Wild Flora's Wild Gardening

Old is Not Ugly

2009-10-16T18:58:00.011-04:00

A dead tree, or snag, growing in a remnant patch of old growth forest in Nova Scotia. Photo by Tim Skelly.

MANY PEOPLE ARE AFRAID of old age these days. They might feel better if they spent more time around old, dead, and dying trees.

In the Q&A section of this blog, which is on the right-hand side of the page, I answered a question from a reader who was wondering whether she should go to a lot of trouble to try to save a much-loved tree from mistletoe. My response was fairly long, but the short version is, Probably not.

Why not? Trees are no different from other life forms: Just like us, they eventually get old and/or diseased and die. This can be tragic, especially if the tree is an example of a species under threat from an introduced disease or insect pest. But it doesn't have to be. Old trees show us that there is dignity and grandeur in old age. Dying and dead trees also make a vital contribution to all the life forms around them. Allowing a tree to decline and die with dignity can be a gift to nature and to yourself.

Many species of birds and small mammals rely on the cavities that form naturally in dying and dead trees as places to raise young and shelter from harsh weather. The "nest boxes" and "roost boxes" we humans put up are an attempt to provide birds with the equivalent of cavities in dead trees, but most animals prefer the natural cavities if they can find them. Unfortunately, because humans often cut down dead and dying trees, these animals have a tough time finding natural homes.

Even a stump of a dead tree has value. As they rot, stumps, fallen logs, and other "deadwood" become natural sponges, soaking up water that they will later release slowly, during dry weather. This helps to prevent flooding. It also provides a perfect environment for the seeds of many species of plants, including new trees, to germinate and grow. This photograph was taken in a patch of old growth forest in the Seattle area.

This photo, taken in the Seattle area, shows the remains of an American chestnut. Once common in the eastern United States, this species was affected by an fungal disease that was introduced on imported Asiatic chestnut trees. The disease has killed billions of trees, as a result of which the tree is now extremely rare. The owner of this tree made every effort to save it -- an appropriate step given that the trees are now rare -- but was unsuccessful. It is now incorporated in her garden as a piece of natural sculpture reminding visitors of the dangers posed by introduced species.

More natural sculpture: a snag in old-growth forest in Nova Scotia.

If a big old tree falls in an area inhabited area, the result can be damage to life or property. (So it's important to get a consultation from a trusted arborist if you think a tree might present a hazard.) But these events are natural and beneficial in the forest. The roots of a fallen tree, along with soil and other vegetation that was attached to the roots, are known as the "rootwad" or "root plane." This big mass of soil and decaying plant matter is great habitat for many animals and a good location for new plants to germinate and grow. Photo by Tim Skelly.

When a root plane lifts up out of the soil, it often leaves a shallow depression behind. This small, sheltered pond is ideal habitat for amphibians. Photo by Tim Skelly.

This is the end: This photo shows the forest floor in an area of old-growth forest near to a lake. The open area over the lake exposes this part of the forest to high winds, so many trees have fallen down. As they decompose and are covered by mosses and other vegetation, the forest floor takes on what ecologists refer to as "pit and mound architecture." The uneven terrain creates a wide variety of habitats, referred to as "microhabitats," that can support different small creatures and plants. Photo by Tim Skelly.

Update on bats and wind power

2009-10-05T07:42:00.001-04:00

SCIENTISTS SEEM TO HAVE SOLVED THE MYSTERY of why bats are killed by wind turbines, and they think they can use this knowledge to prevent bat deaths. This good news comes from the Journal of Wildlife Management via Science Daily: Bat deaths can be reduced by making sure that the blades of the turbines do not turn (at least not much) when wind speeds are low. Taking this precaution doesn’t significantly affect energy output from the turbines, either. The idea is already being successfully used in some locations.

There’s a lot more to the story, however, so if you’re interested I recommend checking the following sources:

Treehugger article: “Scientists Solve Wind Power’s Mass Bat-Killing Problem”

Science Daily article, “Scientists Find Successful Way to Reduce Bat Deaths at Wind Turbines”

Press release from the University of Calgary, “U of C scientists find successful way to reduce bat deaths at wind turbines”

Press release from the University of Calgary, “Extreme pressure changes near blades injures bat lungs, U of C study finds”

Original journal article: Baerwald et al. “A Large-Scale Mitigation Experiment to Reduce Bat Fatalities at Wind Energy Facilities.” Journal of Wildlife Management, 2009; 73 (7): 1077

My earlier post on windpower and wildlife can be found here. For the record, a (“up to”) 60% reduction in bat deaths isn’t enough to make me ultra happy about the popularity of wind power. But it is good news, and perhaps this discovery will lead to others that will reduce bat deaths even more.

Many thanks to Carole Browne of Conservation Gardening for mentioning this news on her blog.

More good news

2009-09-15T17:50:00.001-04:00

WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC of good news, check out this article from Fine Gardening magazine. Here we have a well-known garden writer, writing in a mainstream gardening magazine, advising readers to stop tilling their soil!

Mind you, natural landscapers have known everything in this article for a decade or more. In fact, I confess that a small part of me is miffed when mainstream writers suddenly “discover” practices we’ve been using for ages, and don’t mention that these ideas are not new.

Still, I try not to give in to that tiny, mean-spirited part of this complete personality, and instead take joy in realizing that these practices are … can it be? … is it possible? … actually starting to be looked upon as … acceptable? Even desirable?

Articles such as this one, and other good news, give me reason to hope that this may actually be the case.

Good news

2009-09-15T13:50:00.004-04:00

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I blogged about the depressing case of Deborah Dale, a past president of the North American Native Plant Society whose Toronto garden was destroyed by over-zealous officials who did not understand or appreciate her natural landscaping.

So imagine my joy upon checking the NAPS website this morning, to discover that a couple in Ottawa just won a battle to preserve their own half-acre meadow of pollinator-friendly plants! On July 25, 2009, the Ottawa Citizen reported that the city of Ottawa had rescinded a bylaw that would have forbidden Hank and Vera Jones from retaining their environmentally friendly, wildlife-friendly plantings.

Equally encouraging is the amount of public support the Joneses received: They received legal advice and representation from the Ecojustice Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Ottawa; the Ottawa Citizen published an excellent editorial and an equally excellent opinion piece supporting their cause; the Green Party wrote a letter of support; and the Citizen also published several letters to the editor supporting their cause. For a cheer-making experience, I highly recommend reading some of the articles, letters, and editorials the Citizen has published:

Garden bylaw rescinded (news item)

Councillor calls for scrutiny of bylaws (news item)

Wildlife gardens get new life before council (news item)

Lawn row with city has been won before (news item and photo)

Green Party backs Jones with naturalized lawns (letter)

Lawns growing wilder than lawn weeds (opinion piece)

We can go with natural lawns (letter)

Let's enjoy nature in the middle of suburbia (letter)

We need to redefine an "attractive" lawn (letter)

Farewell to the lawn (opinion piece)

Changing tastes give new meaning to the word "lawn" (news and photo)

Wildlife garden row could end up in court (news)

Let the garden grow (letter)

The artifice of the "lawn" (editorial)

Sneezing time

2009-09-06T08:54:00.004-04:00

THIS IS A MISERABLE TIME of year for many allergy sufferers. Unfortunately, people with allergies often blame the wrong plants, which does nothing to relieve their suffering and may prevent them or even their neighbors from planting harmless species.

Left, the pollen of Common ragweed causes most respiratory allergies at this time of year. This photo is by Forest and Kim Starr, via the Wikipedia Commons.

As it happens, a wildlife-friendly garden is likely to be an allergy-sufferer's best friend. Why? Because plants that are pollinated by insects tend to have heavy pollen. Because it’s heavy, this pollen is not carried on the wind, which means that it does not have a chance to get into your nose and start the immune-system reaction known as an allergy attack. So a wildlife-friendly garden full of flowers that are being visited by butterflies, bees, and other pollinators is not likely to cause allergic reactions.

In late summer, the chief cause of respiratory allergy symptoms is ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia). This is an annual weed that’s common in the Northeast, Midwest, and South. Although it’s native to North America, I’ve never heard anyone recommend it as a garden plant!

Ragweed pollen can travel hundreds of miles but most of it lands near the plant, so the closer the plant is to you the more likely it is that the pollen will end up in your nose. If there is any ragweed growing near you, the best way to dispose of it is probably to wet it down (to make the pollen grains heavy, so they don’t scatter), then cut it back carefully and again carefully put the stems into a plastic garbage bag, which can be put out with the trash. The best time to do this would be early on a chilly morning, when pollen production would be at its lowest.

For future years, the best way to keep ragweed off your property is to plant aggressive perennials, preferably ones that are pollinated by insects, because these plants can prevent the annual ragweed from getting a foothold in your garden. In other words, have a wildlife-friendly garden! Goldenrod might be a good choice because it is insect pollinated and extremely aggressive.

One warning: People who are allergic to ragweed pollen may also be allergic to the pollen of other plants in the Aster family. Now, the Aster family is huge and includes many wonderful wildlife-friendly plants with heavy pollen, including Goldenrod and Purple coneflower. It would be a tragedy for any wildlife-friendly gardener to give up these plants altogether. But if you are allergic to ragweed, you may want to plant these species further from your house and avoid bringing the flowers into your house or working right next to them during pollen season. Sniffing the flowers of plants in the Aster family would also be ill-advised, as that would pull even heavy pollen into your nose.

Meanwhile, here are a few ways to keep allergies under control this time of year. Most of them come from the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology.

Try to stay inside with the windows closed when pollen counts are high. This is generally between 10 am and 4 pm on dry days. (Rainy days are safer because the rain washes the pollen out of the air.) You can get local pollen counts from the National Allergy Bureau at (800)-9-POLLEN, or http://www.pollen.com/.
An air conditioner helps because it cools and dries the air, an HEPA filter can clean the pollen out of the air.
And of course you need to avoid anything that would stir up pollen or bring pollen into your house during pollen season, from raking leaves to hanging clothes outside to dry (because pollen collects on the clothes). If you've been working outside, change your clothes when you come inside.
If you do go outside when pollen counts are high, you could try wearing a pollen mask.
Another tip is to keep your bedroom closed up during the day and then bathe before you go to bed. This will prevent pollen from getting into your bedding.
Also, I'm sure any allergy sufferer who is willing to take drugs has already tried all the over-the-counter drugs, but have you tried nasal rinsing? This will wash pollen grains out of your sinus cavities. Here are instructions from the AAAAI.

Don’t give up on hummers just yet

2009-09-01T16:08:00.001-04:00

Above, a scene from my deck during the summer. We had at least six of these guys drinking from 5 feeders, which I had to refill 2-3 times a day. That thing in the background is the tower that delivers our high-speed Internet service—not the prettiest thing in the landscape, but we do love having high speed.

AS I WRITE THIS, it’s September 1, and I still have at least one hummingbird coming to the feeders of the six or more that came constantly throughout the summer. Instead of having to fill five feeders at least twice a day, I now am down to three (the last storm having blown down and smashed two of them). I go on filling them daily to make sure the food is fresh, but the feeders are usually not empty when I do fill them.

Wherever you live, if you feed hummingbirds at all it’s a good idea to leave the feeders out and keep them filled with fresh food at this time of year. This will help your own birds, who most likely will come back to you next spring, “make weight” for the big migration that’s ahead of them. It also provides food for hummers that are stopping over on their way south. Some sources recommend keeping feeders up for at least two weeks after you think you’ve seen your last hummingbird of the year.

Windpower and Wildlife

2009-08-28T20:09:00.006-04:00

LATELY MORE AND MORE homeowners are thinking about installing small turbines to generate power primarily for their own homes.

The advantages of wind power are obvious. The disadvantages are mostly a concern for people living near the turbines, who may complain about noise, vibration, or changed views. But for me the overriding worry is the potential effect on wildlife. It hardly makes sense to attract wildlife into your garden, then batter them with windmill blades, now does it?

FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND

Most of the concern about wildlife and windpower comes from research done on big, big turbines. Thus far there is plenty of evidence that collisions with the blades do kill birds and bats. There are also concerns about the effect of wind turbines on wildlife habitat. The area around the turbines, as well as the area under transmission lines, is usually cleared of vegetation. Also, some wild animals simply avoid areas where there are man-made structures. But research on the relationship between wildlife and big wind is only just beginning.

Wind proponents argue that the design of wind turbines has been improved to a point where the impact on birds is small. My reading suggests that we need more research to be sure of this.

It looks as though there is even more reason to worry about bats. Apparently nobody thought much about the effect of windpower on these animals until fairly recently. Now it turns out that bats may actually be attracted to wind turbines or to the areas around wind turbines. (Nobody knows why, though there is a lot of speculation.) They are very slow to reproduce, so the death of breeding-age animals could have a signficant impact on their populations. Research on this topic is even scantier than research on wildlife-impacts as a whole.

Researchers are continuing to try to improve the design of big wind turbines so that they’ll have less impact on wildlife, as well as on how to place them so that they’ll have less of an effect. The Nature Conservancy, an organization I respect, seems to be in favor of wind energy as long as turbines are sited properly. But personally I’m going to have trouble supporting big wind until more has been done to prevent injury to wildlife.

THINKING ABOUT ADDING A Small WIND TURBINE?

So what about small wind? First keep in mind that typical “small wind” isn’t all that small. Though you can buy tiny turbines that install on the roof of a house, when people talk about residential or small wind installations they are usually talking about a fairly large turbine (they look big to me, anyway) that installs on a tower somewhere near your home.

There are a lot of nonwildlife issues to consider before putting in one of these turbines, the upfront cost being just one. If you haven’t already done everything possible to make your home energy efficient, installing a smaller turbine is almost certainly not the best use of your money. If you are already energy efficient, CanWea’s Small Wind Energy site is a good place to look for resources that would help you explore this complicated decision.

What about wildlife? According to the CanWEA site, “migrating birds tend to fly well above small wind turbine height,” so at least one wildlife population is probably safe from a smaller turbine. But backyard birds and bats do appear to be at risk. In fact, CanWEA recommends against placing a smaller turbine “in areas where birds concentrate,” which would appear to rule out a home surrounded by wildlife-friendly landscaping … unless you happen to be an exceptionally bad gardener!

The CanWEA site argues that wind turbines “are far less of a danger to birds than buildings or household cats.” This is currently true, but it’s hardly an excuse for adding to the hazards our local wildlife already face. Besides, if homeowners continue to add turbines to their properties, the kill rates will increase.

HOW ABOUT ROOFTOP TURBINES?

Rooftop turbines are more interesting from a wildlife-impact point of view. Although they have moving blades that could potentially injure birds or bats, the hazard area is smaller because the turbines themselves are small. Also some of the designs look as though they would be much less hazardous to wildlife than the conventional vertical-blade (aka wildlife whacker) design. On the other hand, anything with moving blades might be hazardous. I wonder whether it would be possible to enclose a rooftop turbine in a cage?

The tiny turbines are controversial, however, and not just for the usual reasons (noise, etc.). Some critics contend that they do not work, or at least do not work well. The Wind Turbines Now website seems to provide a fairly balanced overview of the issues surrounding rooftop turbines.

I would like to see more research done on rooftop turbines before investing money in them. In June 2009 it was announced that the Boston Museum of Science had set up a Wind Turbine Lab for precisely that purpose, and it will be interesting to see what they (or other researchers) turn up.

WINDING UP

IMHO, wind turbines will not not a good choice for wildlife-friendly gardeners until someone can come up with a design that's been shown to be wildlife-safe. It’s hard enough protecting your birds and other wildlife from window strikes and neighborhood cats. We don’t need any more hazards in the backyard.

In the meantime, I’m going to be taking a closer look at solar power. The technology keeps improving. You can use solar to heat water and air directly, but if you would like to try using it to generate electricity, you'll be glad to know that the price of solar panels has dropped dramatically. Solar panels are quiet and inconspicuous, and above all ... they don't move.

Additional sources used in writing this post

“Assessing Impacts of Wind-Energy Development on Nocturnally Active Birds and Bats: A Guidance Document.” (pdf) Journal of Wildlife Management 71(8) 2007.

“Mitigation Toolbox.” Compiled by National Wind Coordinating Collaborative Mitigation Subgroup and Jennie Rectenwald.

“Wind Energy and Wildlife Concerns 101” (PowerPoint presentation). Dale Strickland. Presented at the Wind Wildlife Research Meeting VII, October 28, 2008, Milwaukee, WI.

“Wind & Wildlife: Key Research Topics.” Prepared by the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative Wildlife Workgroup. May 2008.

“Wind and Wildlife: Let’s Keep it Green” (PowerPoint presentation). The Nature Conservancy. Presented at the Wind Wildlife Research Meeting VII, October 28, 2008, Milwaukee, WI.

Credit

The art at the top of this post is from Dover Books’ Vintage Label Art, modified by me to add the “D” to “Win.”

Meet the natives: American arnica

2009-08-17T14:29:00.002-04:00

This is American arnica, Arnica chamissonis, aka Chamisso arnica, which I purchased as small transplants last spring from Richter’s Herbs. This cheerful, daisy-like little plant is doing beautifully in a section of my garden where I dug out a drainage ditch to carry water away from the foundations of the house. Only about 6 inches tall, it is already bushy and covered with flowers. (Correction: The plant is actually about a foot tall. But it's so sprawly that it appears to be shorter.) Given that it’s a perennial and spreads by rhizomes (but not aggressively so), I’m expecting an even better display in future years.

According to the USDA Plants Database, American arnica likes coarse soils, but this area of my front yard is quite clay-ey, despite my efforts to break up the clay with organic material.

The plants database also says that whereas this arnica doesn’t mind occasional flooding (that’s why it’s in the drainage ditch), it has very little tolerance for drought. Though we had a mostly wet summer, lately it’s been hot and dry here. Yet the little arnica continues to bloom its head off.

And though this plant is a sunlover like most of the daisy-like plants (known to plant nerds as composites), it will tolerate partial shade. So all in all, I’d say it’s a pretty undemanding little plant.

What’s more, the composites are almost all good butterfly plants! The flat surface of the bloom provides an ideal landing area for larger butterflies, allowing them to alight without injuring their wings. The central disc is composed of many small flowers, each with a payload of nectar for the butterfly to drink from.

A. americana is native throughout most of Canada and in the western United States. It is not native to the Maritime provinces where I live, but because it’s native as far east as Quebec I classify it as “nearly native”—good enough for my somewhat lax standards.

This is not the arnica traditionally used in herbal medicine. That arnica is A. montana, a European species. However, Richter’s claims that A. americana may have the same properties as A. montana. Please note that although I occasionally report health claims made on behalf of plants, I don’t endorse or deny these claims. Many plants contain substances that might be either toxic or beneficial depending on who uses them and how they are used—please never use a plant medicinally unless you’re sure you’ve identified it correctly and that you know how to use it. For a brief discussion of research on the medical properties of A. montana, see this entry in the Wikipedia.

Make it a dozen … 13? … more?

2009-08-14T14:26:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I announced the arrival of the new ducklings (pictures of the newly hatched are in the post below), saying that I thought Peeps, the mom, had managed to produce “about 10.” This was already quite a lot more ducks than I thought I had invited to this party.

But you know, it’s hard to count ducklings. They move around, they hide underneath mom, behind each other …

So what do you think? I count at least 13. Maybe 14. Ducklings, ducklings, and more ducklings. Oh my.

This one’s not worried …

The ducklings hatched on August 11. They made their first brief appearance outside of the nest yesterday, the 12th. The photo below shows them starting to explore the area around the nest. I brought them water in an old dog bowl, and the day-old duckies immediately jumped in. Even at that age, they know they were born to be tub toys.

That metal thing is part of an old antenna that came down during the big hurricane a few years back. I put it in there because I thought the Muscovies (which are perching ducks) might want to perch on it, but they never do.

As of today Peeps is taking them for long strolls around the duck enclosure, which is a big hoop house covered with chicken wire and shaded by an ancient grapevine. There are so many ducklings that it sometimes looks as though she’s being carried along on a yellow, fluffy wave.

I like that portrait of mom and (some of) the kids.

The photo above shows them visiting the area where the rest of the ducks get their food and water.

And here’s mom teaching them how to hunt for food. Unlike songbirds that are sheltered in the nest until they can fly, and fed by their parents throughout that time, ducklings feed themselves from day one.

The rest of the family is pretty bored with the whole thing. In the photo below, that’s the dad on the right. Hide, Peeps’s mother, is in front. She hatched four eggs only about a month ago, and those are her kids behind her. Yes, they do grow up fast.

The one on the left is Duck, Hide’s sister. She sat on six eggs for two months (they usually hatch after 35 days) but didn’t hatch one. (This may help to explain why I’m a little stunned by the size of Peeps’s brood.) When Hide hatched her four, Duck abandoned her unhatched eggs and started helping to take care of Hide's brood. Hey, it takes a flock.

Make room for ducklings

2009-08-12T18:56:00.009-04:00

There she is, the proud mom. A bit too proud, perhaps, because this overachieving mother seems to have managed to hatch about 10 eggs. (The previous record, held by her mother, was four.) I don't know exactly how many Peeps has because she won't let me get close enough to find out. (The closeup photos below are courtesy of a Zoom lens!) But one thing's for sure -- it's a lot more ducklings than I was expecting.

I am not quite sure what I'm going to do with so many ducks, but if you're in the market for fertilizer, let me know -- I expect to have it in large quantities next spring.

