Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
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 [...]
Sometimes a native species looks just like a non-native. One example, blooming now in the Pacific Northwest, is the hazelnut or filbert. Corylus cornuta, beaked hazelnut, is our native species. On the west coast, it’s variety californica and in the rest of the continent you’ll find variety cornuta. It usually grows as a mid-sized shrub [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
When you think “Christmas tree” you’re probably conjuring up a conifer. They’re those trees with (generally) evergreen needle-like leaves that bear their seeds in woody cones. Those cones are where the name conifer comes from. Where I live in the Pacific Northwest conifers are the backdrop for most of our landscape, whether in the wild [...]
One of the greatest joys as a designer of native gardens in California is working with Arctostaphylos, a.k.a., Manzanita. I can trace my interest in these plants all the way back to my early childhood. One of my favorite pastimes at this early stage of life was taking road-trips with my grandpa to the back [...]
There is nothing quite as peaceful and calming, yet as vibrantly alive, as visiting a wildlife garden. If you are lucky enough to have one in your back yard or neighborhood, you know what I mean. The busy activity of birds, butterflies, bees and pollinators amid the color and texture of the native plants [...]
A Bestiary continues . . . with the raptor of the dead . . . the utterly critical and graceful . . . even when teetering . . . Turkey Vulture. Dark as a moonless night this new world vulture . . . nature’s silent black knight, Cathartes aura, emanates mystery while evoking macabre images from [...]
Out here in the Plains prairie resotoration is a sort of buzz phrase for people like me. Suddenly, visions of a horizon to horizon ocean of grass and wildflowers, dotted by herds of bison, rush like irish coffee to the brain. I swoon with warmth and alcohol. Oh, prairie. Marry me. Yet prairie restoration in [...]
News from Team Beautiful Wildlife Garden