Learning to See the Beauty of Nature in Our Gardens
In my garden, I always savor the often unheralded plants. Plants that many remove from their own landscapes because they are unattractive “weeds”. If you remove Thistle (Cirsium spp.), you are missing out on experiences better than any action movie. Meet Nuttall’s Thistle (Cirsium nuttallii) a resident of my landscape. This guy took forever to [...]
If you are reading this and it is after 6:11 a.m. EST, I guess the end of the world hasn’t taken place or, if any of the other doomsday theories has occurred, that BWG Blog has been translated into Nibiru-ese. I’m not a big believer in these sort of silly conspiracies, but let’s just say [...]
So nearly two years ago now, I wrote a post in praise of the genus Pycnanthemum, the mountain mint. I praised it for its pollinator attraction, for its toughness, for the attractive foliage. It’s as low maintenance as a plant gets—whack it down in mid-fall when it’s gotten woody, and you’ll find a low, glossy [...]
When I think of wetlands, the image that first comes to mind is cattails (Typha angustifolia). Our home and property, which I named Marshview, is surrounded on three sides by wetlands. A wetland is a land area that is saturated with water and is a distinct ecosystem. Our wetlands do not support fish since they [...]
There is not a great deal of plastic in my garden. Some of the hoses are made out of some ungodly rubber/vinyl/space-age polymer, and I use those little plastic-coated wire plant ties as much as anybody, and the rain barrels are a sort of beige plastic, but for the most part, my garden is made [...]
Getting last sun, warm on my neck, my shadow long into the flower bed, purple faces look up at me, geraniums taking in the warm sun too, and not wilting in the heat. These geraniums are found nowhere else that I know of. Spread by cuttings from neighbor to neighbor, they say “Topanga” to me. [...]
May is Garden for Wildlife Month, a promotion of The National Wildlife Federation. I’m sure if you are reading this blog, pretty much every month is Garden for Wildlife Month and that is commendable and as it should be. I guess the May promotion thingy is just to get those who haven’t started in the [...]
I went to the garden t’other day, O readers, to have a good mope. I had a pretty good reason. The little cafe in town that has been there for years and years suddenly went out of business, completely without warning, ffft! gone. Now, I could come up with a lot of noble reasons why [...]
There’s a commercial running rampant on tv right now called “Shop Small,” the idea being that for one day (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) we should support the small businesses in our communities. Well, being the extremely intelligent people that you are, I’m sure you realize that we cannot make much of a difference at all [...]
At some point, many gardeners begin to propagate their own plants. You buy and plant seeds, baby plants emerge, you’re hooked. Then you realize seeds don’t really come from the store: plants make their own—in your garden, in the local forest preserve, and along the railroad tracks, too, and if you collect a few, no [...]
Despite the title of this post, I will not be writing about the management of prairies or meadows by burning. Instead, the title refers to a book I just finished reading: Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements. This book will not be found in the gardening section of your library or [...]
News from Team Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