Meanwhile, why worry about the price of duck food when you have tiny ducklings to enjoy?

For information on native plants

2009-05-24T14:26:00.008-04:00

If you're looking for information on native plants, the place to start is usually your local native plant society. Here's a list of native plant societies in the United States and Canada that's accurate as of today, May 24, 2009.

First, here are some cross-border organizations:

For all of North America but especially Canada (it was originally the Canadian Wildflower Society), see the North American Native Plant Society.

For New England states, especially Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, see the website of the New England Wildflower Society.

For Midwestern states and a few others, see the Wild Ones.

For the New York City metropolitan area, see NY-NJ-CT Botany Online.

For Western New York state and nearby areas of Ontario, see the Niagara Frontier Botanical Society.

For the Great Plains Biogeographic Region, which runs from central Canada to Texas, see the Great Plains Native Plant Society.

For prairies of the upper Midwest, see the Prairie Enthusiasts.

If you have trouble getting information from any of the other sources listed here, try the organizations directory maintained by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Additional organizations are listed here by state and province, with the states and provinces arranged in alphabetical order:

Alabama Wildflower Society

Wildflowers of Alabama

Alaska Native Plant Society

Alberta Native Plant Council

Arizona Native Plant Society

Arkansas Native Plant Society

Native Plant Society of British Columbia

Victoria [British Columbia] Horticultural Society

California Botanical Society

California Native Plant Society

Colorado Native Plant Society

Connecticut Botanical Society

Southern California Botanists

Delaware Native Plant Society

Botanical Society of Washington [District of Columbia]

Florida Native Plant Society

Georgia Native Plant Society

Georgia Botanical Society

Native Hawaiian Plant Society

Idaho Native Plant Society

Illinois Native Plant Society

Grand Prairie Friends of Illinois

Indiana Native Plant and Wildflower Society

Iowa Native Plant Society

Iowa Prairie Network

The Grassland Heritage Foundation [Kansas]

Kansas Native Plant Society

Kentucky Native Plant Society

Folsom [Louisiana] Native Plant Society

Louisiana Native Plant Society

Maryland Native Plant Society

Minnesota Native Plant Society

Missouri Native Plant Society

Missouri Prairie Foundation

Montana Native Plant Society

Nebraska Native Plant Society

Nevada Native Plant Society

New Brunswick Botany Club

Native Plant Society of New Jersey

The Wildflower Society of Newfoundland and Labrador

Native Plant Society of New Mexico

Finger Lakes [New York] Native Plant Society

New York Flora Association

North Carolina Native Plant Society

Nova Scotia Wild Flora Society

Native Plant Society of Northeastern Ohio

Ohio Native Plant Society

Ohio Prairie Association

Oklahoma Native Plant Society

University of Oklahoma Botanical Society

Field Botanists of Ontario

Waterloo-Wellington [Ontario] Wildflower Society

Native Plant Society of Oregon

Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] Botanical Club

Delaware Valley [Pennsylvania] Fern & Wildflower Society

Pennsylvania Native Plant Society

Heliconia Society of Puerto Rico

Rhode Island Wild Plant Society

Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan

South Carolina Native Plant Society

Tennessee Native Plant Society

Native Plant Society of Texas

Native Plant Project of the Lower Rio Grande Valley [Texas]

Native Prairies Association of Texas

Utah Native Plant Society

Virginia Native Plant Society

Washington Native Plant Society

West Virginia Native Plant Society

Botanical Club of Wisconsin

Wyoming Native Plant Society

Many thanks to the Michigan Botanical Club, which provided the list I updated in order to create the one above.

The illustration at the top of this post is a free sample courtesy of Dover Publications, from their Crafter's Cornucopia CD-Rom and Book.

Amazing things you can do in a wild garden #1

2009-05-04T17:58:00.010-04:00

In answer to a reader's question, I've just provided instructions on how to move a bumblebee nest. Yes, it can be done. I can't say that I recommend it. For one thing, there is a slight chance you'll get stung. Also, the bees will die in late fall and you can then destroy the nest without harming them.

However, if the nest is in a spot where the bees simply cannot be allowed to stay, it is possible to move them to a nest box and then put them somewhere that's safe for them and you. If you put them in the right kind of nest box (see below), you can even enjoy watching the activities inside the nest.

If you'd like to know how, check out the instructions in the Question & Answer section I've started on the right-hand side of the blog. If you want to see previous Q&As (just one so far, but I hope they'll accumulate) check out the new website I've started. I plan to archive all my old posts here in hope that I do a better job of organizing them than I can here at the blog, so the information will be easier to use.

The information on moving bumblebee nests is adapted from a wonderful book, by the way. I recommend Brian L. Griffin's Humblebee Bumblebee: The Life Story of the Friendly Bumblebees and Their Use by the Backyard Gardener to anyone who's interested in bumbles. The book is hard to find in stores but is still available from Brian's website , which is now being run by his daughter, Lisa Novitch.

The company Brian founded, Knox Cellars, specializes in orchard mason bees, another wonderful native bee. But they do sell a few bumblebee items including the Humble Bumble Observation Home, which Brian designed so that you can actually peek in and watch the bumbles at work. If you have bumbles to move, I'm sure you couldn't find a better new home for them than one of Brian's Humble Bumble homes.

Update: I'm very happy to report that Alicia and her husband, who are sure that the insects nesting in their eves are bumblebees, have decided to put off further construction work until late fall so as not to have to disturb the nest. On behalf of pollinators and pollinator-lovers everywhere, thank you Alicia!

The illustration at the top of this post is courtesy of Dover Publications. It was a free sample from their Full Color Fruit Crate Labels CD-Rom and book.

Bees Facing a Flower Shortage?

2009-04-17T06:59:00.007-04:00

There's a good article on the Scientific American website that tells a CSI-style story of efforts to determine what causes Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious die-offs that are killing large numbers of honeybees and threatening a number of agricultural crops that are honeybee-pollinated, including almonds and blueberries.

The bad news for those who like CSI-style endings is that it looks like there's no one culprit. Evidently a range of stressors are undermining the bees' ability to fend off disease.

One of these stressors is especially interesting to wildlife-friendly gardeners, however: Namely, the bees are apparently suffering from a flower shortage. To quote the article:

"We and other experts also suspected that the bees' natural defenses might be undermined by poor nutrition. Honeybees and wild pollinators, too[,] no longer have the same number or variety of flowers available to them because we humans have tried to 'neaten' our environments. We have, for example, planted huge expanses of crops without weedy, flower-filled borders or fencerows. We maintain large green lawns free of any 'weeds' such as clover or dandelions. Even our roadsides and parks reflect our desire to keep things neat and weed-free. But to bees and other pollinators, green lawns look like deserts. The diets of honeybees that pollinate large acreages of one crop may lack important nutrients, compared with those of pollinators that feed from multiple sources, as would be typical of the natural environment." (Emphasis added.)

So here's my new motto, something to remember the next time you're giving yourself a hard time for having a "messy" garden:

Save a dandelion, save a bee

Let yourself be messy. The bees (and a lot of other critters) will live better if you do.

A drumroll please: Woodpeckers greet the spring

2009-03-21T08:42:00.003-04:00

Spring announced itself with a rat-tat-tatting sound the other day. I was out fairly early on a sunny but cold morning when I heard the sound of a woodpecker hammering away at something. The very rapid rate of the rat-tat-tat (about 15 hits per second) meant that this woodpecker was most likely “drumming”—in other words, announcing his presence to other woodpeckers, especially any females who might be interested in setting up housekeeping with him.

This hard-hitting bird helps the forest and other animals

Woodpeckers are in a family of birds (Picidae) that have strong bills with a chisel-like end that allow them to drill into trees looking for insects to eat. They then use long sticky tongues to get the insects out. Their heads and brains are specially adapted to allow them to take repeated heavy blows without suffering brain damage. Strong claws and a stiff tail help the woodpecker brace itself on a tree trunk while it's hammering.

This ability to find and eat tree-damaging insects makes woodpeckers an important contributor to forest health. (Once upon a time it was thought that woodpeckers hurt the trees they drilled, but it’s now known that the opposite is true. Our forests would be much less healthy without woodpeckers and other insect-eating birds.)

Woodpeckers also play a very important role helping other forest creatures find places to nest and raise young. Woodpeckers use their special bills to excavate holes in dead and dying trees, which the woodpeckers use for nesting. In later years, after the woodpeckers have abandoned the holes, animals such as squirrels and other birds such as chickadees take them over for their own nests. Without woodpeckers and the dead and dying trees they nest in, many animals would be homeless.

Common woodpeckers include the tiny Downy and the large Flicker

There are quite a lot of different woodpeckers seen in North America, but "backyard birders" most often see Downy woodpeckers and Hairy woodpeckers, both of which come to feeders. Like most woodpeckers, Downy and Hairy woodpeckers are black and white with red on the head (at least in the males). The Downy woodpecker is quite small, only 16-18 cm (6-7 inches) long. The hairy woodpecker is much larger at 24-25 cm (9-10 inches).

Gardeners also see Flickers, which are large (30-33 cm) and easy to recognize because they are a sort of beige or buff color with red across the back of the head. On “yellow-shafted” flickers, which are most often seen in eastern North America, the underside of the tail and wings is golden yellow. On "red-shafted" flickers, most often seen in the West, these areas are brick red. Flickers are often seen feeding on the ground, where they are looking for ants, one of their favorite foods.

In my gardens on both the West and East coasts, I've been very fortunate to also see Pileated woodpeckers. These are very large (43-50 cm) birds with very noticeable red crest on the head. They resemble and also sound like the cartoon character “Woody Woodpecker”. The first time you hear the "ha ha ha ha ha" sound of a Piletated woodpecker, you'll know exactly where the cartoonists got the idea for Woody's famous call!

Pileated woodpeckers were once considered to be birds of old-growth forest but they seem to be adapting somewhat to life around humans. Because of their size, however, they are dependent on having large trees to nest in.

Why is this bird banging on my house?

At this time of year homeowners sometimes complain that woodpeckers are hammering on their homes. The woodpecker may be looking for insects, so the woodpecker may be doing you a favor by alerting you to a potential problem. If a woodpecker is looking for insects in your siding, the pecking sound will not be a steady beat. The woodpecker will tap on the siding then wait and listen for sounds that might indicate there are insects inside, drilling only if it thinks there might be food within.

But as I mentioned earlier, in spring woodpeckers also drum on hollow trees and other objects in order to make a loud noise. If they can’t find a hollow tree, they’ll look for something else that makes a satisfying sound—including a metal chimney on your house. Since a favorite time for drumming is early in the morning, homeowners whose chimneys are being used for these jam sessions can get pretty annoyed.

The best way to prevent woodpeckers from bothering your house is to leave plenty of dead or decaying trees (known as snags) in the landscape (as long as you can do so without creating a hazard). Like a lot of animals, woodpeckers are much less likely to bother humans if they can find what they need in nature. Snags are very important to a wide range of animals, so leaving them is one of the most important things anyone can do to help wildlife.

If you are not using a chimney, you can discourage a woodpecker from drumming on it by muffling the sound. This can be done by wrapping the chimney in burlap. (But only if you’re not using it!) Shiny mylar “scare tape” or “scare balloons”, which are available from many nurseries to keep birds away from fruit trees, or hanging aluminum pie pans will sometimes scare them off.

If all else fails, keep in mind that woodpeckers only practice their drumming during nesting season, so you will only have to put up with the noise for a month or two. The benefits woodpeckers bring to our forests and our fellow creatures is surely worth a short spell of early morning drumming. Personally I think it’s one of the cheeriest sounds I know, as it tells me that spring is definitely here.

Please note: I originally wrote a shorter version of this article for The Jazz-ine, an e-newsletter circulated in my part of Nova Scotia.

Planting the bones

2009-03-14T11:10:00.013-04:00

LIKE A BEAUTIFUL FACE, a well-designed garden needs structure. But the bones of a garden are its layers of vegetation--trees, shrubs and groundcovers, possibly with other layers in between or above.

Just as there are standards that define a "classically" beautiful face, there are standards that define an aesthethically pleasing garden. Key among these is the requirement that a well-designed vista should have vegetation at at least 3 levels. In a flower border, this comes from having tall, medium-sized, and short plants. In a landscape, layers are typically provided by large trees at the top or canopy layer, small trees or shrubs at the middle layer, and by a ground layer composed of small shrubby groundcovers or other plants.

In the flower garden, structure comes from planting different sizes of annuals and perennials. For height and plain old cheerfulness, nothing beats sunflowers, as shown in this garden painting by Monet.

In the landscape, trees, shrubs, and groundcovers bring structure to the scene. This painting by Van Gogh shows a garden with at least four layers of vegetation (a large tree, many small trees and shrubs, a planting of perennials, and lawn). He's also added structure using man-made objects: benches, gates, and buildings. For instance, the church tower in the distance on the right echoes the tall tree on the left, creating a canopy layer for this design. The garden gate on the lower right side completes the middle layer.

Happily, multiple layers are also good for birds and other wildlife. Different animals "specialize" in different layers of the environment. Juncos, for instance, feed and nest near the ground, whereas other birds tend to hand out in the middle layer and some will be found only in the treetops. So what's aesthetically pleasing to many of us is also what creates the most hospitable environment for animals. (Personally, I don't think that's the least bit accidental.)

It's important to keep structure in mind when planning a landscape. Trees provide that essential top layer of landscape structure (even aside from all the other benefits they convey). Since trees take a long time to grow, we always want to hold onto and take advantage of any trees already present on the site, creating a design around them. If there are no trees on the site yet, we'll want to decide what we want in that top layer and get that planted before starting to worry about anything else.

While waiting for big trees to mature, consider planting fast-growing trees such as paper birch. Typically trees that grow quickly don't live long ("live fast, die young"), but some clumps of short-lived, fast-growing trees will give at least the illusion of an upper level while the slower growing, long-lived trees plod along to their ultimate size. In the meantime, those fast-living trees provide shelter for wildflowers and animals. And when they do die, they become excellent habitat for birds and other animals that nest in decaying trees.

This homeowoner created structure in a relatively new garden by planting fast-growing paper birch in a key location. Even though they probably won't live long, fast-growing trees create wildlife habitat and the shady conditions needed by many wildflowers that are native to wooded areas.

Sometimes you can get the effect of a canopy layer using man-made structures, especially if you grow vines on them. Some structures such as houses or pergolas can be covered in perennial vines. But you can also use fast-growing annual vines such as scarlet runner beans to mask structures such as telephone poles that wouldn't be suitable for permanent plantings. (Sure, there's a chance you'll lose the vines if the telephone company needs the pole, so that's why you want to plant easy annuals such as scarlet runners. But more likely the phone company will find other things to do, and you and the hummingbirds will get to enjoy the flowers.)

Whether you're gardening for wildlife or gardening for yourself, your environment will be richer and more aesthetically pleasing if you remember to plant the bones.

In this painting by Monet, layers come from low-growing flowering plants, flowering plants that have been raised above the ground in pots and window boxes, a small tree and large shrub, and -- at the top level -- vines that have been trained to grow to the roof of a two-story house. Both Monet paintings, the Van Gogh painting, and the Art Nouveau woman in the background of the image at the top of this post are all courtesy of Dover Publications.

Ninety thousand plants

2009-03-06T12:26:00.017-04:00

Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) is a native North American wildflower. I knew it was native on the West Coast, but I had no idea that it was also native in Massachusetts until I looked it up in the USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database, gateway to a treasure-trove of information on native and naturalized plants.

NINETY THOUSAND PLANTS. Actually, a few hundred more than that. That's how many plants are listed in the USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database, an invaluable resource any time but especially this time of year when many of us are thinking about spring planting.

Although it's never safe to say that any data source is "complete", it's hard to imagine that there's a native or naturalized plant in the United States or Canada that isn't listed here.

This database is invaluable for anyone interested in gardening with native plants. Want to know whether a plant is native in your area? Just look it up at the PLANTS Database. A majority of the plants listed, including pretty much all the common ones, come with maps showing you where they are naturalized (that is, have escaped from cultivation) and where they are native, along with a wealth of other standardized, well-sourced information.

Take Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) as an example: If I look it up on the database, I will find a map showing that it is "present" (that is, naturalized) in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts. If I click on "view native status", I see that the plant is native in all those states and the one Canadian province as well.

Also available on this page are photos of D. formosa, information about the plant's status (at risk, considered invasive, that sort of thing), and a link to the plant's "Conservation Plant Characteristics" sheet. This standardized form contains about 100 items, including active growth period, bloom period, flower color, propagation requirements, growth requirements, and commercial uses.

But -- let's be honest -- the Conservation Plant Characteristics page is designed for plant wonks. Want something that's more gardener friendly? At the bottom of the top page for D. formosa are links to other websites that are better written and easier to use. For instance, at the Native Plant Database at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center you will find information on how to grow Pacific bleeding heart in a garden and also on its wildlife uses and other benefits in the landscape, all written in gardener-ese.

The information made available through the PLANTS Database is slightly different for each plant. Whereas some plants have no web page of their own, you can at least see how even the most unusual plants are related to other plants in the database. And there is plenty of information for the more common plants. Almost 800 plants come with plain English fact sheets or plant guides that provide much of the information any gardener would want to know.

So for instance, if you look up Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), you can click on a link to get a two-page fact sheet in pdf format with brief information on alternate names, uses (including landscaping and wildlife), conservation uses, appearance, distribution, growing conditions, and even varieties (known as cultivars) that have unusual colors and other features and are grown specifically for the nursery trade. The plant guide for Purple coneflower is four pages long and includes information on propagation. Both the fact sheet and the guide are written in lay language.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is one of nearly 800 plants for which the PLANTS Database provides detailed information in the form of fact sheets and/or plant guides.

I could probably go on forever about this database, but the best way for you to learn about it is to play around with it yourself. Here are just a few more suggestions for ways to use the database:

Want to know what plants are native where you live? Use the State Search function to generate lists of native plants for your state or province. So for instance, when I searched for Nova Scotia, where I live, I generated a list of almost 8,000 plants that are native here.

Interested in finding out whether any member of a specific genus is native in your area? Use State Search to generate a list of plants native to your area, then scroll to the species name you're interested in. So for example, if I generate a list of plants native to Nova Scotia, then scroll to the Dicentras, I find that whereas D. formosa isn't native here, D. cucullaria (aka Dutchman's breeches) is native in this province. There isn't much information about Dutchman's breeches at the USDA website, but that's not a problem: By using the links at the bottom of the page I can easily get all the gardening information I need from sources such as the Kemper Center for Home Gardening and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

I can use the PLANTS database to find out what plants are native in my state or province. Even if the PLANTS database doesn't have much information on a specific plant that I'm interested in, it will probably provide links to websites that do have good information on the plant. The photo above shows Dutchman's breeches (D. cucullaria), which is native where I live even though its close relative Pacific bleeding heart (D. formosa) is not. The copyright-free photo was taken by Jennifer Anderson @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database.

Curious about the status of a plant you're thinking of adding to your garden? Check it out in the database. For instance, if I look up Dicentra spectabilis, the common garden bleeding heart, I will find that it is not native in North America but has naturalized in several states. This tells me that I should check the USDA page to make sure that it's not considered noxious anywhere (it's not) and the Invasive Plants of Canada and Invasive Plants of the Eastern United States websites to make sure that it's not invasive (it's not) before deciding to introduce it into my garden.

Maps at the PLANTS Database site tell me that Common bleeding heart (D. spectabilis) is not native anywhere in North America but has naturalized in a few states. Further research confirmed that although the plant can naturalize, this old-fashioned "cottage garden" plant, which is very popular with hummingbirds, is not considered invasive or noxious anywhere.

All in all, this database is a great resource. If you're shopping for plants this spring, it wouldn't hurt to assign one of your browser tabs to this site.

Apples for Animals

2009-02-27T22:04:00.007-04:00

The image above is from Full-Color Fruit Crate Labels, courtesy Dover Publications.

IF YOU LIVE IN A RURAL AREA or have a large property, there's a good chance you have one or more apple trees. You may have planted them yourself, but it's also possible that they appeared on their own. Wild apple trees have been cropping up all over the North American landscape for a couple of hundred years now.

Only a few species of crabapple are considered native here, but a wide variety of apples have been introduced since the arrival of European settlers, sometimes deliberately but often just because someone threw an apple core in the right place. I have one apple tree that is growing happily where my compost bin used to be. I moved the bin rather than cut down the apple because it amuses me to think that it must have grown from an apple core one of my parents tossed into the trash.

Wild apples are one of the exceptions (and there are some) to the general rule that "native is better" in choosing plants for the wildlife garden. Wild apples provide food in the form of fruit, seeds, buds, nectar, sap, and insects. Birds nest in the branches. The older trees develop cavities that are prized as nest sites by many species. The list of animals that benefit from wild apples includes everything from bears to butterflies.

If you are lucky enough to have wild apples on your property, you can just let them grow. A friend of mine refers to these untended apple trees as "living brush piles" and happily enjoys watching all the birds and other animals they attract.

However, you can also prune wild apple trees to encourage fruit production. If you want to prune your apple trees, this is probably a good time to start. Most authorities say that you should prune apples as late in winter as possible (so as to avoid damage from harsh cold) but before leaves begin to appear on the tree. In most regions, this means pruning sometime between late February and early April. Pruning can be hard work (especially if you're out of shape after a long winter), so I've decided to start now but plan on working only for short periods when the weather is good. That way I can take it easy and do only as much work as I feel like doing on any given day.

