Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Come on, Blue Elderberry, you can do it! Grow, grow, grow. Don’t stop now – you’re on your way. Keep growing and send out roots. Send out more leaf to soak in the sun to make yourself strong. Grow so fast that you leave the snails and slugs behind. Stand firm and dig in your [...]
As spring finally unfolds here in Western Massachusetts, the final featured woodpecker of my ‘A Bestiary’ has just returned to Flower Hill Farm from his southeastern United States winter range. Northern Flickers Colaptes auratus, can be surprising and sometimes ruffle feathers of their fellow birds by not acting as a normal woodpecker should. I often see [...]
Ahhh, spring is on its way. My bones are starting to thaw. Longer days beckon me to spend time in the garden. And, being the good gardener that I am, I have an award-winning list of tasks that I ought to be getting to. Self-imposed oughts, of course. And I stress “self-imposed” because I bet [...]
It may still be winter, but in our backyard, the Bewick’s wrens are already checking out the local real estate market. Last year we were lucky enough to host a pair of nesting chickadees in our backyard. Watching birds select mates, build nests, and raise young is a wonderful education for children. Observing these processes [...]
The second member of the Picidae family featured in ‘A Bestiary’ is the showy and industrious Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Sphyrapicus varius. These brightly patterned woodpeckers are frequent visitors to the gardens here at Flower Hill Farm and are somewhat steward-like to a few of our apples, crabapples and hawthorns. The trees the sapsuckers adopt might be considered [...]
When the days get shorter and other signs of winter hang in the air, most birds pack their bags and leave for warmer climates. They are not necessarily running away from the cold weather, but from the lack of their favorite food, insects. Not all leave; the ones that can make it through the winter [...]
The avian slice of ‘A Bestiary’ continues with the Picidae family of woodpeckers . . . and where else to begin but with the most striking and strident of these birds . . . North America’s own . . . Pileated Woodpecker Dryocopus pileatus. Walking about in the gardens and fields one early spring morning, [...]
“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 [...]
As chill settles in on this first day of winter, more anecdotal beastly tales unfold in my latest installment of ‘A Bestiary: Tales From a Wildlife Garden.’ Chance encounters with wildlife always strike me as quite remarkable . . . just being in the right place at the right moment and being in that moment [...]
A personal storm. So here I am deeply immersed in city bylaws and misinterpretation, misuse, bureaucratic bungling…déjà vu from almost three years ago when I wrote about it for the newsletter only for it to come up again as an attack on gardening… natural gardens… and having to defend while trying to complete a [...]
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