Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
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 [...]
As I’ve posted about before here, I love Rain Gardens. Last year I removed a patch of lawn in my backyard, dug out a shallow basin, and extended two roof downspouts into it. When it rains (which it does a lot here in western Oregon), the garden fills with water and slowly infiltrates into the [...]
A type of wildlife friendly landscape that is attracting a lot of attention these days is the meadow garden. Even though this style of garden is considered one of the most beneficial and informal there are key points one should take into account before jumping in with both feet. One of the main considerations [...]
“The path follows an old path which a hundred years ago was used for sleds to bring cordwood down the hill. I found that along both sides of it small hemlocks were predominant. Twenty-five years ago I started cutting out almost all of the deciduous trees edging the path…. It has gradually developed into a [...]
Meadow Lawns. You might think this is an oxymoronic trick word-pairing, given that the definition of a lawn is “a stretch of open, grass-covered land, especially one closely mowed.” As we know, meadows aren’t normally mowed. It might work, however, if you consider that the word “especially“ is not “only” which gives meadows a fighting chance, for a meadow [...]
It could be said that the most important component of what we as native plant gardeners/designers do is educate people. We feel an inherent value, Joy, and necessity to set an example for others; to provide for wildlife in our suburban landscapes. Historically some claim the idea of the native plant wildlife garden began in [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
The newness of a titanium aortic valve and a Dacron aorta have worn off and I am totally used to the loud beat of my new bionics. Even though I walk ever so slowly, sometimes scooting along across the ground, I still look for interactions between wildlife and native plants. I haven’t been on many green roofs [...]