Here are a few key things to remember when pruning an apple tree. Many of these pointers also apply to pruning other trees and shrubs:

The first step in pruning any tree or shrub is to remove dead or diseased branches and branches that are crossed or rubbing together.
Fruit production is stimulated by sunlight, so a lot of your effort in pruning an apple tree will be to expose the branches to light. Neglected apple trees tend to get quite dense, so you will also want to thin out the canopy so as to allow sunlight to reach the remaining branches. Typically this means removing a few limbs.
But never remove more than 1/3 of the canopy of any plant in one year. If the plant needs a lot of work, plan on stretching it out over several years.
Apple trees must be pollinated by another apple tree in order to bear fruit. So there is no point in pruning an apple tree if you have only one tree in the area. If you have an apple tree that isn't fruiting, consider planting one nearby.
Horizontal branches (that is, those that extend at an angle of 45 to 90 degrees from the trunk) are the strongest and also the ones that receive the most sunlight. So you will want to keep those.
In contrast, drooping branches, branches that shoot upward (aka water sprouts) and branches forming on the lower trunk and coming up from the root (aka suckers) should be removed.
Branches that are growing in toward the trunk instead of away from it are often removed so as to keep the interior of the tree open. But again, don't take too much in one year.
For aesthetic reasons and in order to make it easier to reach the fruit, some people shorten apple trees by chopping off the tops. This isn't necessary if you are growing the trees for wildlife. Pruning the tops of trees requires special equipment, and climbing on ladders is dangerous, so unless you have a really powerful reason to keep the tree short, I wouldn't bother with this type of pruning.
Proper pruning technique is important to prevent disease from getting into the tree. There are lots of good resources online (see below).
Once you've pruned your apple trees, consider using the branches to make brush piles. This will create even more habitat for wildlife.

Of the resources I found online, my favorite document on pruning wild apple trees for wildlife came from the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, an excellent all-around source for information on gardening in the Northeast: Wild Apple Trees for Wildlife

Some other good resources on pruning wild apple trees:

NRCS Natural Resources Conservation Service Upland Wildlife Habitat Management: Apple Tree Release and Pruning (pdf file)
Winter Pruning of Trees by Paul Rodman
Wild Apple Trees: Pruning for Wildlife by Scott Dunlop
How to Prune Apple Trees Between Autumn and Spring (video)
Managing Abandoned Orchards and Apple Trees for Wildlife

And here is a good resource on pruning from the U. of Maine: Pruning Woody Landscape Plants.

Opening that can of worms

2009-02-15T15:42:00.007-04:00

This is a must-read for all wildlife-friendly gardeners. Susan Harris of the Sustainable Gardening Blog has done a thorough job of researching all the ins and outs (as in "the worms go in and the worms go out) of composting with worms, including the vexing issue of whether vermicomposting contributes to the destruction of woodland ecosystems.

To summarize the high points: Earthworms change the soil. This is great if you grow vegetables and some conventional garden plants because earthworms produce the kind of soil these plants love. But it's not great if you're trying to protect a woodland ecosystem where earthworm activity has historically been very low. In woodlands, many plants rely on a thick layer of "duff" (organic material) in which to grow; high earthworm activity decomposes this duff too quickly, threatening the survival of many native woodland wildflowers.

As is so often the case, the species that present the greatest threat are not native to North America. Now, this much many of us already knew. But what Harris discovered in her research is that it is beginning to look as though the primary threat is one particular non-native: Lumbricus rubellus, aka the night crawler, the earthworm commonly used as bait. (The popularity of this worm as bait helps to explain why, unfortunately, it has been spread so widely.)

But there's good news for gardeners. According to Harris, the type of earthworm commonly used in vermicomposting does not present a threat to woodland ecosystems. That's because the red wiggler, Eisenia fetida, doesn't survive well in the wild.

Harris advises her readers to make sure they use only red wigglers in their composting efforts, purchasing them from reliable sources. My solution to this problem is simpler and cheaper: I use worms I collect in my own garden. That way I can't add any non-native species to the environment unless they were already there (and if they were already there, my composting efforts won't make any difference to the population). Of course, if you have no red wigglers in your garden, this may not work for you. But why not give it a try? The worst that can happen is that your initial vermicomposting effort will fail, and you will know that you have to purchase red wigglers.

Another good piece of advice Harris passes on in this article is to avoid dumping the contents of a worm bin in a wooded area. As a matter of fact, you should never dump any garden waste in any natural area.

Incidentally, ducks love to eat earthworms--especially those big, juicy nightcrawlers!

Signs of the Season

2009-02-11T11:58:00.006-04:00

When you hear the fee bee bee sound of the chickadees, spring is on its way. Most likely the birds are staking out territory in preparation for spring nesting.

This cheerful sound is one of a few heartening signs that a long winter is coming to an end. Another is the lengthening days. Although in theory the days have been getting longer ever since December, it seems as though it's only now, post Groundhog Day, that the difference becomes noticeable.

And of course another infallible sign of spring is the sudden appearance of gardening supplies and seed packets in all the stores. Gardening seems to be getting the jump on Valentine's Day this year -- I think I've seen more seed packets than greeting cards on the shelves.

This is the time to order plants and seeds and plan the garden, if you haven't already done so. The garden shed can be excavated and tools prepared for early spring work. On nicer days, many trees and shrubs can be pruned now while still dormant. And it's easier to see the shape of a plant when the leaves are off.

But don't prune heavily if you want to make wildlife habitat and achieve a naturalistic style. Plants should be shaped but not scalped. And they should be left open enough so that birds and other animals can find shelter inside.

If you have enough room on your property, make brush piles out of any large branches you collect. Keep them well away from the house in case of fire, but do try to put brush piles where you can watch them from a window, even if you have to use binoculars. You'll be amazed at the number of birds and small animals a brush pile will attract.

If you didn't put up nest boxes on a nice day in fall (the recommended approach!), there is still time to do so. In fact, in England Valentine's Day marks the beginning of National Nest Box Week. But before you try to install nest boxes, do be sure that you can do it safely. Any time you work on a tall ladder, have someone with you to hold the ladder and go for help if you do fall.

In choosing nest boxes, keep in mind that the best boxes are not necessarily the cutest ones. Each species of bird has special requirements, and what you want is a plain box built according to specifications for the species you want to attract. I talked about how to choose a box for chickadees in this post, and there is also useful information here.

If you've been feeding the birds through the winter, plan on keeping your feeders up through spring nesting season. You can collect short pieces of yarn, animal hair, and even lint to put out for use by nesting birds.

The graphic at the top of this post is courtesy of Dover Publications, from their book Old-Fashioned Silhouettes. The word "Spring" is my addition, however.

Happy Groundhog Day!

2009-01-31T09:10:00.003-04:00

FEBRUARY 1-2 FALLS MIDWAY between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. We are now one quarter of the way between the longest night of the year and the shortest.

Many festivals are associated with these two days. February 2 is Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Imbolc/Imbolg, or the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, depending on your tradition. The Feast of St. Brigid is celebrated on February 1, especially in Ireland.

In Northern Europe these festivals were associated with the beginning of spring, as they coincide with the time when ewes can first be milked, seeds sown the previous fall begin to grow, and there are other signs of new life. In northern North America, this is High Winter, the time when we are likely to see our coldest weather.

Only uncertainty is abundant

This is a time to face uncertainty and the worry that goes with it. Earlier generations would have looked with concern at their remaining supplies of firewood and food: Is there enough to keep us going until winter is over and fresh food becomes available at last? The rest of the winter was likely to be unpleasant, with increasingly stale foodstuffs being parsimoniously doled out. A prolonged winter could mean starvation. One old saying reported from Vermont is that on Candlemas you should still have half your hay and half your wood. In some parts of Ireland, the Feast of St. Brigid is celebrated by leaving a sheaf of corn and an oat cake on the doorstep for fairies to eat. This is a sign of gratitude for the previous year’s good crops and a wish for the next year’s crops to do equally well.

No doubt many people checked their woodpiles and larders at this time and found them wanting, just as many people today are looking at their investments and wondering how they’ll make it through retirement.

Not surprisingly many traditions emphasize efforts to predict how long winter will last. An English saying is:

If Candlemas be fair and bright, Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, Winter will not come again.

We also have the tradition of watching animals for signs of how much longer winter will hang on. The custom of observing one specific animal on one particular day probably arose in Germany, where hedgehogs were probably the animals of choice. (It may not be a coincidence that hedgehogs were at one time considered sacred to the Great Goddess.) Groundhogs were used once the tradition moved to North America.

A Time for Preparation

Some cultures cope with the uncertainty of this time by engaging in rituals of purification. The Ancient Romans named the month of February after their word februare, which means “to purify” (and seems to have found its way into the product name “Febreze”), and dedicated this month to cleansing and purification.

The association of February with purification lasted through the Middle Ages and into modern times. Often rituals were used to purify or cleanse the fields before they could be planted. Among the Celts, Imbolc may have been celebrated by a ritual procession around the farm, designed to create a protective boundary around the land. In the movie “Groundhog Day”, the character played by Bill Murray is forced to relive February 2 over and over again until he … well, you should watch the movie and see for yourself.

Contemporary versions of these ancient rituals of might be to mend clothes, repair broken objects, sharpen knives and other tools, paint a room, clean out a closet or your inbox, save money, write a will. You could open that statement and find out how much is left in your retirement account. You could watch “Groundhog Day” or visit the groundhogs at a local zoo. You could wonder how long the Recession will last. Ask the groundhog if he happens to know—he probably knows as much as the economists do.

This season is a particularly hopeful one for gardeners. This is when we get out the paper and pencils, the catalogs, the gardening books, the wish lists of plants, and start planning out gardens. It's also a good time to inspect your tools and do any maintenance or sharpening you neglected to do when you put them away (or, like me, threw them in a corner of the garden storage space) in the fall. On nicer days, take a walk around your property and look for signs that animals are becoming active once again. Think about pruning shrubs and trees while they are dormant. It's easier to see the architecture of a deciduous plant when it has no leaves. And don't forget to put out food for the birds (and fairies)!

A poem for Groundhog Day

By Lynn Ungar

Celebrate this unlikely oracle,
this ball of fat and fur,
whom we so mysteriously endow
with the power to predict spring.
Let's hear it for the improbable heroes who,
frightened at their own shadows, nonetheless unwittingly work miracles. …

For the rest of the poem with a photo and music, please visit the Panhala website.

A few plums

2009-01-26T08:20:00.005-04:00

HERE ARE A PARTICULARLY INTERESTING ITEMS picked from the latest installment of the Wild Ones organization's e-mail newsletter:

Wild Ones now has its own channel on YouTube. At the moment they have 7 videos including tours of the new Wild Ones Ecocenter now and 11 months ago. The rest are photo contests from 2003 through 2008.

The website of the US Fish and Wildlife Service National Wildlife Refuge System now has an educational offering titled Managing Invasive Plants: Concepts, Principles, and Practices. This is designed for people who are managing large natural areas on public land in the United States but some ideas could be adapted to gardens and smaller landscapes. From the gardener's standpoint, the most useful information is in the section on management, particularly physical, chemical, and biological methods of control. If you have enough land, you may be interested in the sections on prescribed grazing (I'm planning to take a good look at the section on goats) and prescribed burning. All the sections are overviews, so if you already know a lot about control of invasive species you may find that there is not much new here.

The Pollinator Partnership is offering a number of handouts that were prepared for the 2008 Pollinator Week last June. These are in pdf format and include:

Housing poultry

2009-01-11T08:49:00.011-04:00

December 2007: The ducks wait for me to find them a place to spend the winter. In case you're wondering, bathtubs should be reserved for rubber duckies.

PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN BACKYARD POULTRY these days, so I thought I might say a few words on that subject. Most people choose chickens, which I've never had. I chose ducks because I had read that they are easier to care for than chickens are. This has certainly been true of my Muscovy ducks, who are almost in-duck-structible, as I like to say.

Whatever poultry you pick, be sure to have good housing for them. My one big mistake was that I got the ducks before I had made proper arrangements for living quarters. I did arrange a nice home for the younglings on a deck, but that worked well when they were youngly. Eventually they grew, learned how to fly (well, they don't fly well so it's more of an assisted hop), and escaped down to the pond. This was fine too for a while. The ducks had an idyllic summer living la vida duckie (though the pond's frogs may not have enjoyed it so much).

When the pond froze, however, we soon discovered--as countless farmers have learned before us--that keeping animals over winter is not just a pond full of duckies. My husband and I had to catch them. Which was, as they say, a laff riot. It is truly a shame that nobody was out there with a videocam.

Then, since we weren't willing to go the traditional route--kill them, cook them, eat them--we had to figure out a way to house them over the winter. They spent some time locked up in a bathroom while I rigged a winter shelter for them on a back porch. Then they spent the winter trying to get out of their too-small shelter, and often succeeding. More hilarity ensued.

I was lucky enough to have a large hoop-house, formerly used as a greenhouse but abandoned except for weeds and a big, overgrown grapevine. Last spring we covered the hoops with chicken wire, then dug a trench around the outside of the shelter and buried more chicken wire down to a depth of about a foot. This was to prevent predators from digging under the wall.

It is particularly important for your shelter to be sturdy enough to keep predators out, as just about everything loves poultry. This is as true in the city as anywhere else. One urban friend of mine lost most of her flock after a neighbor's dogs got loose. She had a well-made hen coop, which had kept raccoons out for years. But it wasn't strong enough to defeat marauding pet dogs.

Even with the precautions we had taken, we lost two ducks after predators (raccoons, most likely) managed to break the door to the duckhouse. After that we installed a much sturdier door, held in place by three bolts, and I started inspecting the shelter regularly for signs of attempted break-ins. Eventually I reinforced some of the chicken wire when I noticed that somebody had started chewing on it. Since then the ducks seem to be doing pretty well, and I'm planning to get more in the spring.

July, 2008: The Duckburg Biosphere Reserve (as we like to call it) is a much better home for ducks. The shelter in the middle of the photo is a kennel that used to belong to my late giant-breed dog Molly. The old grapevine provides shade in the summer. That metal thing to the left of the dog kennel is part of an old antenna. I thought the ducks might like to perch on it (Muscovies are perching ducks) but they don't use it. On the other hand, the grapevine is using it, which creates more shade. Not shown in the photo is a child's swimming pool, which is their pond. This year I'm planning to replace it with a similar-sized stock-watering tank, having discovered that I can buy such a thing at the local feed store.

As the hoop house is open to the elements, when winter arrived I took the old dog kennel you see in the photo above, and separated the two halves. Each half is now a low-ceilinged duck house big enough to hold several ducks. I used scraps of plywood, paneling, insulation, styrofoam, and old cardboard to insulate these shelters, and (weather permitting) try to keep the floor well covered with wood chips and hay. When temperatures are below freezing, I check the ducks 2-3 times a day depending on the weather, taking a bucket of warm water with me every time. I don't mind doing this, as I like the ducks and enjoy visiting them.

As you can see, keeping poultry can be a good deal of work. But if you are not trying to do it on the ultra-cheap, as I am, you could make it a lot easier by starting out with a well-designed, well-built shelter. Otherwise be prepared for a lot of comedy -- and occasional tragedy -- while you figure out an affordable way to shelter and protect your birds.

Sustainable Sites

2009-01-08T07:51:00.005-04:00

Above, Monet's garden as painted by Monet. Image courtesy of Dover Publications.

A VERY ENCOURAGING EVENT HAPPENED last November: Publication of a 180-page draft of a report sponsored by the the United States Botanic Garden, the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Lady Bird JohnsonWildflower Center. Together these organizations have put together the Sustainable Sites Initiative, a science-based effort to create guidelines for sustainable landscapes and restoration projects. The draft report was based on more than 2 years of research by experts in fields ranging from hydrology to human health. You can download it at the Sustainable Sites website, with comments being accepted until January 20 and the final report scheduled for publication this summer. Ultimately this process is supposed to lead to the development of criteria for determining whether a site is sustainable.

If you'd like an overview of the report from a gardener's perspective, check out "How Green Is Your Garden? A New Rating System May Tell You" by Anne Ravner in the January 7 issue of the New York Times. Ravner visited the United States Botanical Garden in Washington and uses a tour of the garden (with luscious photos, of course) to illustrate sustainable-gardening tips such as using native plants, avoiding pesticides, and using "right plant/right place" planting to put plants where they will receive the right amount of water naturally. For even more detail on the botanical garden's sustainability initiative, see this page at the Sustainable Sites site. There is also a page on conservation at the botanical garden's own website.

Winter Solstice Greetings

2008-12-21T16:36:00.004-04:00

Greetings to all on Winter Solstice, 2008. For some information on Solstice and some thoughts on its meaning, please see my new blog, "Wild Flora's Wild Ramblings."

Drawing courtesy of Dover Publications.

Thanks and thoughts

2008-12-18T12:21:00.008-04:00

THANKS TO ALL who have commented on the previous post, especially to Gloria for her warm welcome back. For about 13 months I was involved in a very rewarding but very time-consuming project--educating woodland owners about ways to earn income from selective harvesting of a few trees instead of the wholesale clearcutting that is too frequently practiced in this area. I struggled to keep up with the demands of the project and this blog but finally caved in and stopped blogging. Now the project is over, I'm easing back in to posting.

While off doing other things, I did have some time to think about the blog, however, and I have been thinking about taking a slightly different approach than the one I was using before. I'd like to make it easier for me to keep up with the blog and at the same time make sure that those who are kind enough to read the blog find it, a., useful and interesting and, b., easy to read.

Here are some of the conclusions I've reached so far. I'd appreciate any comments anyone has to offer:

Every blogger has her own strengths, but I think my greatest strength is probably my ability to do research. Other bloggers are better writers, are more knowledgeable about gardening, etc. etc., but I seem to excel at reasearch. Probably it's because I'm a former journalist, but I enjoy research and seem to be pretty good at it. I also enjoy sharing the results. I also think this is probably a good service to provide for readers because, let's face it, in the Blogosphere lots of people have opinions. Facts, not so much. At any rate, I've been thinking that this blog should specialize in offering research-based answers to specific questions. In fact, I'd enjoy answering reader questions if anyone would like to pose any.
I find it impossible to post as often as other bloggers do, and yet I'm sure my erratic schedule must be annoying for people who read this blog. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier on everyone if I tried to stick to a schedule, even if it isn't very frequent. Once a month is nothing by blogging standards, for instance, but it is at least a schedule I could stick to. And those of you who do not use feed readers would at least know when to check this space for new material.

The art above is from an old cigar box label and is courtesy of Dover Publications, which gives away free samples of its clip art books and CD-Roms.

Not soon enough

2008-12-11T09:19:00.003-04:00

THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL Protection Agency has announced that it is finally going to impose restrictions on the amount of pollution that can be spewed by lawnmowers, weed whackers, and other gas-powered engines in lawn and garden equipment. Effective in 2011, these machines will be required to cut smog-forming emissions by 35 percent.

The EPA has estimated that small gas-powered lawn and garden machinery emits anywhere from 9 to 33 percent of some air pollutants, depending on where you live. The person operating the equipment gets an even higher dose. Anything that removes some of this pollution has to be counted as good.

But why wait until 2011 to enjoy these benefits? Instead of a lawn mower, why not use a scythe? It's good exercise and nonpolluting as well. Much easier to store, too.

The scythe shown at left is a traditional Austrian scythe from Lee Valley. I was assured by an expert on scythes that it is an excellent choice for a beginner who is just interested in cutting grass. (There are other styles of scythes that might be more useful for other situations.) To learn more about this scythe, see this page at the Lee Valley website. (If you have any trouble finding it, look under Gardening/Lawn Care/Assorted).

The Duck-Slug Principle

2008-12-04T10:56:00.009-04:00

Above, Muscovy duck mom Hide with baby Peeps, photographed in their guaranteed-slug-free enclosure last summer.

"YOU DON'T HAVE an excess of slugs. You have a deficiency of ducks!" This is a paraphrase of a quote often ascribed to Bill Mollison, one of the founders of the Permaculture movement back in the 1970s. Permaculture is a way of designing property so that all the pieces (land, water, air, animals, plants, humans, and human constructions) work together to provide the basic necessities of life. One of the big attractions of Permaculture is that it uses natural means to do things that otherwise would have to be done through human labor.

For instance, rather than kill slugs ourselves, all we have to do is make sure we have enough ducks!

Permaculture is biased toward creating habitat for humans. Domesticated animals get more attention than wild animals do, and agricultural plants are favored over native species. Even so, a homestead designed along Permaculture design principles will make a lot more room for wildlife than a conventional property wood. Permaculture design ideas are compatible and can be very helpful in a "wild" approach to land management.

Take, for instance, control populations of pest insects. The slug/duck formula applies here too. By providing cover and food for the animals that eat these pests, I can control them without having to do much work myself.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to plant plants that attract these insects, which are usually referred to as beneficial to distinguish them from the pesty kind. Check this site for a list of plants that attract various types of beneficial insects.

For information on Permaculture, see the Wikipedia entry and the website of the Permaculture Institute.

Duck (Her name is "Duck")

"Dish-Style" Hummingbird Feeders

2008-04-10T06:25:00.010-04:00

Here is it again: Here's a rerun of the picture of the dish-style feeder I recommended about a month ago. This post will give you leads on how to find one, or one like it. Except for this one, all of the photos in this post are from the respective manufacturers' websites.

