Wild Flora's Wild Gardening: On Becoming a Wild Gardener

On Becoming a Wild Gardener

IF YOU ENJOY watching birds, squirrels, and other wildlife in your garden … if you are trying to garden in an environmentally friendly way … if you believe that we humans should try to co-exist with the other species that inhabit this land with us … you're going to love being involved (if you aren’t already) in a growing national movement toward what I call wild gardening--gardening that is wildlife-friendly and inspired by nature.

Many people are attracted to wild gardening because they enjoy watching birds and other animals and want to attract them to their properties. This is an easy and very rewarding way to get into wild gardening, so I'm going to be focusing on it for a while. Here 's a little bit of an introduction:

Wildlife-friendly gardening is a way of taking care of our land – whether it’s a 100-acre spread or just one window box -- so that we help birds and other animals instead of driving them away. Wildlife-friendly gardeners do this by providing food, shelter, and clean water for animals, while minimizing practices that harm wildlife. In return, we enjoy the beauty, song, and entertaining antics of countless creatures; know that we are being environmentally responsible in our gardening practices; and bring a little “wildness” into our gardens and our lives!

Wildlife-friendly gardening need not be expensive or time-consuming. In fact, many people find that maintaining a wildlife-friendly garden is much less expensive and time consuming than gardening the old-fashioned way (especially if you formerly were trying to maintain a large lawn).

Wildlife-friendly gardening is not out-of-the-mainstream. Across the country, thousands of people are engaged in this practice.

Finally, your wildlife-friendly garden doesn’t have to conform to any one gardening style. It’s possible to design a wildlife-friendly garden in any number of styles -- from “natural” to “neat and tidy” and everything in between.

In the next weeks and months, we'll be exploring what all this means in practice. Please join me again soon!

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About this blog and its owner

I’ve lived and gardened in Chicago and the Seattle area, and now I live on 250 acres in eastern Canada. Most of my life has been spent as a journalist and editor, but after moving to Seattle I took a detour and ended up designing and installing wildlife-friendly gardens. For a long (sorry) but (I think) funny essay about this experience, please click here.

In this blog, I try to combine my gardening experiences with journalism-type research to come up with items that I hope will be useful to you, the gardener who wants to be kind to wildlife. The blog will probably be most useful to people living in areas where I have some practical experience, namely the band of states and provinces that are on either side of the United States-Canada border.

Being self-employed, I go through spells when I’m self-unemployed and am able to post frequently, and spells when I’m involved in a project and not able to post. This site is a labor of love and, alas, like so many labors of love it often has to take a back seat to labors of lucre.

If you like what you find here, please consider joining the site as a member or adding it to your “follow” list. The modules for this are below.

Q&A

Question: I have a neat old elm tree in the front yard which is sorely afflicted with mistletoe. I don't know quite what to do with it, as every windstorm drops branches, bark and other parts down on the yard below. I know the infected wood will have to go, at least that is what I'm told, but a considerable amount of tree must be removed in the process. It is a dear tree, and I don't want it to come to fatal harm. What should I do? From Mary

Answer: Dear Mary, old is not ugly, dying is not bad, and dead is part of the natural order. At least if you're a tree.

Old, diseased trees, and the dead trees they eventually turn into, play just as important a role in an ecosystem as the young, healthy ones do--even more important because, thanks to the misguided practices of the past, dead and dying trees have become so rare. Holes in dead and dying trees are vital nesting spots for many birds and small mammals. Dead branches and other litter (which is not necessarily a sign of disease--healthy trees drop litter too), if left to decompose naturally, are also important for ecosystem health.

When working with old trees it's important to get advice from an arborist who understands their value and won't be in too much of a hurry to make drastic changes. Before hiring an arborist, I'd ask him or her to explain the ecological value of dead and dying trees. Ideally I'd want to work with an arborist who could show me examples of dead or dying trees he/she has left standing (aka snags).

I don't know much about mistletoe because I've never lived anywhere that it grows, but I wasn't surprised to read in the Wikipedia that it is an ecologically important species. All too often, valuable native species are classified as pests just because they don't fit preconceived notions of attractiveness. To me it sounds like a pretty cool plant and one I would be happy to have in my garden.

All in all, as long as the tree doesn't pose a hazard to people or property (the advice of a professional could be helpful in making this decision), I would leave it alone to live out its life in dignity and peace. If the tree does pose a hazard, I would look for an arborist who is willing to do the least amount of work necessary to remove the hazard, making every effort to leave as much of the tree as possible and not destroy its appearance.

With any luck you will find someone who appreciates the aesthetics of old trees--who recognizes the beauty, as well as the ecological importance, of big holes, broken limbs, and gnarly wood. (With any luck, we will all find people like this as we get older--but that's another story!)

I like to answer questions! Send me a question at wildflora at gmail dot com and I'll try to answer it. If you provide an email address, I usually respond privately within a few days. (If I forget, please forgive me and send me a reminder.)

Looking for a question and answer that appeared here previously? I am archiving them at my new website. Currently you'll find one question and answer about how to get rid of a multiflora rose and another about how to move a bumblebee nest.

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