Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
Winter’s long days and short nights, when my garden is resting, are my contemplative time. Lately, I’ve been contemplating words and how they affect what we believe in and do. (I’m a writer trained as a plant biologist, which makes me fluent in two languages, English and Science.) Words are powerful abstractions. They can [...]
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 [...]
As crisp autumn air sweeps trees free of leaves, that float and flutter like bright butterflies twirling and falling into heaps of leafy carpeting . . . ’A Bestiary . . . Tales from a Wildlife Garden’ continues with the princely Eastern Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris.) Moving on from the class of Mammalia [...]
Most Californians understand that swelling populations in the southwest are and will continue to outpace water supply both from the California State Water Project sources and the Colorado River. Additionally, Golden state residents are learning that water-wise habits in our landscape and gardens can save up to 60 percent of this precious resource. But something [...]
In my prior post I wrote about the importance of familiarizing ourselves with the flora and fauna of our local native ecosystems. With regard to our native flora, trees make up one of the most important components of any ecosystem. They literally form the foundation of most plant communities and contribute greatly to local animal [...]
This upcoming weekend, our native plant nursery will be a vendor at the 25th annual Baltimore Herb Festival. Of course we spend a lot of time thinking about which of our native plants will be good food for wildlife, but for this event we want to focus on telling people that many plants in their [...]
If a group of native plants can be considered as simultaneously obscure and baffling, it would surely be our native sedges. The USDA PLANTS database lists more than 500 species of Carex native to North America, but only a handful of these are readily available in the nursery trade and even fewer are commonly used [...]
When people think of creating a native garden the first thing that typically comes to mind is plant material. Images of specific varieties pop up in the mind’s eye along with characteristic flower color, aroma, foliage texture and ability to attract one’s favorite garden-friendly wildlife. Rounding out the general idea is how said plants will [...]
Many of the writers on this blog have been contributing to a series of posts called “Plant This, Not That“. In each case, we highlight a couple of plants that are invasive and/or overused and then suggest some great native alternatives. In my most recent contribution, I focused on native groundcovers for Baltimore. However, I [...]
After a lecture I gave a few months ago on native plants for Baltimore, one of attendees wondered on his blog about sustainable urban groundcovers. I’ve been meaning to take a stab at his question, so here goes! Specifically, Chris asked: “So, what are the best groundcovers for the Mid-Atlantic? Again, the idea here is [...]
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