Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
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 [...]
The use of native plants in residential landscapes is critical to the protection of our wildlife. Among native plants, some of the most valuable are our trees. Native trees provide fruit, nuts, and seeds in addition to acting as host plants to a huge number of butterflies and moths. History is often our guide when [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Using plants native to your area can be useful in many ways: native shrubs and trees provide excellent support for local wildlife, they convey a clear sense of regional identity, and they are often quite beautiful. One of the joys of gardening with native species is that these species provide this array of benefits simultaneously: [...]
News from Team Beautiful Wildlife Garden