SINCE RECOMMENDING "DISH-STYLE" HUMMINGBIRD FEEDERS about a month ago, I've had several inquiries from people who have had trouble finding one. Several large companies do make them, however, so with a few tips (which will arrive shortly) anyone who wants a dish-style feeder should be able to locate one for sale.

First, let's quickly review the advantages of dish-style feeders. In my book, the main advantage is that they're easy to clean: Just remove the top and you can clean the inside thoroughly, without having to use a bottle brush. Another advantage is that because the feeding holes are above the water level, there is no risk of dripping as there is with styles that place the holes below the liquid. This style also deters some of the larger insects that are attracted to sugar water, because their tongues aren't long enough to reach the water. (If the insect is small enough to crawl in through the feeding hole, however, it will do so.)

So how can you find them? I'm aware of three companies that make this style of feeder.

Yule-Hyde

The one in the photo above is made by Yule-Hyde Associates Co., a Canadian company. It has most of the characteristics I recommend in a hummingbird feeder:

1. Dish style for easy cleaning.

2. Perches for better viewing of the birds.

3. Mounts on the window. This allows better viewing of the birds, but another advantage is that window-mounted feeders are rarely troubled by sugar-seeking ants.

The one drawback of this inexpensive feeder is that the perches seem to break off easily. For that reason, a more expensive feeder made out of tougher plastic may be a better investment.

Now oddly, I cannot find this feeder on the Yule-Hyde website. In fact, I can't seem to find this feeder available online or even mentioned online. I purchased mine at a local feed store, but have no idea how anyone who doesn't live near me can get one. All I can suggest is that you ask local stores whether they are able to order them. Ask for Model Number HBW1.

Aspects

Meanwhile, two U.S. companies also make dish-style hummingbird feeders, and their products are widely available. These feeders are more expensive than the Yule Hyde, but they are also made of tougher plastic. So they may well be a better deal in the long run.

Right, the Aspects HummZinger "Mini" holds 8 ounces of sugar water, which is usually plenty as you should replace the food frequently anyway. Note the perches and the ant moat around the hanging stem.

Aspects makes several versions of its dish-style "HummZinger" brand. All are hanging styles (in other words, not window mountable), but they do have perches. They come with a lifetime guarantee and also have built-in ant moats, which is a convenient feature on a hanging feeder. (An ant moat, as the name implies, is a trough that you fill with water. This helps to prevent ants from reaching the sugar water in your feeder.) An ant moat is nice to have but not essential on a hummingbird feeder as ant moats can be bought separately from companies such as Lee Valley.

Aspects also sells a window-mounted dish-style feeder which they call the "Nectar Bar". Unfortunately, the Nectar Bar does not have perches.

Right, the Nectar Bar from Aspects. I like the little roof that prevents rain from getting into the sugar water, but I wish it had perches.

Droll Yankees

Droll Yankees is one of the best-known and most respected makers of bird feeders, and they also make dish-style hummingbird feeders. They offer a hanging style and a window mounted style, both in a sturdy plastic with a lifetime guarantee. Both feeders also have a perchable rim.

Right, dish-style feeders from Droll Yankees. The top one is a hanging style, the "Happy Eight 2", while under that is the window-mounted "Window Hummer 2". Both have perchable rims.

I think all of the feeders described here are good ones and would be happy to have any of them. However, by a hair I think my favorite would be the Droll Yankees window-mounted dish-style hummingbird feeder, shown at bottom.

Where's your garden?

2008-04-03T20:26:00.006-04:00

This map created by Steve Baskauf of Vanderbilt University shows North American ecoregions as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. For a much larger, interactive version of the map see Steve's Bioimages website. For a short stack of legalese pertaining to this image, please see the bottom of this post.

IT'S A GOOD THING I'M NOT INTO CONSPIRACY THEORIES. If I were, I'd be casting a very suspicious eye on plant hardiness zones.

This concept originated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture but has become very popular in gardening circles. The idea is that plants can be assigned a numerical rating based on the minimum temperatures they are able to withstand. This gives you a rough idea of whether a given plant can survive in your garden, regardless of where the plant originated.

Imbedded in this concept is the notion that a garden can and should be free of any ties to its location. Bring in rhododendrons from China or four-o'clocks from Peru, it doesn't matter as long as the plant can survive on your site. Gardeners are even admired for their ability to grow plants from far away places. And if they are able to grow plants not rated for their zone (tropical plants in upstate New York, for example), why, they are considered positively heroic.

Now, if I were prone to believe in conspiracies, I'd say this is part of a plot cooked up by the horticulture industry to sell more plants--especially plants that are likely to struggle and die in new homes to which they are poorly suited. And then no doubt the sellers would be shocked, shocked to learn that these plants have to be replaced.

But I'd rather just propose an alternative. What if we stop admiring gardeners who pay no attention to where they live? (They can go on gardening that way if they want to. I'm suggesting that the rest of us quit just praising them for it.) Instead, let's start to admire gardeners whose work conveys a sense of place. What if, instead of worrying about plant hardiness zones, we start thinking about ecoregions instead?

I'm not sure whether anyone knows precisely where the ecoregion concept originated, but the World Wildlife Fund (aka the World Wide Fund for Nature) has done the most to define and develop it. Their less-than-wieldy definition of an ecoregion is "a large area of land or water that contains a geographically distinct assemblage of natural communities that (a) share a large majority of their species and ecological dynamics; (b) share similar environmental conditions, and; (c) interact ecologically in ways that are critical for their long-term persistence."

But you get the idea. According to the WWF, there are 825 terrestrial ecoregions on the planet, so figuring out which of them you live in can be a challenge. Fortunately, Steven Baskauf, a senior lecturer in Vanderbilt University's Department of Biological Sciences, used the WWF's GIS files to develop a map of the ecoregions in North America. I've provided a glimpse of this map above, but to see it in its full glory you have to visit Steve's Bioimages website.

There, you will most likely be able to home in on your very own region. (Currently the map represents 76 of 125 ecoregions on the continent.) For instance, I clicked on Eastern Canada and, from there, easily found that I am in the New England/Acadian Forests, known to the WWF as NA0410.

What's more, from Steve's site I was then able to link back to the National Geographic's "Ecoregion profile" of my region, which linked me to the WWF's scientific report. Back at the Bioimages site, I was also able to find a link to the WWF's list of species found in this region, as well as other images and information.

OK, "Hail to thee, NA0410" doesn't have much of a future as a bioregional anthem. But at least NA0410 is home, and the plants that come from dear old NA0410 tie me to the place I live. "Plant Hardiness Zone 5", on the other hand, is marketing. And its plants tie me to nothing except somebody's desire to make a buck.

The map shown above is copyright 2002-2004 Steve Baskauf, who used data from Olson, D. M, E. Dinerstein, E.D. Wikramanayake, N.D. Burgess, G.V.N. Powell, E.C. Underwood, J.A. D'amico, I. Itoua, H.E. Strand, J.C. Morrison, C.J. Loucks, T.F. Allnutt, T.H. Ricketts, Y. Kura, J.F. Lamoreux, W.W.Wettengel, P. Hedao, & K.R. Kassem. 2001. Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth. BioScience 51:933-938

The Six Word Memoir Meme

2008-03-26T07:21:00.004-04:00

SO PINE NUT TAGGED ME WITH A MEME. An interesting one, too. I like haiku; the "six-word memoir" seems to be similar, an attempt to capture a moment in just a few words.

This meme requests that you write a six-word memoir "of your inner birder." At first I was ready to settle for something wordless yet charged with symbolism, like the clip art above, which I purchased many years ago from an outfit called ArtParts.

I still like this idea, but then I started thinking that I don't really consider myself a birder. I mostly enjoy so-called backyard birds myself. I like to feed birds; in fact, I like to feed most things. My first reaction, on seeing almost anything, is to wonder what it would like to eat. And then of course, because I wasn't looking for it, my six-word memoir popped into my head.

Which I think is how haiku and their friends are supposed to work. So here it is:

Hello there. What do you eat?

If you'd like to participate in this meme, consider yourself tagged. Here's Pinenut's original post.

Gardens BEE Very Important!

2008-03-22T10:15:00.011-04:00

Long-horned bees, Melissodes spp., are among the native bees being studied by scientists at the U. of California, Berkeley. The researchers found that males of this genus like to sleep overnight in cosmos flowers. (The flower shown in this photo, however, is a verbena.) The photo was taken by Johnny N. Dell, bugwood.org, and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

THERE'S A GREAT NEW ARTICLE about native bees in the March/April issue of Orion magazine. In "The Headbonker's Ball," Matt Jenkins visits a U. of California Berkeley entomologist and grad students who are studying California's native bees. What makes the work of entomologist Gordon Frankie unusual is that he focuses on cities rather than on rural areas. He has found that native bees are doing better in urban areas than they are in California's agricultural regions.

Gardens As Reservoirs

This finding is similar to one I reported last July. That study, conducted in England, found that wildlife-friendly gardens were critical to the survival of threatened British bees. Likewise in the very different environment of California, Frankie and his grad students are finding that properly designed and maintained gardens are now better habitat for bees (and presumably for other pollinators as well) than agricultural areas where farmers grow only one crop and also may make frequent use of pesticides.

In other words, here is still more evidence that what we do in our gardens can be vital to the survival of species. As Frankie puts it in the Orion article, a garden can be "a reservoir of genetic material" helping to keep species alive when their natural habitat has been lost.

Findings From a Bee Garden

In order to explore the contributions gardens can make to survival of native bees, Frankie et al. started an urban bee garden in Berkeley back in 2003. Among their findings: Although a few non-native plants do seem to be helpful to bees, native bees are six times more likely to visit native plants than non-natives. At least in California, plants in the Salvia family (that is, sages) seem to be among the best bee-attracting plants. But Frankie stresses the importance of planting a variety of plants, as different plants attract different bees and plants that bloom at different times provide food throughout the growing season. He also encourages gardeners to dead-head plants as they finish blooming, in order to encourage a second flush of bloom.

Also important: Leave patches of bare earth so that native bees that nest in holes in the ground can find somewhere to live. "Bare earth" means not just soil that is free of plants but also soil that is free of plastic or even thick mulch.

For more information on what Frankie and friends are up to, check out their Urban Bee Gardens website, and don't miss the excellent article in Orion.

Birds and Windows

2008-03-19T18:59:00.004-04:00

On sunny days, glass can be so highly reflective that humans as well as birds are fooled into thinking that they are looking at open sky, trees, or other scenes in nature. This is a serious hazard for birds, which are often injured or killed in collisions with window glass. Photo by MIROSLAV VAJDIC for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

WITH SPRING WE OFTEN GET LOTS OF BRIGHT, SUNNY DAYS--good for gardeners, but not always so good for birds, who may crash into windows that are reflecting what look to them like beautiful open skies. If you have this problem, here are a few tips to help you and the birds do better this year.

Why they do it

Typically birds fly into windows for one of two reasons: 1., the window is reflecting sky or trees or some other scene the bird thinks it can fly into or, 2., the bird sees real daylight through a window and thinks it can fly through to the other side.

No fly-throughs

Situation number 2 is fairly easy to prevent. The trick is to avoid having uncurtained windows either directly opposite one another or kitty corner from one another. So for instance, if you have a large open living area with windows that face each other on the north and south sides of the house, make sure that the windows on one side are always covered with curtains. That way a bird will never get the idea that it can fly through your living area and come out safely on the other side.

Situation number 1 is more difficult. There are only two ways to deal with this situation. One is to put up a barrier that prevents birds from hitting windows. The other is to make your windows reflect less light.

Upon reflection ...

Let's look first at ways to make windows less reflective.

The easiest way to make your windows reflect less (and definitely the one that appeals to me) is just to let them get dirty. The dirtier the windows get, the fewer bird strikes you'll have.

Don't want to wait several years for your windows to get seriously murky? You can soap the outsides. Yes, people do this.

If you want clean windows, however, preventing bird strikes gets harder. But here are some ideas. I can't guarantee that any of these will work every time, but they probably will help to prevent at least some window strikes.

Idea number one: Glue small stick-on decals or use window clings (which are a lot easier to remove) all over the outside of the window, placing them about 8 inches apart. Yes, they have to be on the outside because putting them on the inside won't prevent the window glass from reflecting light. And yes, they do have to be that close together because if they're not, birds may try to fly between them. The window clings sold under the brand name of Whispering Windows are bird-themed and quite attractive.

Don't want pictures on your windows? Idea number two: Some people try hanging strips of shiny tape, often referred to as bird-scare tape, in front of windows. In theory the fluttering tape frightens birds so that they stay away from areas where it is hanging. (This trick is also used to scare birds away from orchards.) The Wisconsin Humane Society even sells a holographic bird-scare tape.

Idea number 3: For those who want a more conservative look, there is now a product called CollidEscape. It is a film that can be applied on the outside of window glass. I haven't tried it myself, but supposedly it makes the window glass much less reflective. From the outside (in the pictures anyway), it looks like a very tidy-looking version of soap. However, unlike soap it allows you to continue to see out the window, or so the manufacturer claims. Warning: This stuff is expensive: $3/square foot if you are referred through the Fatal Light Awareness Program, a worthwhile organization that is working to preserve the lives of migratory birds in urban areas.

Bird Barriers

Another technique is to put up a barrier that you can see through but that birds will bounce off of.

If you're a do-it-yourself type and your house lends itself to this modification, you may be able to install fine garden-protection netting from below your eves to below the windows. The netting will be almost invisible from inside the house or from the street, and if it is taut enough birds will bounce off it without being hurt--you are, in effect, making a bird trampoline. You might have to stretch the netting on a frame before installing it in order to get the desired effect. Please note that if the netting is not taut enough, birds might get tangled up in it. The netting also must be far enough away from the glass so that the birds bounce off the netting without striking the glass.

If you'd rather not do this yourself, the Bird Screen Company makes fiberglass window screens that can be attached to the outside of a window using hooks and suction cups. I haven't tried this product, but according to the manufacturer, the hooks hold the screen far enough away from the glass so that birds will bounce off unharmed. Though pricey, this product is quite a lot cheaper by the square foot than CollidEscape is.

And the winner is ...

Dirty windows! But that's at my house. If I were going to try anything other than good old-fashioned grime, I'd probably give the fiberglass Bird Screens a try. They seem to be practical and good looking, and I think there's a good chance they would stop most if not all window strikes. If you decide to try any of these techniques, please let me know how they work for you.

More Good News

2008-03-16T15:21:00.004-04:00

Dear all,

Earlier today I wrote a sort of two-faced post in which on the one hand I said it was great that Douglas Tallamy's new book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens is getting a lot of publicity--but at the same time I gave a gigantic ho hum to the arrival of the book itself. I received a good comment from blogger Benjamin Vogt, who is relatively new to this style of gardening and liked the book a lot. He suggested that I haven't given the book enough credit and referred me to the review he wrote for his blog, The Deep Middle.

Having read Benjamin's summary and a list of fun facts he pulled from the book, I have to say that it sounds as though Tallamy's book is one of the better ones that have come out on this topic in the last decade. If you are new to native-plant gardening and looking for a book to get you started, see what you think after reading Benjamin's review and the other links provided in my original post, which is below. If you're not already familiar with the material, this book will probably kick start your enthusiasm for native plants and give you a new appreciation for the value of insects in the garden.

Cheers,

Wild Flora

Good news from the New York Times

2008-03-16T06:22:00.006-04:00

The Victorian-era illustration above is from the Full Color Decorative Bird Illustrations CD-Rom and Book. This example was kindly provided by the publisher, Dover Publications.

HAVING WORKED AT THIS FOR SO LONG, I'm always a little amazed, and a lot thrilled, when mainstream publications start to promote ideas I've been talking about for at least a decade. So you can imagine how pleased I was when the New York Times "Home and Garden" section recently published an article titled, "To Feed the Birds, First Feed the Bugs."

Yes!

For the article, writer Ann Ravner visited the home of Doug Tallamy, author of a new book that has been gaining a lot of attention for naturalistic gardening: Bringing Nature Home was published by Timber Press last November. Tallamy is an entomologist at the University of Delaware. You can see his academic resume (and a nice photo) at the university's website. His book has its own website, which includes a couple of items that appear to be excerpts from the book:

"Gardening for Life" makes the argument for why it is so important for us to use native plants in our gardens and otherwise try to make these spaces wildlife and environmentally friendly.

"Gardening for Biodiversity" is a list of what Tallamy considers to be "the 20 best native woody and perennial plant genera for supporting biodiversity in East Coast suburban landscapes."

The latter illustrates why books such as these are often a disappointment to anyone who is beyond the beginner level of native-plant gardening. Because books such as Tallamy's have to appeal to a wide audience, they are often too general to be of much help once you are actually trying to create a native plant garden in a specific region. For instance, Tallamy lists all the usual suspects of the native plant world. And because he lists genera rather than species, you will still have to find out which plants are appropriate for your region.

To be honest, I'm not all that interested in Tallamy's book (which I hasten to admit I have not read--so if I'm wrong about it, please tell me). I'm very glad he wrote it, but my initial investigation suggests that it's another in a growing list of books that cover more or less the same ground. Probably the first of them, or at least the first to get a lot of attention, was Sarah Stein's Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, which was published in 1995. In the late 1990s, I bought a lot of these books. But eventually I tired of reading the same information over and over again. Now I spend my money on reference works that are specific to my region.

That isn't to say that these books should not be published! On the contrary, every time one of them comes out there is a chance it will catch a wave of publicity, as Tallamy's has. Each wave of publicity attracts new people to native-plant gardening. Many people who are avid native-plant gardeners today caught the bug by reading Stein. Ten years from now, it looks like we'll have another batch who were inspired by Tallamy's work.

Witness the article in the New York Times, which allows us to pay a vicarious visit to Tallamy's garden in Pennsylvania, where he and his wife have removed non-native, invasive plants such as Oriental bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, and multiflora rose, and replaced them with natives such as white pine, black cherry, and goldenrod. The best part of the article is Tallamy's argument in favor of encouraging insects in the garden. He is quoted as saying that 96% of North American birds other than seabirds feed their young on insects.

None of this is exactly new, but it probably is new to a lot of New York Times readers. So let's celebrate. With its lovely pictures of native plants and the insects that depend on them, the New York Times article is a great advertisement for native plant gardening.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to learn more about Tallamy's book, I recommend the following:

A review of Tallamy's book by Susan Harris at the Garden Rant blog.

Interview with Tallamy at the Garden Rant blog.

The Hummers Are Coming

2008-03-08T15:59:00.006-04:00

Above, Wild Flora's favorite hummingbird feeder is an easy-to-clean "dish" style that attaches to a window with a suction cup and has perches so the birds can sit while feeding.

SPRING IS ON THE WING. The hummingbird migration map at hummingbirds.net is starting to show those little colored dots that tell us ruby-throated hummingbirds are being seen in North America. So far they are being seen only along the southern edge of the United States, along the coastline in Texas, Louisiana, and other southernmost states. But with their arrival on the continent, most of us can look forward to seeing our friends within the next month or so.

Male hummers arrive ahead of the females and establish territories around good food sources. Once they've found a good territory, they return year after year. So it's important to make sure your feeder is already out when the males start to arrive.

The best feeder

Time to buy a new feeder? The "dish" style, shown in the photo above, has a lot of advantages over the more common "bottle" style. In the dish style, the feeding holes are in the lid (the red part of the feeder shown in the photo) while the nectar fills a container (the clear plastic dish under the red lid) that screws onto the lid. One advantage of this style is that the dish and lid are both easy to clean--unlike the bottle in the bottle style, which usually can be cleaned thoroughly only with a bottle brush.

Another advantage is that dish-style feeders don't drip. Also, this style of feeder tends to discourage wasps and bees, as their short tongues can't reach the nectar in the dish. (Unfortunately, this sometimes encourages them to crawl into the dish in search of food. However, on the whole I think you are less likely to see wasps and bees hanging around this style of feeder than around many of the bottle styles.)

It's fun, though not essential, to have a hummingbird feeder that attaches to a window with a suction cup. Hummers are very brave and will not be discouraged from feeding even if you stand on the other side of the window to watch them.

Perches are also nice to have. Hummers don't need them, as they can hover while feeding. However, if perches are available the hummers will use them. This lets them rest and gives you a better look at the birds while they're feeding.

"Hummer Juice"

Before the hummers arrive, you'll want to be sure to have a big bag of plain white sugar. Mix tap water and sugar in a ratio of 4:1 (four cups water to one cup sugar) and store it in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. It's no longer considered necessary to boil the water before you mix up a batch of "hummer juice"--just be sure you change the liquid often.

There's no need to add anything to this liquid. With their extremely high energy needs, hummingbirds use sugar water to meet calorie requirements. But they get most of their nutrients from a diet of small flying insects, which they hunt on the wing.

In fact, attempts to "improve" the standard formula for hummingbird food are likely to do more harm than good. Well-meaning efforts to enrich the liquid can unintentionally introduce ingredients that are not good for the birds and/or encourage the growth of molds and bacteria.

Maintenance

Once you start feeding the birds, be prepared to change the sugar water every few days, as often as daily in warm weather. Molds and bacteria are probably the biggest threat to feeder-using birds, so probably the most important thing any bird lover can do is to make sure the food is always fresh.

You will also want to be sure to keep the feeders full throughout the breeding season and until there are an abundance of nectar-producing flowers in bloom.

