Learning to See the Beauty of Nature in Our Gardens
Gail Eichelberger of Clay and Limestone has a beautiful wildlife garden in Middle Tennessee.
My dear wildlife gardening friends, Sometimes we have to make tough choices. A favorite woodpecker tree must come down because it is dangerously close to the house; native plants have to be edited because they are too happy in our gardens; or, our gardening budgets won’t stretch to include everything we want to accomplish! I’ve [...]
To expect anything else is to set yourself up for heartbreak in your beautiful wildlife garden! As sure as you plant those bulbs or perennials a squirrel or chipmunk will discover the fresh dirt smell and pop those plants right out of the soil. Dang them! On a recent visit home, our son had an [...]
You won’t be sorry. Not only are there an amazing number of beautiful natives to light up your garden from spring through frost~The pollinators and other critters will love them. Asteraceae is one of the largest plant families and is found growing all over the world. So vast that it is subdivided into tribes which [...]
Most cool mornings we can sit on the screened porch and listen to the birds splashing in the bird bath or chatting to one another in the treetops. We can hear the chipmunks scolding and the squirrels scampering. We can see the bees moving among the wildflowers, but, it’s been years since we could hear [...]
If you know anything about my garden, Clay and Limestone, you already know that I adore rough and tumble wildflowers. Wildflowers that many have called roadside weeds. Wildflowers with no known pedigree. Species wildflowers that haven’t had the wild or good bred out of them. Native species that do exactly what they are supposed to do: [...]
It’s late summer and the topiary buffalo are still roaming in Bison Meadow. You have to walk the paths to find them grazing amidst the wildflowers that have been growing all summer. Last winter when I introduced you to this two acre prairie, all that you could see were the bison, Junipers that dotted the [...]
Cup Plant is in full bloom and almost every resident pollinator has visited it for nectar or pollen. Cup Plant is a native wildflower of Tennessee’s tall grass prairie and one of my favorite rough and tumble wildflowers. I love the big daisy like flowers with their little disk florets that seem to wave to [...]
I adore butterflies. Bumbles make me happy. But, my favorite of all the pollinators visiting or living in my garden are the Skippers. How could they fail to make you smile or delight you with their flitting about the garden as they try to attract a mate. Skippers are members of the Superfamily Hesperioidea. [...]
Just when I was thinking that I wanted to thin the advancing hordes of Goldenrod I noticed this gall. It was new to me and an Internet search revealed that it’s the ‘parasitic home’ of the Goldenrod Gall Fly. A tiny fly whose entire life is centered around goldenrod. A tiny fly that managed [...]
I fell head over heels in love with Tennessee Purple Coneflower the first time I visited a cedar glade. Not only did the flower plant itself in my heart, but, the stark beauty of the glade made an enormous impression upon me. It would not be stretching the point to say it changed my perception [...]
Green Dragon, Arisaema dracontium, to be precise. It’s a marvelous woodland wildflower that slowly unfurls to reveal its leaf. Yes, leaf! It may look like two leaves, but, it’s one leaf that forks into leaflets of unequal size and uneven numbers. The parted leaflets curve around to give Green Dragon a rather large horseshoe [...]
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