Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Each of us has tackled an invasive that gobbled up part or parts of our cherished garden (not to mention hours, if not weeks or months, of our time, energy, and muscle). In some cases we inherited invasive plants when we bought or rented our home. Some of us, looking back, now know that we [...]
Yesterday, in Time to Get Tough, Emily DeBolt introduced the topic of invasive plants and legislation in the Northeast to control their sale. Today I’d like to take the conversation to the opposite coast where I live in Washington State. Washington’s Noxious Weed Board issues an annual list of noxious weeds. The list is divided [...]
A grand old sugar maple stood beside the road at the edge of the hayfield across from my house. By the time I moved to the neighborhood, this tree was no beauty: it had already lost its leader, and several branches jutted out as jagged stubs. Foliage up top was so sparse, the local redtail [...]
Like most gardeners, my garden is composed of some plants that I inherited when I bought my home, others that I bought before I really knew much about plants and still others that I purchased in my ongoing efforts to create a wildlife garden. And like many native plant lovers, my garden is a mix [...]
A couple of years ago I gave a presentation to a hall full of Master Gardeners on my favorite topic: saving energy in our landscapes. I pointed out that if we gardened with more native plants, this would support regional pollinators, thereby potentially reducing the energy costs associated with replacing a vital ecological service. Compared [...]
A couple of months ago, I posted on this site an article that reviewed three garden shows, noting that the third of these, the Ecological Landscaping Association’s Annual Conference, gave its attendees a thought-provoking paradox. One of the event’s speakers discussed the vast and costly damage caused by Japanese knotweed in Great Britain, and another [...]
Sometimes I feel like I’m stuck in my own twisted version of the movie Groundhog Day, reliving the same conversation over and over again. As a professional landscape designer, I meet lots of homeowners with varying degrees of interest in their gardens. Some are die-hard gardeners, others are newbies, and others could care less about what’s happening outside [...]
Globalization Our world today has grown so very small. Internet communications have turned once far away strangers into close friends, reality as close as the computer screen. Globalization thrives now even in the remotest of jungles. Peoples and civilizations are mixing, interweaving families, languages and traditions. What started with transoceanic journeys by raft requiring months [...]
I have recently attended three very different garden shows that together reveal a big shift in our society’s gardening attitudes and interests. Yet I also found that a troublesome old belief – the idea that people’s garden dreams are more important than the health of the natural world – not only persists but is being [...]
Ecosystem Gardening is a way of healing the wounds to wildlife caused by human activity in the environment. Instead of destroying habitat we are creating welcome habitat for wildlife in our gardens. Dave Foreman in Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century eloquently describes six “wounds” that the human population is inflicting on ecosystems which [...]