And finally, you'll want to do whatever you can to attract small flying insects to your garden, as these are an important part of the hummingbird diet. Like almost all birds, hummingbirds eat a lot of insects and also feed a lot of insects to their young.

I'll return with a discussion of planting for hummingbirds soon. In the meantime, to learn more about hummingbird migration, see this page at hummingbirds.net For a longer and more detailed discussion of hummingbird feeding, see this post of mine from last year.

It's All Relatives

2008-03-03T17:55:00.008-04:00

Illustration above taken from Geometric Designs for Artists and Craftspeople by Dover Publications, which is nice enough to give away free samples of its clip art.

A POPULAR SAYING BACK IN MY COLLEGE DAYS, when we were first breaking free of the moral absolutes our parents had tried to teach us, was "It's all relative." Much later in life, when I began to learn about ecology and such, I changed what by then had become a cliche into a phrase that I can still live by. And so today I often announce, "It's all relatives."

In other words, everything is connected to everything else. This is hardly news to anyone the least bit familiar with ecology or natural history, but the specific examples never cease to inspire interest--and, in me at least, something akin to awe.

The paradox of protection
One such example came up recently in a study published in Science magazine. In this research, scientists working in Kenya fenced off whistling thorn trees (a type of Acacia) so that the trees could no longer be eaten by elephants and giraffes.

Now, it might seem that protecting the trees from huge plant-eating mammals would be a good thing to do. But after about 10 years of this, the trees were all dying off.

It turns out that the Acacias ordinarily provide good habitat for a particular type of ant. The trees provides food and shelter, in return for which the ants attack any animal that tries to eat the trees' leaves.

Once they were fenced off, however, eventually the trees got lazy and stopped providing the right habitat for the friendly ants. As a result, these ants were replaced by other ants, which had no interest in defending the trees. On the contrary, these new ants have a mutually beneficial relationship with a type of wood-boring insect, which soon took up residence in the Acacias.

Eventually the health of the Acacias began to be undermined by the wood-boring beetles and other insects that were able to invade now that the friendly ants were gone. And so the Acacias started to die.

For want of an ant ...
The trees were, quite literally, being killed by kindness.

Fencing off large predators caused the loss of their tiny defending army, leaving the trees exposed to far worse dangers than the occasional elephant or giraffe. Invisibly to human eyes, relationships that had evolved over thousands of years had been preserving the health of the trees. Yet as scientist Todd Palmer pointed out to writer Cornelia Dean in an article for the New York Times, it took only 10 years for this protective net to fall apart after humans intervened.

As Dean's article notes, scientists are finding similarly complicated relationships all over the planet. In North America, for example, research conducted in Yellowstone National Park found that wolves protect aspen trees by frightening off elk that otherwise would over-browse them. In its article on mutualism, the Wikipedia points out that gardeners sometimes try to create mutually interdependent relationships, as when we plant beans next to corn so that the beans can provide nitrogen for the corn while using the corn stalks as trellises.

It's (also) all relative
For wildlife-friendly gardeners and natural landscapers, stories such as these are reminders that we must not be too hasty to identify any creature as an enemy. One of my favorite examples, which I've talked about before, is aphids. Most gardeners kill them on sight, but they are one of the best bird foods in the garden, and if you want to attract birds, usually it's best to let those aphids live.

At one time most people in the West assumed that wolves were "bad" because they killed elk; now we know that the relationship between predator and prey, a., is more complicated than that and, b., affects many living things, not just the most visible participants.

Likewise, preventing a plant from being eaten might seem like the obvious thing for a plant-lover to do. But is it? Can we be sure?

Perhaps the best attitude to take toward any fellow creature is to acknowledge that, like all creatures, it has a role to play. Unless we know what that role is, best to proceed cautiously.

My own rule of thumb is that native species, having evolved together, are presumed to have relationships that are worth preserving. Non-natives, being new introductions, are less likely to be important in some larger drama that is currently invisible to me.

But even so, I try to remember to proceed carefully. After all, it's all relatives.

For more information on the research done in Kenya, see the BBC News or the Scientific American.

Pollinating the spring ephemerals

2008-02-27T19:45:00.006-04:00

Photo of Dicentra cucullaria by Catie Drew.

IF YOU LIVE IN ANY AREA THAT IS NATURALLY WOODED, the first native plants to come up in spring are those known as spring emphemerals. These small wildflowers take advantage of that brief period in early spring when the soil warms but deciduous trees have not yet leafed out. During this small window of time, they appear and flower before fading back into the soil again as their woodland habitat is engulfed in shade.

During this time, the spring ephemerals can't just sit there and look pretty--though they most certainly do. Their critical task is to attract pollinators so that they can set seed and ensure the survival of their species.

Getting pollinated is pretty difficult for the spring ephemerals because they can bloom only when the forest canopy is still open but can be pollinated only when it's warm enough for insects to be able to fly. If those two seasons don't coincide, they won't be able to get pollinated unless they are able to self-pollinate.

Because they do have such a tricky time getting pollinated, most of the spring ephemerals are generalists--they can be pollinated by a wide variety of insects. However some of them are adapted to being pollinated by specific insects. Trillium, for instance, has a distinct smell that attracts flies. Dicentra cucullaria, aka Dutchmen's breeches, is dependent on queen bumblebees for pollination. Some of the orchids are also very specialized.

One interesting adaptation is found in Cornus canadensis, a low-growing member of the dogwood family. The flowers of this plant are so eager to be pollinated that when an insect lands on one, it explodes with a shower of pollen that covers the insect in golden dust.

Most of the pollinating insects that visit spring ephemerals also go to the early spring flowering trees and shrubs, incidentally. Willows are especially popular because of their huge production of pollen. Maple flowers and flowering Ericaceous shrubs also seem to get a lot of attention.

But the bottom line is that they all need each other. The interactions are very complicated and poorly understood, and we don't really know which native plants and/or pollinators are essential to the survival of which other native plants and/or pollinators. All we really know is that they're adapted to each other, often in very precise ways. One of many concerns about global climate change is that even slight changes in delicate, vulnerable relationships between species such as these could have unforseeable but monumental effects.

Have you seen these bees?

2008-02-21T20:30:00.015-04:00

IF YOU LIKE A TREASURE HUNT, you're going to love this. The Xerces Society is asking gardeners and others to look for several species of bumblebees that were once thought to be very common but are now feared to be in severe decline. Xerces were kind enough to let me republish the images of the bees you see to the left, by the talented artist Elaine Evans, in hope of inspiring readers to be on the lookout for these little ladies this spring. If you are a blogger, please help to spread the word, and do let me know what sightings are reported to you!

The image above shows yellow-banded bumblebee, Bombus terricola, a personal favorite because it is the one I might see here in my own garden in Nova Scotia. A characteristic to look for in this species is the fringe of bright yellow hair at the end of the abdomen. Bumblebee species also vary considerably in the pattern of black and yellow on their bodies, as you'll see from the remaining pictures.

Yellow-banded bumblebees were common throughout most of their range (which included most of the Northeast and most of the band along the American-Canadian border) until the late 1990s, when suddenly sightings almost ceased. I'm happy to say that, after hearing that the Xerces Society was looking for this bee, my friend and fellow Nova Scotian gardener Jodi DeLong produced a photograph of one--taken in her own garden. For details on how you might also be able to identify a yellow-banded bumble bee, visit this page at the Xerces website.

Next (left) is another Eastern bumble, the rusty patched bumblebee (B. affinis). A characteristic of this bee is the small rust-colored patch on the second abdominal segment. Once common in the East and much of the Midwest, it has not been found in most of its range since 2003. To learn more about how to identify this bee, visit this page at the Xerces website.

Finally, the last of the three bees is the Western bumblebee, B. occidentalis, shown below right. This bee actually has several quite different color variations, depending on where it's found. The pattern shown here is characteristic of the species in Northern California to British Columbia. A quite different color pattern is found in the species in central coastal California, and yet another pattern in those found from the Rocky Mountains to Alaska. For details on how to identify this bee, visit this page at the Xerces Society website.

Anyone who sees one of these bees is asked to contact Sarina Jepsen at the Xerces Society. If you have photos or a collection of bumblebees or have any other evidence of past sightings, the Society would like to hear about these as well.

As a bonus for visiting, the Xerces site has downloadable "Wanted" posters for the bee species they're looking for. These posters make amusing decorations and are a good way to remind yourself to watch for these bees in your garden. I plan to download the poster for yellow-banded bumblebee and put in on the kitchen door, where I'll see it whenever I'm headed out.

It's believed that these bees may be declining because of a disease that was transmitted via bumblebees transported commercially for use as pollinators in greenhouses. The commercial bumblebee industry is one of many potantial threats to wild bumbles, another being loss of habitat. Wildlife-friendly gardening is an important way to help these and many other pollinating species. Supporting the Xerces Society, one of the finer wildlife organizations I know, is another.

(Not So) Scary Things About Peanut Butter

2008-02-17T19:16:00.001-04:00

Photograph by Piccolo Namek, made available via Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License.

Back in December, I wrote about using peanut butter, straight from the jar, as a winter food for birds. Someone then asked about the possibility that sugar or preservatives in commercial peanut butter might be harmful to birds. I decided to do some investigating, and this is what I learned:

As far as I have been able to find out without checking the ingredients of every brand, commercial peanut butters contain salt, sometimes sugar, and what are known as stabilizers, which prevent the oil and solids from separating.

You can leave it on the shelf (for a while anyway)

Preservatives are not generally found in peanut butter because peanut butter has such a low moisture content that it does not support the growth of bacteria—at least, that’s what is claimed by leading peanutbutterologists.

That’s why people are able to keep opened peanut butter on the shelf rather than refrigerate it. However, the oils in peanut butter can go rancid, especially in heat. That jar on your shelf will eventually start to smell off if you leave it long enough, and should be thrown out at that point.

A fungus among us?

Peanuts, hence peanut butter, are also susceptible to an Aspergillus mold (A. flavus, to be exact) that produces the potential liver carcinogen called aflatoxin. Both commercial and “natural” peanut butters are equally subject to this problem as Aspergillus occurs naturally on peanuts as well as on a number of other food products. Amounts of aflatoxin in human food are closely regulated in North America, and most authorities seem to agree that risk from aflatoxin in foods in the industrial world is vanishingly low.

That being said, the risk of aflatoxin contamination is apparently lowest when the peanuts are ground soon after picking and immediately placed in an airtight container. As a result, this may be one of those cases (and they do occur) where buying the big supermarket brand is a safe choice. About 5-10 years ago when the Consumers Union in the United States tested various brands of peanut butter for their aflatoxin content, the highest levels were found in peanut butter “ground fresh” in health food stores, whereas the lowest levels were found in the big supermarket brands.

Trans-fat free?

Another possible reason to be afraid of peanut butter is the stabilizers used to keep peanut butter from separating. Generally these are fats of some type; they used to use hydrogenated vegetable oils but these are being phased out. I don’t have information on what’s being used to replace them. However, in the United States at least (and I suspect in Canada as well), peanut butter must be at least 90% peanuts. The quantity of stabilizers of any type to be found in peanut butter is relatively small.

Our friend, the peanut

Peanuts themselves convey quite a few health benefits, incidentally. According to the Wikipedia, they contain high levels of monounsaturated fats and Resveratrol (a phytoalexin also found in the skin of red grapes), various nutrients, and an antioxidant called p-coumaric acid. The American Peanut Council is even touting a study in which peanuts were found to be so nutritional and satiating that they might be used as a method of weight control.

But that's a possible benefit to me, not a bird. When all is said and done, I've concluded that peanut butter is not very scary at all. I certainly have not been able to find any evidence that birds are placed in any danger by consuming the relatively small amounts of sugar, stabilizers, or salt found in commercial peanut butter.

This item originated as a posting to the NSNature e-list.

Back from the woods

2008-02-16T16:28:00.002-04:00

Well, I'm back. The forests aren't exactly safe from clearcutters yet, but I tried to do my bit. In the meantime, I accumulated some good items for the blog, which restarts tomorrow with a bit of investigative reporting about, of all things, peanut butter.

Thanks for your patience.

Back to the Woods

2008-01-19T23:49:00.000-04:00

WITH A COUPLE OF HUNDRED ACRES OF THEM, it's a good thing I like trees. Since moving to Nova Scotia and my little forest a few years ago, I have become more and more interested in forests and forest-related issues, to the point where lately I have been getting involved in projects so time-consuming that it is impossible for me to keep up with this blog. Last time this happened, I disappeared for a month. This time I am going to try to be a little more professional and at least let readers know in advance that I am taking one of my arboreal sabbaticals. This time I think I will be missing for a couple of weeks, and with luck will be back in early February. Thanks for understanding.

Where do little birds sleep in winter?

2008-01-14T13:48:00.001-04:00

MANY BIRDS DEPART FOR WARMER CLIMATES when winter comes. But the presence of chickadees, finches, and other small birds at winter feeders attests to the fact that quite a few species stick around all winter long. On warmer winter days these birds' layers of feathers and down keep them quite warm, especially when friendly humans help to make sure they are able to meet their calorie needs. But where do they go at night and in harsh weather?

The importance of evergreens

In harsh weather birds seek shelter just as we do. Dense evergreens are often used for this purpose, which is one of many reasons why it's good to include evergreens in your wildlife-friendly garden. Evergreens that are left to grow naturally--not pruned or limbed up--typically provide better shelter. An evergreen that has been very heavily pruned (for example, to form a hedge) may be so dense that birds can't get into it, making it useless as shelter.

The importance of dead trees

Quite a few species of birds hide from storms in holes in dead or dying trees. Chickadees prefer to nest alone in a cavity just large enough to shelter a single bird. But some species, such as finches, will roost in the same cavity in order to share body heat.

Sadly, dead and dying trees are increasingly difficult to find. You may be able to provide an alternative, however, by putting up what's known as a roost box. This is similar to a nest box in that both are attempts to duplicate a cavity in a dead or dying tree. A roost box is designed for winter use, however, whereas a nest box is designed for use in warmer weather.

How a roost box is different from a nest box

As shown in the diagram above, a roost box is designed to hold in heat: There are no ventilation holes in the top of the box, and the entry is down toward the bottom. Typically the box has perches on the inside, allowing one or more birds to sit comfortably.

In contrast, the nest box does have ventilation holes under the roof. There are no perches in the box because the bird doesn't use it for perching: She builds a nest for her eggs down in the bottom of the box. Placing the entry at the top of the box helps to protect the eggs and baby birds from predators. Often the inside front of the box is roughened or ridged to help the young birds climb out of the box when it's time to leave.

How roost boxes are similar to nest boxes

Neither a roost box nor a nest box should have a perch on the outside. The birds don't need one, and putting a perch on the outside of the box just gives predators something to stand on. Both should have drainage holes in the bottom. Both should have a door that can be opened for cleaning. The exact dimensions of the box will vary depending on the species you're trying to attract; the entry hole should be as small as possible in order to deter predators.

I've found that birds generally won't use nest boxes or roost boxes if there are natural cavities available in the area. (This is a very good reason to protect those dead and dying trees!) However, these are good additions to your property if you live in an area where all the old, dying trees have been cut down.

How to make your own

If you're handy with wood, making roost boxes and nest boxes is an enjoyable project; the boxes are decorative, and there is always at least some chance the birds will use them. Plans for roost boxes are readily available online. Here are a few sites:

Where have all the (small furry animals) gone?

2008-01-11T20:55:00.000-04:00

Hares are among the small animals that remain active all winter. (However, they are not usually seen beating drums.) "Hare and Tabor" is taken from Hone's Everyday Book by William Hone, published 1826. Thanks to FromOldBooks.org for making this image available on the Net. To learn more about William Hone, try this website.

Click here for the previous installment in this series, on insects and spiders.

THE CUTE CHIPMUNK THAT STUFFED HIS CHEEKS at your bird feeders all summer is now literally holed up in its extensive underground burrow. There your little friend has entered a state called dormancy in which breathing, heart rate, and body temperature are slowed. Every two or three weeks the chipmunk comes out of dormancy long enough to attend to personal business and eat the food that it carried back to its burrows in its cheek pouches last summer while it was raiding your feeder. Then it’s back to “sleep” again for the rest of the winter.

Please do not disturb

Dormancy allows many animals to reduce their need for food and stay out of harm’s way during cold winter months. However, it’s a fragile state. Dormant animals are vulnerable to predators, and they can also starve if they run out of fat and food before the winter is over. During the course of the winter, a chipmunk will normally lose almost half of its bodyweight, but if it is disturbed and has to come out of dormancy more frequently than otherwise necessary, it could easily starve. It’s a kindness to keep noisy or disruptive activities out of habitat areas during wintertime.

Hibernation vs. torpor

Dormancy can be shallow or deep. The deep type is sometimes called hibernation or deep hibernation while the shallow type is referred to as torpor or shallow hibernation.

In hibernation, the animal’s body temperature drops and other metabolic activities slow down dramatically. The body temperature of a chipmunk, for instance drops from 37 to 3 degrees Centigrade; its heartbeat drops from 350 to 4 beats per minute.

Among our native small furry animals, bats, and groundhogs (aka woodchucks) are included among the hibernators. Other small furbearers are not deep hibernators but do enter a less intense type of dormancy as a way of conserving resources for short periods. Raccoons and skunks, for instance, will doze for most of the winter in their dens, coming out on warmer days.

Signs in winter

Other small animals remain active all winter, and these are often the ones you see (or see evidence of) around bird feeders. Both grey and red squirrels are active during the day, as you already know. Rabbits and hares and deer mice are also active during the winter but at night, so you will have to look for their footprints in the snow.

Fresh snow is a great place to look for animal tracks, by the way. Learning to tell the difference between tracks of various animals that are active in winter is fun and not terribly difficult. One of my favorite books on this topic is Tracking & the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks & Sign by Paul Rezendes. The Peterson Field Guides Animal Tracks guide by Olaus J. Murie is a good resource and the right size to take with you into the woods.

Where Did All the (Insects and Spiders) Go?

2008-01-05T07:59:00.000-04:00

"January" is taken from Hone's Everyday Book by William Hone, published 1826. Thanks to FromOldBooks.org for making this image available on the Net.

WITH WINTER DOING ITS WORST THIS YEAR, many of us are seeing a lot of birds and squirrels at the feeders. But other animals we see frequently in summer, such as chipmunks and most insects, are nowhere to be found. Here’s a little overview of where some of your gardening friends are spending the winter, starting with insects and spiders.

Animals that are not warm-blooded, as mammals are, have difficulty generating enough heat to use their muscles in cold weather. With cold, their muscles stop responding and they just slow down until they finally can't move any more. This is why you'll sometimes find a "sleeping" bee on a flower in the early morning: The over-eager bee got caught by dropping temperatures and became dormant before it could get home. Usually the bee will "wake up" as soon as it warms up.

Insects and spiders and other animals that are referred to as cold-blooded (though what is circulating in their bodies is not, technically, blood), typically either die with the first frost or spend cold days "asleep"--that is, in a state more properly referred to as dormancy. They are very vulnerable during dormancy, and are a lot safer if they have a sheltered spot in which to hide.

Butterflies

Some butterflies migrate to warmer climates. (Monarchs are famous for this.) But many dormant butterflies are present in and around your garden all winter. Depending on species, they may overwinter as caterpillars, in the chrysalis (the enclosure in which they transform from caterpillars into adults), or as adults. Woodpiles, brushpiles, untended flower beds, and trees with loose bark are all popular spots for overwintering butterflies.

Bumblebees

Most bumblebees die when cold weather arrives. However, the pregnant queens survive, spending winters in abandoned mouse nests or other holes in the ground, waiting for warm weather to lay their eggs and raise a new crop of worker bees. Because of their “furry” coats and ability to generate heat by shivering, bumbles are able to move around even during fairly cold weather. (They even are found in the Arctic tundra, where they pollinate the small patches of wildflowers that grow on the carcasses of dead animals.) This is why bumblebees are often the first insects you’ll see in spring. It's also why that bee you find sleeping on a flower in the morning is probably a bumble; they're the ones most likely to still be out even when temperatures are dropping.

Spiders

Dormant spiders are often found in leaf litter, where they wake up and move around on warmer days. These spiders are an important source of winter food for birds, which is why you’ll see small birds poking around in the leaf litter in your garden if you were kind enough to leave it there for them. Contrary to a widespread misconception, outdoor spiders rarely enter homes in search of heat; spiders that are adapted to life outdoors probably can’t survive indoors, as the indoor air will be too dry for them. Spiders found living inside homes are usually nonnative spiders that are adapted to living in dry, warm climates. If you take them outside, they will probably die.

Diapause

Many insects experience not only dormancy but also diapause. Unlike dormancy, which is a physiological reaction to dropping temperature, diapause is a genetically programmed response that often triggered by changes in the length of the day. In diapause, the animal doesn’t just stop moving but also stops developing; this is nature’s way of ensuring that it will be at the proper stage of development (e.g., emerging from the chrysalis) at the right time of the year (e.g., when flowers are in bloom).

Hope

2008-01-02T07:40:00.000-04:00

This photo was taken in a small patch of Acadian old growth forest that is now surrounded by clearcuts. Thanks to Tim Skelly for use of the photo.

"Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star."
Czeslaw Milosz
Thanks to Panhala.net for introducing me to this poem.

