast quantities [...]