More of My Favorite Bloggers' Favorite Blogs

2007-12-31T09:53:00.000-04:00

The following is a continuation of yesterday's post about blogs recommended by my favorite bloggers. All the blogs I've chosen to list appear to be updated frequently, are more than 50% about nature or natural gardening, and appeal to me for one reason or another.

I HIT PAYDIRT AT POLLINATORS WELCOME. Gloria's thorough research turned up the following great nature and wildlife-gardening-related blogs:

Ramblings of a Naturalist features the photos and observations of Patrick Roper of Sedlescombe, East Sussex. Much to my delight, Patrick also has anoother blog about the wildlife that visit his windowbox and yet another blog about his observations of a single square meter in and around his garden. (These confirm my long-held belief that it is possible to be a wildlife-friendly gardener no matter how small your garden is.)
Sweet Pea Chronicle is about the efforts of "Firefly," a Maine gardener, to create a wildlife-friendly garden.
The Regent's Park Wildlife Garden is about a community-run wildlife garden in the famous London park.
Maryland's Windstar Wildlife Institute has a blog that seems to focus on wildlife-friendly gardening.
The Ojai Garden features a natural community garden in Ojai, California.
Green My Planet is by San Francisco enviromental consultant and landscape consultant Jennifer Berry.
Community of the Land is one of the places where professional writer and wildscaping consultant Susan J. Tweit blogs.
Natural Gardening is by "LKW" of upstate South Carolina.
Chicago Nature Lady paints watercolors and observes nature in and around you-know where.

Gloria also gives a nod to The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, Burning Silo (2 votes each so far), and Monarch's Nature Blog (up to 4!)

Meanwhile, over at Surburban Wildlife Garden, Dawn is the only one of my favorite bloggers who noticed that Don and Lillian Stokes, authors of the ubiquitous bird books, have a blog. Also, though it's not precisely a blog, I'm grateful to this tireless investigator for discovering that GardenWeb has a forum dedicated to wildlife-friendly gardening.

In Toronto, Native Plant Girl recommends the blog of Southern Ontario native-plant gardenener Garden Nerd. And though it's not a blog, I'm grateful to NPG for pointing out that the popular You Grow Girl website has a forum devoted to discussion of gardening with native plants.

And closer to home, Bloomingwriter Jodi DeLong recommends:

The blog for Blithewold, a 33-acre public garden-arboretum on Narragansett Bay in Bristol, RI. I like all the items about garden wildlife.
Ontario's Crafty Gardener, with hand-made items for birds.
Flatbush Gardener, "Adventures in Neo-Victorian, Wild, Shade, Organic and Native Plant Gardening, Garden Design, and Garden Restoration."
Greenbow, the blog of Lisa, a gardener and bird lover in Indiana.

Finally, sustainable gardening writer Susan Harris maintains a lightly annotated list of blogs at her website. One of these days I'll check them out, for but for now I'm going to content myself with getting to know the blogs already listed.

My Favorite Bloggers' Favorite Blogs

2007-12-30T07:07:00.001-04:00

NOW THAT I'VE LISTED my own favorite blogs, a comment left by "PCrucifer," a newbie blogger over at Peepers Pondering , got me interested in what these bloggers are reading. PCrucifer, for example, recommends the following links that I also thought were pretty cool:

Wiggly Wigglers, run by Karen Dowell, who works for a mail-order business based on a farm in Herefordshire, England. It's just as cute as it sounds.
Monarch's Nature Blog belongs to a naturalist, field biologist, and nature photographer in Western New York.
Urban Dragon Hunter is about observing dragonflies in Southeastern Michigan.

And what about the ever-thoughtful and ever-reliable Julie Dunlop, over at Pines Above Snow? Here's another vote for Monarch's Nature Blog. Also:

A DC Birding Blog seems have a lot of good information about birds, and not just in DC.
Julie Zickefoose writes about trying to live the good life on 80 acres of Appalachian woodland.
The Blog of Henry David Thoreau features the Best Blogger Ever, only of course they didn't have blogs when he was around. If you're familiar only with Walden, this is a great way to read Thoreau's journals.

From Bug Girl's Blog, we get:

Burning Silo, with lovely nature photography.
Another vote for Monarch's Nature Blog (that makes 3 so far).
Endangered Ugly Things ("Sure they're not cute, but they're at least as important as your fuzzy thing.")
The Invasive Species Weblog.

Bug Girl also gives us (none too surprisingly) these fascinating insect-related blogs:

The Backyard Arthropod Project: Nature watching in a back yard in Michigan.
Bug Dreams: Gorgeous photography.
Bugs for Thugs: I'm running out of ways to say "this is a blog about entomology." (Bug lovers--they're irrepressible.) But it is.
Songs of Insects is about the singing insects of North America. (How can you not love this one?)

Incidentally, I'm not passing on every blog recommended by my recommended bloggers. If a quick check of recent posts revealed that the blog hadn't been updated in at least a couple of months, it doesn't make the cut. I also eliminate blogs that seemed to be more than 50% about topics other than nature or either wildlife-friendly or natural gardening. And finally, I'm not including a blog unless something in it caught my interest.

More tomorrow, if the storm that's coming our way doesn't blot out the satellite dish.

A Few of My Favorite Blogs

2007-12-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

I HAVEN'T DONE ENOUGH -- couldn't possibly do enough -- to thank the fellow bloggers who have made blogging such an enjoyable experience during the past year. Here are a few of my favorites, classified (roughly) according to the types of topics they usually write about:

Conventional gardening

I confess that I don't often read blogs about gardening as it's usually practiced. However, a few such blogs are such standouts that they attract my attention even when I'm trying to focus on blogs that are supposed to be closer to my own interests.

One such blog is Bloomingwriter, by my friend Jodi DeLong. Jodi is a fine writer and photographer, and so passionate about her topic that she can get you carried away with the glories of a new plant even when you're weakly protesting (as I often do), "but ... it ... isn't ... naaaaaa .... tiiiiiiive."

Garden Rant, which has a slightly subversive attitude toward gardening (e.g. "Bored with perfect magazine gardens"), belongs to several garden writers--one of whom, Susan Harris, frequently writes about the issues that interest me: sustainable gardening, wildlife-friendly gardening, and native-plant gardening.

Nature watching

This Week At Hilton Pond is a naturalist's account of his observations at the Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History in York, SC. The weekly reports typically tackle a specific topic (a recent one was all about saw-whet owls); they are information-filled and always include wonderful photographs.

In Pines Above Snow, Julie Dunlop makes superb recommendations of books about nature. I love her intelligent, thoughtful way of writing about two of my favorite topics.

In Bootstrap Analysis, "Nuthatch" writes about birds and other wildlife, books, and does occasional reviews of scientific literature on topics of interest to wildlife-friendly gardeners.

Wildlife

Written by several people, 10,000 Birds seems to be emerging as the pre-eminent blog for bird lovers and bird watchers. The volume of posts can be overwhelming, and if you're not a bird watcher you probably won't be interested in many of them. But quite frequently one of the authors will devote an entire post to a single topic that is of interest to wildlife-friendly gardeners (an example was a recent post on milkweeds).

Keri Dearborn's AnimalBytes gives delightful, fact-filled introductions to garden wildlife, especially invertebrates. Keri is a writer, poet, and urban naturalist who lives in the Los Angeles area.

Bug Girl's Blog is by an entomology PhD who is also a frequent guest blogger at Skepchick.

Wildlife-friendly gardening

In Suburban Wildlife Garden, Dawn, a bookseller in Austin, Texas, relates her efforts to create a wildlife-friendly garden. Dawn has assembled a particularly nice set of links.

Hope Kuniholm has described her habitat garden at her website. This isn't precisely a blog, but I include it because it's a great example of an attractive habitat garden in a relatively small space. Hope gardens in New York State.

Frogpond is about Australian gardener Jo's you-know-what. I love the photos and hope she will keep updating it.

Gloria, a Chicago-area gardener, is developing an excellent blog about her wildlife-friendly garden, Pollinators Welcome. I particularly like how fact-filled many of her posts are. For instance, a recent post is all about leaf-cutter bees.

Native-plant gardening

See Native Plant Girl for "news and resources for Toronto [and other] native plant geeks, gardeners and stewards." With tons of great links.

A Land Steward's "Don't Do" List

2007-12-23T15:20:00.000-04:00

Why would you go to the trouble of removing a dead tree, stump, or fallen log, when it makes such a great garden sculpture?

IN WINTER, MANY HOMEOWNERS DREAM BIG. There's nothing like cold to bring out plans for ambitious projects, landscaping and otherwise.

I was reminded of this when I ran across a brochure I wrote several years ago for the Thurston County (Washington) Native Plant Salvage Project with a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 10. Titled "A 'Don't Do' List for Land Stewards," the brochure explained that many of the activities landowners believe they "have to do" actually aren't necessary and may even be unsafe and/or bad for the environment. Plus they cost time and money!

Taken from that brochure, here's a list of ambitious projects that it probably would be best to try not think about this winter:

Drastic changes of any type. Work with--don't try to change--natural features such as wet areas and slopes. Remember this natural landscaping rule: Don't fight the site!

Installing a large (or any) lawn. Native plants are much easier to maintain, and friendlier to the environment.

"Landscraping." Avoid any project that involves removing native vegetation or soils. If you absolutely must remove soil in order to build a structure, store plants and soil during construction and replace them later.

Landscaping of any area that isn't used. Why saddle yourself with maintenance of an area you're not going to use?

Paving. Hard, nonporous surfaces contribute to runoff, which in turn can contribute to pollution of waterways, to say nothing of drainage problems around your home. If you need a parking or other solid surface, consider using one of the modern surfacing materials that allow water to soak through the surface instead of running off.

Removal of standing dead or dying trees, stumps, or fallen logs. Dead wood is very important habitat for birds and other wildlife, helps to provide the kind of environment in which native plants will thrive, and adds interest to your garden. Unless a snag (standing dead tree) presents a hazard, let it be.

Removal of rocks and other yard "waste." Rocks and brushpiles are excellent wildlife habitat.

Heavy pruning. Trees and shrubs generally make better wildlife habitat, and are more natural looking, if they are not pruned. Pruning during nesting season can cause birds to abandon their nests.

Trying to be "perfect." Many of today's conventional ideas about what constitutes a "perfect" landscape have their origins in efforts to imitate the British upper classes of the pre-war era. Others can be traced back to more middle-class notions--but the notions in question are still British, and more than 100 years out of date. These approaches to land management are completely inappropriate to North America in the 21st century, and it's long past time for homeowners to start breaking away from them.

Happy Winter Solstice

2007-12-21T15:54:00.001-04:00

Radio carbon dating shows that construction of Stonehenge began in about 3100 BC and was completed around 1600 BC. The alignment of the stones suggests that it was used to commemmorate the Winter and Summer solstices. Photo by Frederic Vincent courtesy of Wikimedia, distributed under a Creative Commons 2.0 ShareAlike license.

TONIGHT AT 1:08 EASTERN STANDARD TIME, the sun will be at its furthest distance from the Northern Hemisphere, and we here above the equator will be in the midpoint of the longest night of the year. This is Winter Solstice, which humans have marked in one fashion or another for some 7,000 years. Traditionally this is a time when humans drive away the dark by lighting candles and keeping a Yule log burning all night.

This is the black depth of the year
in which the seasons, circling near,
are pulled into the vortex; here
the bonfires of midwinter burn.

The quickening spirits of the Spring
whirl round their bright bewildering,
and with the energies they bring
we conjure up the sun's return.

—British-Canadian poet Robin Skelton

However much we may be divided by nationality, ideology, or religion, the Winter Solstice reminds us that we are one species sharing one planet. I wish you light on this long, dark night.

More on Deer

2007-12-19T19:18:00.000-04:00

THE BOOTSTRAP ANALYSIS BLOG has an interesting report on deer browing and songbirds. "Nuthatch," the anonymous academic who writes the blog, reviews an article in a recent issue of Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists' Union. The article discusses the way in which browsing by deer changes ecosystems and reduces their value for songbirds. This is a concern for wildlife-friendly gardeners because, as I mentioned in a previous post, typical suburban landscaping tends to create deer habitat and thus encourage deer overpopulation. (And then gardeners complain that they have too many deer.)

In testimony to this phenomenon, Nuthatch also refers to an article that appeared earlier this month in the New York Times, which said that white-tailed deer populations have risen from 300,000-500,000 at the turn of the century (down from 20 million or more because of overhunting). According to the newspaper, there are now about 32 million white-tailed deer in the United States. Note that this is 12 million more deer than were present before the arrival of Europeans!

And of course the combination of exploding deer populations and the automobile is not a good one. A clever graphic that accompanies the article gives the annual odds of hitting a deer in the United States as anywhere from 1 in 57 to 1 in 245 in the less urban parts of the Northeast. (In other words, anywhere from 1 out of 57 drivers to 1 in 245 drivers will hit a deer during a 12-month period.) I don't know how this would translate into odds, but I know that on the short stretch of road in front of my house, at least one deer is hit and killed every year. That doesn't count the people who end up in a ditch because they swerved to avoid one.

The table of contents of the issue of Ibis is here.

Wildlife Gardening and Deer

2007-12-17T16:47:00.000-04:00

Above is a photo of a black-tailed deer that was munching on fireweed a few feet away from my living room window in Redmond, WA, a few years back. I found that native plants did not attract deer to anything like the extent that my neighbors' exotic ornamentals did. When deer did eat my natives (like this fireweed), the plants grew back quickly and were not seriously damaged.

"Few events in the history of North American wildlife have been so remarkable, so unexpected, and so provocative of conflict as the rise of suburban deer," writes Richard Nelson in his wonderful book Heart and Blood: Living With Deer in America. Famously referred to as "rats with antlers" by writer John McPhee, suburban deer have sadly helped to turn many gardeners against wildlife and wildlife-friendly gardening.

Yet there's an irony here, because it is humans who have caused deer populations to explode in areas of human habitation. You see, deer like the same kind of environment we do: A few wooded areas but lots of open ones; an abundance of well-fertilized, well-watered plants (decorative to us, tasty to them); and a complete absence of predators. When we provide them with their ideal environment, quite naturally they breed. Some suburban areas in the United States are now trying to cope with deer populations that can be as high as 250 animals per square mile. Killing or removing the animals has no long-term effect, because they simply repopulate.

So naturally there are conflicts. Yet oddly enough, suburban gardeners seem to assume that nature is to blame for the deer problem, instead of looking a little closer to home.

Why wildlife corridors

I started thinking about this today after reading a post at the Garden Rant website, in which Susan Harris discussed a lecture by Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens. According to Harris, Tallamy makes the case for native-plant and wildlife-friendly gardening in a way that many conventional gardeners have been able to accept and understand.

But in describing Tallamy's lecture, she happened to mention that he recommends what are called wildlife corridors. These are plantings of trees and shrubs, which can be anywhere from a few to many feet wide depending on how much room you have, that join one natural area to another.

Say, for example, that you've put a wetland garden near your house, to collect rainwater from your roof. Half an acre away, just outside your property line, is a greenbelt. A wildlife-friendly way to design your property would be to plant a corridor of shrubs, trees, and wildflowers, preferably native, stretching from the greenbelt to your mini-wetland. This allows the wildlife using the greenbelt, including frogs and salamanders, to reach your little wetland. You get to enjoy the new wildlife, and they have a small addition to their habitat area.

No, they don't attract deer

Wildlife corridors are recommended by just about everyone who writes on wildlife-friendly gardening. But in comments on Harris's post, several gardeners complained that wildlife corridors would only bring more deer into their gardens.

So this is my 2 cents on that: The deer are going to be in your garden anyway. As long as the suburbs remain an almost perfect environment for deer, there will be lots of deer around. And as long as you plant things that deer like to eat, the deer will come to the table for the meal you've put out. Being a lot larger than most other suburban wildlife, deer do not need special wildlife corridors in order to move around. And being practically without predators, they have nothing to fear from coming out into the open.

If gardeners refuse to put in wildlife corridors, however, it's the smaller creatures--especially birds and amphibians--that will suffer. These are the creatures that are finding it increasingly difficult to live in suburban landscapes. They are the ones that need protection from predators--especially the domestic cats that are a feature of most suburban landscapes. Amphibians in particular, being slow moving (thus more vulnerable to predators) and with porous skins that must be kept constantly moist, are dependent on corridors in order to move from place to place.

Refusing to plant wildlife corridors will have no effect on your deer problem, if you have one. And oh, by the way, if you're looking for someone to blame for the deer in your garden, find a mirror.

PS: Purely by coincidence, I am about to go down to a supper of venison, courtesy of a local hunter. Here's my recipe for slow-cooked venison roast.

The trackback URL for Susan Harris's post on the Tallamy lecture is http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/854423/23874574

Another Bee Site

2007-12-15T16:51:00.000-04:00

Above, California poppy is one of the plants recommended at the Urban Bee Garden site. California poppy is native in California and can be grown easily from seed in many other parts of North America. It will grow in extremely poor soil, in fact is good for naturalizing along a roadside. But it does seem to need a lot of sun. Like Cosmos, which also is recommended for pollinators and is easy to grow from seed, it tends to reseed itself from year to year.

WHILE I WAS WORKING ON PART II of my history of native plants and gardening, among the sites that googled up was Urban Bee Garden: A Practical Guide to Introducing the World's Most Prolific Pollinators to Your Garden, sponsored by the Urban Bee Project at the University of California, Berkeley. The site includes a good overview of bee gardening and two lists of bee plants. The short list of easy-to grow plants includes these favorites of mine, which will grow almost anywhere: sunflowers, cosmos, California poppy, pincushion flower, penstemons (need sun and good drainage), lavender (not all varieties are equally hardy), lamb's ear, Coreopsis, buckwheat (good cover crop), catnip, and borage. For those who want to dig deeper (so to speak), the site also offers a nine-page .pdf file containing details on both native and nonnative plants and their appeal to honeybees and California bees.

Gardening and Native Plants Part I

2007-12-13T18:07:00.000-04:00

The 16th century painting by Albrecht Duhrer above depicts Adam and Eve. Little known fact: They were in the middle of an argument about whether that tree is a native plant. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

GOD FIRST MADE A GARDEN. Shortly thereafter, gardeners began arguing about what to put in it.

Adam (hand-picking dead leaves off the lawn): “If we get rid of that tree, I won’t have to invent the rake.”

Eve: “Don’t be silly, dear. That tree is native. Besides, it’s habitat for a very nice snake.”

Shortly after that, the pair were evicted from the Garden. Legend blames the snake, but I believe God was just tired of listening to them fight.

Left: God was just tired of listening to them fight. Detail from a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, courtesy the Wikimedia Commons.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of books on “naturalistic,” "wildlife," “wildflower,” "ecological" (or “green” or “beneficial”), “wild,” and, yes, even native-plant gardening. Given that most of these books mention native plants and that they often promote their use, a proponent of native plants might actually be justified in taking hope. Is it possible, just possible that native plants are going to gain the respect they deserve in American gardening?

Well, in the immortal words of somebody or other, don’t bet the farm. If history is any clue, there is little reason to believe that native plants will ever find a secure niche in the Anglo-American garden. Proponents have been arguing in favor of native plants in the garden for at least 100 years; just look around to see how far we’ve come.

That being said, there may be reason for hope. As long as the farm is not on the table, I personally am hopeful for native plants in the garden. Unfortunately, the reason is that the outlook for native plants outside of the garden is now so wretchedly poor. I will be exploring what I mean by this during the next few weeks.

I hope you'll join me for an opinionated history of Anglo-American gardening and its relationship to native plants.

For the Bird Lover on Your List

2007-12-10T18:07:00.000-04:00

MANY THANKS TO MIKE BERGIN, who founded the birding blog 10,000 Birds, for recommending what surely will be the most requested Christmas book of the year, at least among bird lovers. See his review here.

The Forest (or Woodland) Garden

2007-12-09T05:26:00.000-04:00

This photo shows a scene from a woodland garden in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the fence is a completely developed area, with nothing but pavement for miles around. Within the fence is a serene haven for humans and birds. The photo illustrates one of the key principles of woodland gardening, which is the use of vegetation at multiple levels rather than (as in a traditional flower garden) just near the ground. Douglas fir trees provide the top layer. The intermediate layer is occupied by a PNW native shrub called osoberry, and the ground layer is covered with a glossy-leaved native called Oregon grape.

FOREST OR PRAIRIE? Most gardeners are Prairie gardeners, in a sense. Because we like flowers, we tend to like sun. That in turn leads us to prefer gardens that are open and treeless, mimicking the conditions in the wide open Prairies of the Midwestern provinces and states. Many of the most popular garden plants--purple coneflower and black-eyed Susan to name just two--came to the garden from the Midwestern Prairies.

I grow Prairie plants myself, because in addition to being beautiful and hardy, they also attract pollinators. However, for the last 14 years of my gardening life (since leaving Illinois in 1993), I have lived outside of the Prairie States. First in the Seattle area and now in Nova Scotia, I have lived in areas that are naturally forested. And it has always seemed "just natural" to me that my gardens in these areas should be forested too. When the existing tree cover wasn't adequate, I've planted fast-growing trees and planted large shrubs in order to try to get a woodland effect, as I described in a post called "A Walk on the Shady Side".

I have come to prefer this style of gardening to the open style. You don't get as many brilliant flowers in shade, but woodland gardens are cool, quiet, and serene; they are great habitat for birds, and they are relatively easy to maintain. I've also come to appreciate the aesthetics of a shady garden: Because you can't lean on flashy flowers for effect, you have to pay a lot more attention to foliage, structure, and other subtle ways of creating beauty.

Until today, I never gave a lot of thought to where woodland gardening came from, however. So I was very pleased to read an article in today's Guardian that provided some background on this topic. Jill Tunstall writes in the British newspaper that this style of gardening "goes back to the Aztecs but was reinterpreted by the late Robert Hart, a visionary gardener who brought the idea to Britain in the 1960s and named it 'forest gardening'."

She says that Hart, who lived on the border between Shropshire and Wales, realized that forest gardens "were both productive and self-maintaining. He set about rearranging his own garden on forest principles with edible layers of self-sustaining perennials that would provide food, fuel and medicines, as well as support wildlife. His philosophy was recorded in two books, The Forest Garden and Beyond the Forest Garden (Green Books), both published shortly before he died in 2000."

Tunstall insterviews garden designer Jennifer Laurol, who emphasizes, quite correctly, that the key structural element of a woodland garden is layering--that is, the use of vegetation on mutiple levels. Books on natural design typically describe three layers, which roughly correspond to trees (top level), shrubs (intermediate level), and groundcovers (ground level). But apparently Robert Hart listed seven layers, from roots all the way up to the high canopy.

There does seem to be a key difference between the British forest garden and what designers here in North America are more likely to call a woodland garden. (See for example Rick Darke's book The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest, published in 2002.) Designers here tend to want to imitate the ecosystem that would occur naturally on a site, which requires using native plants or at least trying to. In contrast, British designers seem to be more interested in growing food than in imitating the local ecosystem. Hart seems to have emphasized that a forest garden is a more wildlife-friendly, low-maintenance way of growing food plants. I was quite surprised to learn that woodland gardens can be used to grow food plants, as a matter of fact. Although I remain committed to working with native plants, now I'm wondering whether a portion of the food garden couldn't be a lot shadier than I had previously planned.

One thing is certain: Even if you're not a native plant enthusiast, as I am, if you live in a naturally forested area the woodland or forest approach to design is more appropriate, better for wildlife, and easier to maintain.

Many thanks to the member of the Native Gardening group on Yahoo! Groups who tipped me off to the article in the Guardian.

Appreciating Insect Damage

2007-12-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

The illustration above is courtesy of Dover Publications. I believe these are sphinx moths and their larvae, one of which is shown munching on a leaf. Caterpillars eat leaves in order to survive and grow up to their adult forms. Without insect damage, no caterpillers, no butterflies and moths.

Right now I can look out the window at a vast expanse of snow, which arrived far earlier this year than it ordinarily does. But on the Internet, something is always in bloom! In my files I found this link to an August entry from one of my favorite online newsletters, "The Week at Hilton Pond." Published by the Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History, based in York, S.C., these weekly updates never fail to be informative, and are usually illustrated with beautiful photos. I particularly enjoyed this unconventional look at insect-damaged leaves, in which the usual ("Quick, get the insecticide!") response is replaced by a naturalist's appreciation for natural beauty wherever it's found. As you look at these photos, keep in mind that plants are able to withstand substantial insect damage without suffering any ill effects. Typically if a plant dies as a result of insect activity, it was already weak for some other reason. So except for extreme infestations, it's rarely necessary to run for the insecticide just because you see a chewed leaf. It's quite ok to just stop and enjoy what Hilton Pond calls "the artsy side of insect damage."

A Native for Weed Control

2007-12-01T13:59:00.000-04:00

ONE OF THE EASIEST WAYS TO CONTROL WEEDS is by taking advantage of carefully chosen aggressive plants in order to prevent unwanted plants from gaining a foothold. I've been trying to apply this principle in landscaping my front yard, as documented in the "My Forlorn Front Yard" series.

Today I read an interesting article on this topic posted to the Native Gardening group on Yahoo! Groups. In this Oct. 1, 2007, which was carried by the Associated Press, author Dean Fosdick interviewed Leslie Weston, until recently an associated professor of weed management at Cornell University. According to Weston, dwarf goldenrod, a cultivar of the native plant, has been used successfully for weed control in the relatively harsh environment of traffic circles.

Goldenrod competes successfully with weeds in part because it is drought and salt tolerant, and also because it spreads rapidly. But it turns out that goldenrod also has another advantage: It is allelopathic. That is, it has the ability to release chemicals that suppress the growth of other plants. Another example of an allelopathic plant is crabgrass, which helps to explain why this plant is so difficult to eradicate.

There is a lot more information on this and other gardening-related topics at Cornell's Gardening Resources page.

Winter Bird Feeding

2007-12-01T09:52:00.000-04:00

THERE WAS SNOW ON THE GROUND this morning, marking the time to begin my winter regime of bird feeding. In winter and spring, I make an effort to be more consistent about keeping the feeders full, for reasons explained recently in this post. Other than that, the one big addition to my usual routine is a giant jar of the cheapest peanut butter I can find.

Years ago, before meat came in packages from the grocery store, butchers often gave away bits of cow carcass that their human customers did not want to eat. This is how many dogs got their bones; these days, it is almost impossible to get a dog bone from from a butcher, even if you offer to pay for it.

The butcher was also a source for a winter bird food known as suet. Suet is a thick piece of nearly pure white fat that is found behind a cow or steer's kidneys. Hung outside, often in an old onion bag, it would provide high-calorie fuel for small birds during the depths of winter. Suet functions as a substitute for insects, which are also quite high in fat, during a time of year when insects are very difficult to find.

Today it is almost as difficult to get suet from a butcher as it is to get a good dog bone. However, you can purchase suet in stores; it usually comes in the form of a square cake that fits into a "suet holder" that you can also purchase.

I spent a lot of money on commercially prepared suet over the years, believing that this was the ideal way to feed winter birds. But eventually I realized that the custom of feeding suet arose because suet used to be cheap, not because suet is necessarily the ideal food. As a matter of fact, almost any high-fat food will work just as well. And birds actually seem to prefer peanut butter. When you buy it in the giant jars in the bulk foods section of the grocery store, peanut butter is also also quite a lot cheaper than commercial suet.

After discovering peanut butter, I went through several years in which I tried combining it with other things, such as corn meal or dried fruit. Eventually I realized that this is unnecessary and wasteful, so I just started putting out straight peanut butter.

Some people are afraid to give birds straight peanut butter because they've heard that the birds will choke. But I've never seen or uncovered any evidence that this is likely to happen. As far as I know, most authorities now consider this to be an urban legend.

The only concern in offering birds peanut butter or any other high-fat food is that these foods should not be left outside in warm weather. Fats of all types go rancid in heat. This is why I reserve peanut butter for winter feeding.

All of which is to say that today I celebrated the beginning of winter by finding a couple of old, battered suet feeders, a large jar of inexpensive peanut butter that I bought a couple of weeks ago in expectation of this day, and a big spreading knife. I scooped peanut butter out of the jar and into the suet feeders. Within a minute after I had hung up the first one, a chickadee had taken its first bite.

If you don't have some old suet feeders in the garden shed, you can make a peanut butter feeder out of almost anything: a can open at both ends, a piece of scrap lumber as long as it's not treated. Peanut butter sticks to almost anything, after all. Screw an eye-hook into whatever it is, hang it up where the birds will see it, and you have a free feeder. Do not spread peanut butter on a live tree or shrub, however; squirrels will chew through the bark as they try to get at the last of the peanut butter.

In addition to offering peanut butter to the birds, I will also continue to offer the same foods I put out during the rest of the year: black oil sunflower seeds in the hanging feeders and, thrown daily onto the driveway, cracked corn and/or white millet and/or the cheapest seed mix I can find, which is likely to be mostly white millet. (More about choosing seeds for birds can be found in this post.) This combination keeps a wide array of birds (chickadees, nuthatches, doves, juncos, various sparrows, and various finches, to name a few) very happy during the winter. The peanut butter may even attract woodpeckers and other birds that ordinarily would eat mostly insects.

Gardening as Infinite Game

2007-11-29T06:43:00.000-04:00

Michael Umphrey describes gardening as an infinite game. Many cultures have images of something having no beginning and no end, like this Celtic knotwork pattern that comes from the good people at Dover Publications, who are nice enough to give away free samples of their clipart packages.

THIS MORNING I HAD THE PLEASURE of opening an email from Michael Umphrey, resident of Montana, teacher, writer, and author of a book on community-centered education. Michael blogs on several topics, including gardening, from his Internet home at the Montana Heritage Project.

Michael let me know that he had read yesterday's post, "A Gardener's Duty," liked it, and linked to it, which of course sent me in search of the post that mentioned me, me, me. But the ego boost of seeing myself mentioned on someone else's blog was greatly exceeded by the joy of reading Michael's other entries. I started with his take on my post, "Gardeners Understand Small Solutions to Big Problems," then moved on to a post with a title that's bound to appeal to any gardener: "No Time to Garden." It begins with a sentence almost any gardener will understand: "I don't have time to garden well. I garden anyway."

This post introduces the notion that gardening is an infinite game, explained at length in a marvelous 1999 article Michael wrote called "A Sense of Time." An infinite game is the opposite of a finite game, which is played to win. An infinite game is played in order to go on playing. Michael writes:

Football is a finite game. Gardening is an infinite game. A political campaign is a finite game. A family is an infinite game. A business deal is a finite game. A religion is an infinite game.

Michael offers a description of gardening that captures why I continue to garden despite lack of time and, far more debilitating, a frequent sense that the best thing I could do for the Earth would be to do nothing at all.

Gardening, he writes, "takes place as a nexus of vision, art, science, community, and time." This puts gardening, along with forestry, ecological restoration, and agriculture (all practices having to do with the management of land), on a short list of practices that allow us to experience all of these things at once. I don't know about you, but I find that if I dwell in this spot long enough, I begin to see life itself as an infinite game, and can at least briefly put away all my fretting and worries and hovering despair. This experience cannot be expressed in words, but Michael evokes it in the following passage:

Having a garden is, to me, mostly a way of paying attention to the grace that dazzles and reassures, a way of aligning one’s small efforts with something so vast and good that we slowly learn we really do have nothing to fear.

A Gardener's Duty

2007-11-27T20:49:00.000-04:00

This Milo Winter illustration from 1919 shows one of the fables attributed to Aesop, who lived in the 6th century BC; the story itself has been traced back to the myths of Ancient Egypt. In this story, a lion spares the life of a mouse. Later when the lion is trapped, the mouse returns the favor by gnawing the ropes and setting the lion free. The enduring popularity of this and similar stories across many different cultures is evidence of an innate human belief that helping others is ultimately a benefit to ourselves. Or as the last line of Aesop’s fable states, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." This image is courtesy of Project Gutenberg via the Wikimedia Commons.

ABOVE ALL, DO NO HARM.

This is a very old idea in ethics, sometimes called “the principle of nonmaleficence.” The idea is simple: If you are in a position to hurt someone else but don’t have to, don’t.

Ethicists refer to this as an ethical duty. The duty of nonmaleficence is embodied in the words of the Greek physician Hippocrates(460-370 BC)—who wrote that physicians should do good when they can but, “above all, do no harm.”

The duty of nonmaleficence is not the only duty. It must be balanced with the duty of fidelity, which involves such things as keeping promises and not telling lies; the duty of autonomy, which means respecting others’ freedom of choice; the duty of justice, which equates with what most people mean by fairness; and the duty of beneficence—which means that, given the opportunity to do something good, you should. The Oxford English Dictionary defines beneficence as “active kindness.”

Philosopher David Hume, who died in 1776, said that the sense of duty is fundamental to human morality. The evidence: that the duties not only appeal to us rationally but also have the support of “sentiment”—an 18th century way of saying that they appeal to us innately. Recent investigations into the way the human brain works support the notion that a sense of right and wrong—a conscience, if you will—is probably built in to most humans. Most likely it evolved because people who treated others well were usually treated well in return, improving their chances of survival.

A duties-based approach to ethics is less taxing than the rules-based approach many of us were brought up with. Duties require us to do our best in each situation—trivial or earth-shattering, it doesn’t matter. But the approach also recognizes that sometimes duties can conflict. Having trouble deciding whether to help that elderly person cross the street? You can weigh the benefit the elder derives from your good deed against the harm done to the drivers of oncoming cars, and to yourself and others if it will make you late.

Living this way, you may never be the opening story on the 11 o’clock news. But you will be able to look yourself in the mirror and sleep at night. And you know what? Someone who lives a life of nonharming, trustworthiness, respect for others, fairness, and doing good will add as much to the sum of happiness in the world as anyone can. If you don’t believe me, you are hereby condemned to sit down and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” one more time.

What does this have to do with gardening? Well, not to let the big corporate types off the hook--but the choices made by millions of individuals have emerged as one of the major causes of planetary degradation. Choices made in the way we manage land—even if it’s a half-acre back yard—affect the quality of our air and water, species diversity, and a host of other matters of more-than-passing interest to a lot of creatures for a lot of reasons.

Frequently these choices are of little consequence to us. That oceanic expanse of lawn, requiring the riding mower and truckloads of chemicals, may be there for no better reason than because the neighbors have one and so we thought we ought to have one too.

The principle of nonmaleficence requires us to think before we hop on that mower or call for those trucks. Is what I am about to do harmful? If so, can it be avoided without doing even more harm to someone else? How?

The principle of beneficence calls upon us to ask whether we can actually do some good. Is there something we could plant instead of lawn that would be of greater benefit?

Flexibility is built in: If you manage a golf course you are allowed to keep the lawn while you look for ways to do good (beneficence) without putting your family in the street (fidelity and nonmaleficence).

Yet, at the same time, you are required to recognize that duty to others—not just yourself or, for that matter, even your employer—is an inextricable part of ownership or control over land. It comes with the territory, so to speak. The power to do good implies a duty to do good. The power to harm implies a duty not to. To quote Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

One’s duty isn’t always obvious. A criticism of any flexible approach to ethics is that it allows rationalization—as in, “the harm done to me if I am two minutes late is greater than the harm I would do by leaving an elderly person stranded in the middle of the street.” (The criticism of rigid ethical systems, however, is that they lead to absurdities—as in, “I will help this elder across the street even if I cause several fender benders in the process.”)

Living dutifully also requires information, because we cannot gauge the effect of our actions without it. Duties are not abstract—they arise from, and can be exercised only in, practical situations. (This is probably why a duty-based approach to ethics has always been popular in medicine. It is also, I suspect, why duty could be making a comeback.)

Figuring out what it means to manage land in a dutiful way, giving people the information they need to make those judgments—that’s what I’d like this blog to be about. Maybe, instead of calling what I do wild gardening, I should have called it “dutiful gardening.” Or how about beneficent gardening? Gardening with active kindness.

Do You Have to Feed Birds All Winter?

2007-11-20T08:52:00.000-04:00

IT'S WIDELY BELIEVED THAT anyone who puts up a bird feeder, especially in winter, is duty-bound to keep the feeder full day in and day out. This notion is based on the belief, also widely held, that birds become "dependent" on feeders, thus will starve if we humans don't keep the feeders full.

As is so often the case, the reality is more complicated than that. Research into the habits of birds that visit bird feeders indicates that they use the seed we supply primarily as a supplement to other food sources. They probably rely more heavily on this supplemental food in winter and spring, because calorie needs are high in those seasons. (In winter, they need the extra calories to stay warm; in spring, because they are nesting and raising babies.) However, birds forage widely for food, so if the feeder in one garden happens to be empty they usually know of other places where they can get something to eat.

Think about it: Nature never provides a constant supply of food from any one source. Seeds of one patch of plants mature and are available for eating for a week or so, get eaten, and disappear. The birds move on to another food source. (This is one of many reasons why it's important to have diversity in plantings.) The bird that became dependent on one particular type of seed from one particular patch of plants wouldn't survive its first week!

Birds as a group do not become dependent on feeders in the sense that they cannot survive without them. Mom Nature is not that dumb.

But does that mean you can go to Florida for a week in January and not worry about keeping the feeder full? Well, it depends.

How birds use feeders depends on the species. Banding studies show that members of the finch family tend to move around a lot; the finch you see at your feeder today is probably not the same finch you saw yesterday, even if they do look alike. These birds deal with food shortages simply by moving on to the next food source, be it a patch of plants or somebody else's feeder. In contrast, chickadees tend to be faithful to a particular territory, especially in winter. Throughout the winter the same small flock (usually about six birds) will visit your feeder all day every day as long as you keep it full. But even chickadees are prepared to deal with shortages; a lot of the seeds they take from your feeders are not eaten that day--instead, the seeds are hidden for future use. An individual bird can remember thousands--yes, thousands--of spots where it has hidden seeds away.

This means that the majority of birds will survive even if you leave the feeders empty for a week during a cold snap. There's no evidence that a population of birds has ever been wiped out because somebody forgot to fill her bird feeders.

Individual birds are another matter, however. The presence of a well-stocked bird feeder can make the difference between life and death for a bird that would have died without human intervention.

Sick or injured birds are an example. These birds will often hang around feeders because they are not able to feed themselves as easily as other birds are. Sick birds usually die regardless of whether they have access to food, and their presence at feeders may be a threat to healthy birds. Injured birds may heal, however; many people have heart-warming stories of one-legged or otherwise disabled birds that have managed to live, sometimes for years, through the kindness of humans. These are birds that Mom Nature, who is smart but not always kind, would have thrown out of the gene pool. They survive only because some humans have an endearing soft spot for weak and vulnerable creatures.

Another example is what happens during a patch of especially harsh weather. Mom Nature would let some of the weaker birds freeze or starve. Not so we soft-hearted humans; when we make food readily available, even in the worst weather, we help the marginal creatures get by.

So ... do you need to keep those feeders full or not? The less-than-simple answer is that it depends on how hard hearted you are. Some people would, and do, argue that providing supplemental food interferes with Nature's plan, helping weaker animals to survive and breed when it would be better to let them die. This is harsh, but it may be true.

Efforts to keep individual birds alive are often destined for failure. Nature has plenty of ways to prevent a species from overpopulating. If starvation doesn't bring the population down, disease (a very real danger among feeder birds, who pass diseases around while sharing space at the feeder) may do the trick. And if not disease, hungry predators (like that hawk who will probably be attracted to your feeder at one time or another) will take care of the problem.

On the other hand, some of us get emotionally attached to "our" birds. And we think it's worth making the effort to feed them, even if it only gives a few individuals a few more days or weeks (but possibly months or even years) of life. Humans are just funny that way.

If you're in this camp, you'll want to try to keep your feeders full. However, if you do happen to miss a day or even a few days, you can rest easy in the knowledge that the vast majority of your feathered friends will make it through just fine.

My Forlorn Front Yard: 2007 Wrap Up

2007-11-18T09:41:00.000-04:00

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I began a chronicle of my efforts to turn my forlorn front yard into a native plant garden. In the first installment, I listed the problems with the space, ranging from a very awkward size and shape through overhead powerlines to a cheap, lazy owner. In the second installment I vowed to try to create a space that would "reflect the natural ecology of the region." In the third, I described a basic approach for designing any space according to natural principles. In the fourth, I described how to prepare soil for planting.

In the fifth installment, I described an inexpensive way to cover bare soil using native plants available for free from roadsides and nearby fields. This approach imitates nature by using what ecologists call "early successional" plants to vegetate an area quickly. These hardy plants are adapted to spread rapidly in areas that have recently been cut over, burned, or otherwise (to use another ecologists' word) disturbed--that's why they do so well on roadsides. But though many people regard them as weeds, they serve a very important purpose from an ecological point of view: They hold soil and water in place, preventing erosion, and many of them also help to prepare the way for longer lived, slower growing plants that are the next phase in the natural development of a disturbed site.

MFFY Photo Gallery

And finally, I put up a link to an album of photos showing the progression of this space from summer of 2005, when work began with delivery of a load of compost, to spring of 2007. But that was last May. What has happened since then?

The photo left was taken in May 2007. This area was covered in cardboard and compost, then planted, in 2005. Then I made a serious mistake by neglecting to weed in 2006.

As a result, by spring of 2007 I had a healthy population of weeds and, worse still, weed seeds in what had formerly been fairly clean soil. The photo left shows the area after weeding: I was left with a lot of healthy little native plants (mostly Potentilla, wild strawberry, and Sysirinchium) and some big patches of bare earth where various weeds had been removed.

The photo at the top of this post shows the same space just a few months later, in July. As you can see, once freed from competition those tiny plants had grown luxuriantly!

The photo below gives a closer view of the native groundcovers that had taken over the front yard by mid-July. The logs in the photo (which were supposed to outline paths but were quickly overgrown) give a sense of how deep the coverage was. It would have been deeper except that I used an electric weed-whacker to shear the groundcover in areas I wanted to use as paths.

Unfortunately, I did not weed whack the entire front yard. The result of not weed whacking became a lot more obvious just a month later, in August. Here you can see that the unwhacked areas of the front yard are now dominated by tall natives, especially goldenrod and, to a lesser extent, wild bergamot. I like goldenrod, but it is very common in this area, and most people regard it as a weed. Also it is very aggressive. I came to regret having let it spread, although I do think the photo below is quite pretty.

As I look back on this year's effort, I still think the concept is sound. The July photos show that a lush, thick cover of green can be achieved using common native plants. My experience also shows that at least in the sunnier areas, these plants can choke out almost all invasive non-native plants. Only in the shadier spots, where the native groundcovers did not do so well, did I have crops of thistles, dandelions, and other nonnatives.

On the other hand, the execution of my plan was weak. This lazy owner, true to form, did not put enough time into weeding. Had I done a thorough weeding in 2006, I probably would not be struggling with patches of nonnative invasives now. Because they've had a chance to get established, I may have no choice but to go after them with--gasp--Roundup. But first I'll try a lot of digging in early spring.

Another issue is aesthetic. The front yard is supposed to be a compromise zone--wild enough to make me happy but not so wild that visitors will think I've let it go. I failed to meet that goal: The front yard, though mostly native (which is enough to satisfy me), looked far too wild for most tastes. The reason is that I don't like to use the weedwhacker: It wastes electricity, and there is always the risk of harming an animal that's hiding among the plants. Unfortunately, by not weedwacking enough I let the native plants get too tall, and I also let the naturally tall natives (e.g., goldenrod) take over. As a result the front yard never looked tidy; by fall, even though I was fairly pleased with it, I knew that most people would think that it was completely out of control.

Next year, if the weeds cooperate, I'm going to make more of an effort to keep the natives at a "lawnlike" height. Can I have a native front yard that someone other than me will like?

Trapping and Relocating is NOT Humane

2007-11-16T17:15:00.000-04:00

If you really want to be a wildlife angel, trapping them and moving them is not the way to go. This image courtesy Dover Publications.

AS THE WEATHER GROWS COLD, wild animals will be looking for places to spend the winter. This often brings a spate of complaints about animals who have taken up residence in basements, walls, attics, and other locations where homeowners do not want them.

Sadly, a popular solution to such problems is to use a non-lethal trap to capture the animal, then give it a one-way drive to a location far away. Many animal lovers use this technique in preference to lethal methods of control, believing that it's humane. I'm stunned by how often people brag to me about having given an animal a "one-way trip" or a "long drive," expecting me to congratulate them on how kind they've been.

I try not to be unkind in return, as I know they meant well. But you know what they say about good intentions. Consider the following:

1. Most animals are territorial. They establish territories around the areas where they expect to live, raise young, and hunt for food, and they do not willingly share those territories with other animals of the same species.

2. Any territory that is capable of supporting a wild animal of a particular species--for instance, a raccoon--probably already has one residing there. If there is no raccoon already living in a particular territory, it's probably because there isn't enough shelter, food, or water to support a raccoon.

In practice, this means that when you trap an animal that is currently living in your territory and relocate it elsewhere, you're probably doing one of two things: Either, a., you're moving the animal into a territory where it will not be able to survive or, b., you're moving the animal into a territory that already belongs to another animal. If the latter is true, the animals will almost inevitably fight; one will likely die or be severely injured. At the very least one animal will end up homeless.

On top of that, whenever you transport wild animals from one territory to another, you always run the risk of transporting diseases or parasites. So there may be an additional risk to other animals living in the area.

And finally, the chances are that your effort will have been a complete waste. If you do nothing to prevent a species from entering your home, sooner or later another member of that species will reappear in the attic, the basement, the wall, or wherever the previous one was living. Animals are always looking for places to live--if you provide suitable living space, sooner or later that space will be occupied.

None of this is humane. It's not even effective. What is the humane, effective solution to human-animal conflicts? It's what the Humane Society of the United States calls conflict resolution. A key element is exclusion--that is, humanely preventing animals from entering areas where they are not wanted and, if they are already living where they are not wanted, humanely evicting them. Exclusion is not always easy; sometimes it can even be expensive. But it is the key to long-term, humane prevention of conflicts with animals.

Every species is different, so effective exclusion starts with correctly identifying the animal that is causing the problem. (You would be surprised at how often people get this one wrong, then are mystified as to why their exclusion efforts don't work.) The next step is to understand the species well enough to be able to humanely evict it and/or exclude it. A great resource to help you do that is the HSUS book Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living With Wildlife. The HSUS website has fact sheets on many of the animals that homeowners complain about most.

Another good resource is my friend Russell Link's book Living With Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest; although it's focused on PNW wildlife, much of the information would be useful anywhere in northern North America.

Where I've Been

2007-11-14T17:32:00.000-04:00

The image above is courtesy of the good people at Dover Publications, who give away free samples of their clip art. This cigar box art depicts an idealized vision of life in my woodlot. Or at least I think it does.

FAITHFUL READERS OF THIS BLOG, if I have any left, may have noticed that I've been missing for, oh, about a month. This is a lifetime in Internet time, long enough to have your license to blog revoked. So by way of apology I thought I would explain where I've been.

About a month ago, I happily accepted a position as part-time member services coordinator for an organization called the Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators Association. Almost immediately, the organization had the opportunity to bid on a contract that would provide funding to educate owners of small forests about something called uneven-age management. I offered to write the proposal and, to make a long story short, that's what I've been doing for the last month.

Does this have anything to do with wild gardening? Why, yes it does. As the owner of what we here in Nova Scotia call a woodlot, in other words a small patch of forest (anything up to about 2,000 hectare is considered small in these parts), I get to "garden" on a larger scale than most people do. However, the principles that apply to good management of a woodlot are the same as those that apply to good management of a garden: make a place for wildlife, plant natives, create diversity, leave a lot of dead wood, try to do the same things nature would do.

Uneven-age management is a case in point. In this approach to woodlot management, you never cut all the trees at once. This makes uneven-age management the leading alternative to clearcutting, in which large numbers of trees are cut at the same time. Most people who have studied the Acadian Forest, which is the forest type that is native here, agree that clearcutting is not natural to this forest. Uneven-age management is far closer to what nature would do--that is, strike dead just one or two trees at a time, leaving small gaps in the forest canopy. This allows sunlight to reach trees that are growing on the forest floor, stimulating their growth. The result is a forest that contains a lot of diversity: not just trees of different species but also trees of different ages. It's harder to make money doing this kind of forestry, but on the plus side you always have a forest--you don't end up with those empty landscapes that are left after the clearcutters have been through. And there is always plenty of habitat for wildlife. Also if you manage your forest this way long enough, eventually you grow very large, very old trees that, if harvested, are worth a lot of money.

But now I am drifting away from the topic of gardening. My point is that wild gardening is actually quite similar to any type of good land management, no matter what scale you're working on. The question, and this is a question I ask myself quite often, is: Is wild gardening really gardening?

Quick Take: An Ode to Be Visited

2007-10-18T07:52:00.000-04:00

"THIS WEEK AT HILTON POND" is always worth a visit, but this week they have an especially visit-worthy installment. "Ode to Goldenrod" is a photo essay with text devoted to the many small organisms that make their homes among these flowers. The photo essay is composed of large, perfectly focused close-up shots of creatures such as the jumping spider (shown gazing at the photographer calmly, using four of its eight eyes), the green lynx spider and a batch of its hatchlings, a katydid, several wasps, and of course the ever-present and always beloved bumblebee. The photos are all accompanied by text that discusses the life and habits of the creatures pictured.

"This Week at Hilton Pond" is a weekly newsletter posted to the website of the Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History. According to the author, Bill Hilton Jr., the newsletter is devoted to phenology, "the study of change in nature--including the unfolding of seasons and the sometimes subtle ways in which plants, animals, and habitats respond to different photoperiods, variations in temperature, and other biotic and abiotic factors." I had never heard that word until I read it at this website, but I think I will be using it often in future. (In fact, these days I often think that I am much more a phenologist than I am a gardener!) My only complaint about "This Week at Hilton Pond" is that they don't seem to maintain a browsable directory of entries. You can search the site for a topic if you know what you're looking for, or you can page through old entries in the series by working your way backwards from the current installment, but there is no list of topics you can browse. (Or at least I didn't find one.) But this is a quibble compared to the quality of the writing and photography on this blog.

For my own reflections on goldenrod, please see this post.

Quick Take: A New Newsletter

2007-10-10T17:46:00.000-04:00

I JUST RECEIVED MY FIRST ISSUE of Sustainable Gardening News, an email newsletter produced by gardening coach Susan Harris. The writing is lively, the news is interesting, the tips are useful. Susan's energy and enthusiasm are infectious. I think I'm going to look forward to seeing it in my inbox every month, and you might too. To subscribe, visit her Sustainable Gardening website.

How to Set Up Those Bird Feeders

2007-10-07T09:33:00.000-04:00

Above: One of many bird feeders I had around my house in the Pacific Northwest. Note that it was positioned close to a living room window, so I could watch the birds. Though designed as a squirrel baffle, the plastic dome over the feeder helped to keep the seed dry. Unfortunately, this style of feeder doesn't take a plastic dish to catch seed, so I had to clean the ground under the feeder using a small rake. The feeder was positioned away from the bird bath (it looks like a large rock) so that seed and droppings don't fall in the water.

MOST BIRDS ARE MESSY EATERS. They throw seed around. They scatter seed hulls, to say nothing of droppings. If you let this stuff accumulate under the feeder it will not only make a mess but also, potentially, spread disease to other birds.

Previous installments in this series:
Buying a bird feeder.
What type of seed should you put in those feeders?

That's why it's important to give some thought to how you set up a bird feeder. Your goal is to make cleanup as easy as possible.

One trick is to attach a plastic tray to the bottom of your feeder. The tray will catch most, but probably not all, droppings and waste, and it can be removed for easy cleaning. Droll Yankees makes trays that attach to the bottoms of almost all of their feeders. It's also possible to buy trays that can be hung underneath other styles of feeders. In choosing a tray, bigger is better because bigger trays catch more. You also should think about how easy the tray will be to clean, as it will have to be cleaned often.

A disadvantage of trays is that they provide comfortable seating for squirrels and large birds. If you're trying to avoid feeding either or both of the former, you may want to try another option.

An alternative to putting a tray under your feeder is to hang the feeder over a surface that can be swept easily. This is also a good way to feed ground-feeding birds: If you throw the seed on a driveway, for example, it will be easier for you to sweep up or hose off any waste.

You can also put a big piece of cardboard under your feeder, as long as you replace the cardboard often. (That wet cardboard covered in bird droppings will be a fine addition to your compost bin, incidentally.)

Another potential threat to birds is damp seed, which can quickly become moldy. It's important to store seed in a dry place and not buy so much at one time that it will go moldy before you use it. Likewise, don't put more seed in the feeders than can be used up in a day or so.

Although a good-quality feeder will be relatively watertight, it's unlikely that any feeder will be completely waterproof. So it's a good idea to put your feeder where it will stay as dry as possible. Possibly the best possible location for a feeder is underneath your eaves, especially if they are wide, or on a roofed-in porch. If you put the feeder near a window, you will not only keep the feeder dry but also bring the birds where you can get a good look at them.

If you don't want to hang the feeder near the house, do put it under a cover of some sort. You can buy clear plastic domes for this purpose. Sometimes they're referred to as squirrel baffles, because they can also be used to prevent squirrels from reaching a feeder, but they also work well as rain covers.

What Type of Seed Should You Put in Those Feeders?

2007-09-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

Above, black-oil sunflower seed, shown at the top of the photo, is the birdseed of choice for feeders that are above the ground. Cracked corn, shown at the bottom of the photo, is a good choice for birds such as doves, pheasants, and quail, and should be scattered on the ground.

For information on how to buy a bird feeder, click here.

DIFFERENT BIRDS HANG OUT IN DIFFERENT RESTAURANTS. In other words, different birds have different styles of eating and prefer different types of food. Some, like doves, sparrows, juncos, pheasants, and quail, prefer to eat on the ground rather than from a feeder that's suspended above the ground. They also tend to enjoy cracked corn and millet.

On the other hand, birds such as chickadees, nuthatches, and finches, like to visit feeders that are suspended above ground. Fortunately for those of us who prefer to keep our bird feeding activities as simple as possible, all of these birds seem to enjoy black-oil sunflower seed. In fact, studies show that black-oil sunflower seed is the favorite food of chickadees and nuthatches, two species that are widespread and universally loved.

So the easiest and most cost-efficient way to fill feeders is to buy black-oil sunflower seed in quantity, store it in a dry place (a metal garbage can works well if the seed is stored where rodents might get to it), and use it in all the feeders.

Why is black-oil sunflower seed so popular with these small birds? The seeds are small and have a thin shell, making them easy to eat. They are also very nutritious.

The seed is also a good choice for you, the person who is earning the money to buy the seed for these little guys. Black-oil sunflower seed keeps well, and it's inexpensive compared to some other seeds such as niger thistle (aka nyger). What's more, there don't seem to be any major environmental concerns around growing sunflowers for seed; in fact, sunflowers are North America's only native agricultural crop. Most of the crop is used to make oil for human use; the seeds that are designated for birds are those that are not of good enough quality to be used for oil.

Now, black-oil sunflower seed is more expensive by the pound than many birdseed mixes you might find in grocery stores, but in practice it probably is cheaper to use because there's less waste. When mixes are offered in feeders, birds tend to pick through the seeds, looking for the ones they like best. The seeds they don't care for are dropped on the ground, where they can make a mess or attract rodents.

Seed on the ground also attracts birds such as sparrows and juncos. But it's best not to encourage these birds to eat right underneath your feeders. (Think about it--it's not very hygienic!) All in all, the best strategy is to buy one type of seed for the feeders and, if you want to feed ground-feeding birds, buy them some seed of their own.

I usually buy black-oil sunflower in quantity for the feeders and keep it in a metal garbage can on the porch. For the ground-feeding birds, I buy both cracked corn and an inexpensive mix that is predominantly composed of millet (those round, shiny, off-white little seeds) but also has a bit of sunflower seed in it. This appeals to a wide variety of ground-feeding birds, including the pheasants we get around here. (When I lived on the West Coast, the same strategy attracted whole families of California quail.) Food for ground-feeding birds is scattered right on the driveway, away from the hanging feeders.

Coming soon: How to set up a bird feeding station.

Buying a Bird Feeder

2007-09-26T18:17:00.000-04:00

Shown above is a metal bird feeder, made in England, designed to frustrate squirrels. The cage works well to keep out large (that is, adult Eastern gray) squirrels, but the holes are too large to frustrate young gray squirrels, red squirrels, or most large birds. Cover, our celebrity spokesduck, is a little too big, however.

AT ONE TIME, I HAD 17 BIRD FEEDERS. What can I say? Once I also had 10 cats. I used to believe in the principle that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

Now that my watchword is moderation, however, at least I do know quite a bit about bird feeders (and cats). Fall is a time when people often start feeding birds (and with good reason, as studies show that access to well-stocked feeders does help birds survive the winter). So here is my advice on how to choose a bird feeder:

1. Get a bird feeder made of heavy-duty plastic and metal. Yes, I know, you love the rustic look of wood. So do I. But, in my reluctant opinion, wooden feeders are often not the most practical choice. First, they can easily be destroyed by squirrels, which can chew right through wood in search of birdseed. Second, in wet weather wood tends to get damp and stay damp. Dampness means mold, and moldy seed is not good for birds. Finally, wooden feeders are hard to clean. In contrast, a good-quality bird feeder made of heavy plastic and metal will resist squirrels, help to keep your seed dry, and be easy to clean.

Among my favorite feeders are the ones made by the well-known company called Droll Yankees. As far as I know they are easy to find all over North America. These tube-shaped feeders are made of high-impact plastic with metal at the top and bottom and around the holes from which the birds get the seeds. They come with a guarantee. They are relatively watertight. You can take them apart for cleaning and even put them through a dishwasher. And they are very reasonably priced, given the quality of the feeders.

2. Buy a feeder that will hold about a pound or two of seed. That amount doesn't have to be precise. The point is that you want to get a feeder big enough so that you don't have to refill it every day, but not so big that the seed will go moldy before the birds have a chance to eat it. For most people, that means a feeder holding a pound or two of seed, like the Droll Yankees' classic A-6 model, the first tube-shaped feeder ever introduced (in 1969) and still the one to beat.

3. Plan to feed squirrels. Most parts of North America today are abundantly supplied with the large, gray, fuzzy-tailed rodents most people think of when they hear the word squirrel. Actually, chances are that what you're seeing is just one type of squirrel--the Eastern gray squirrel, a species that is doing very well, perhaps too well, in many areas where it is not native. If you are lucky enough to have small red squirrels coming to your feeder, consider feeding them, as they are most likely native and may be threatened in your area.

Eastern gray squirrels, on the other hand, are far from threatened; some people even blame them for driving out the smaller red squirrels, although other people think they are being unfairly blamed for changes caused by humans. One thing is certain: Grey squirrels make a full-time job of emptying bird feeders. This infuriates some people, who then spend a lot of time and/or money fighting off the furry marauders. (Often unsuccessfully, I might add.) If you want to keep your bird feeding simple, plan on sharing. If you can't fight 'em ... feed 'em.

4. If you don't want to feed squirrels ... plan on spending extra money. There are good reasons to try not to feed grey squirrels, including the possible impact on native red squirrels, and there are a variety of devices designed to frustrate grey squirrels. But they do tend to be expensive.

Many anti-squirrel devices, called baffles, are designed to prevent squirrels from reaching a bird feeder. These include covers designed to prevent squirrels from reaching bird feeders from above and plates, cones, or drums designed to prevent squirrels from reaching bird feeders from the sides or from below. (Here are various such devices made by Duncraft.) In my experience, sooner or later squirrels usually manage to find a way to get around these devices. (Remember: They are clever, agile animals, and getting into your bird feeder is the only thing they have to do ... all day.)

I think squirrel-resistant feeders usually work better, although not perfectly. (Note that I said squirrel resistant, not squirrel proof.) One of the simpler and more economical versions is a bird feeder in a cage, shown above. The one shown work fairly well on adult grey squirrels, much less well on the young 'uns, who can slip through the bars. For more protection, look for a cage with smaller openings.

Another option is a feeder that is designed to close if a heavy animal such as a squirrel sits on it; these often can be set so that they will frustrate not only squirrels but also larger birds such as blue jays and doves. The best of these models are built like tanks (the better to frustrate the powerful jaws of professional rodents), and priced to match. After getting over sticker shock, I've had good luck with a feeder similar to the Heritage Farms Absolute II Squirrel Proof Feeder, for example.

But there are quite a few different styles, as you can see at the Duncraft website. And (no doubt this is a testimony to the inventiveness of squirrels) new styles are being introduced all the time. The "Yankee Flipper" from Droll Yankees is one such new entry, for example.

Coming soon: Where to put a feeder, and what to put in it.

Meet the Natives: Common Milkweed, part two

2007-09-22T14:48:00.000-04:00

A pasture such as the one shown above could easily be overrun by common milkweed, ruining its value as food for livestock.

Click here for part one.

BANS ON COMMON MILKWEED, a plant that is vitally important to the monarch butterfly, are a sad reminder that the needs of humans and the needs of wildlife do sometimes conflict. However, this dilemma also gives us a chance to explore ways of trying to meet the needs of both. One important lesson is that gardeners in cities, suburbs, and other areas where there is not a lot of agriculture going on have a vital role to play--if they can get over their all-too-common obsession with "neat and tidy" landscaping practices.

The (Sad) Case for Milkweed Bans

Monarchs are threatened, but so are small farms. And as a resident of farm country, I cannot help but recognize that common milkweed might pose a threat to my neighbors' livelihoods.

There is a large (but family owned) dairy farm where I live, for example. The cows seem to be treated well, with access to pasture throughout the growing season. For winter feeding, the farmer cuts hay on a number of local properties. If these fields were to become infested with milkweed (which could easily happen if someone were to introduce it to the area), this hay would be useless. The only way to keep milkweed out of the pastures would be to use one of the few herbicides that's effective on this plant, a solution that would be expensive and that I doubt anyone in the community would want.

This is why several Canadian provinces have passed bans on common milkweed. (But please don't get the idea that Canadians are backward. As far as I've been able to find out, the main reason such bans are almost nonexistent in the United States is that U.S. farmers use more herbicides, making the bans unnecessary.) I think this is excessive, using a chainsaw where a scalpel would be the ideal tool. But I grudgingly admit that I understand how the bans came to be passed.

The Possibility of Compromise

Canada isn't oblivious to the potential impact of these bans on monarch butterflies. Thus far, most of the provinces seem to have dealt with the dilemma by using selective enforcement. In other words, the bans are on the books for use when milkweed becomes a problem, but they aren't enforced unless somebody complains. For example, in 1996 a researcher for the Monarch Watch organization was told that in Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, milkweed was being controlled only on a "complaint" basis. Only Nova Scotia had an active eradication program at that time.

Ontario has taken this policy one step further by publicizing its policy of tolerance. In a FAQ at the Ministry of Agriculture website, the province explains, "As long as the population of milkweed planted doesn't negatively affect agricultural or horticultual land by spreading seed and new vegetative plant material (i.e. root stock) into fields, nurseries or greenhouses then it is acceptable to plant milkweed in your garden. It is recommended that you consult with your local weed inspector and/or neighbours so that all parties involved are comfortable that the impact to agriculture or horticulture is negligible."

This is laudable up to a point, but of course any gardener familiar with the Deborah Dale case can see the pitfall: All you need is one complaint by one uninformed neighbor, and the monarch habitat you've been lovingly cultivating will be toast.

Better Options

A better option would be for the authorities to start making more fine grained, more informed discriminations. If a plant is a genuine problem in agricultural areas, for example, perhaps it should be controlled in those areas. But that doesn't mean that it should be banned from areas where there are no farms. On the contrary, property owners in those areas should be encouraged to plant milkweed and other native plants with value for wildlife, all the more so if the plants are banned in certain agricultural zones. In fact, milkweed is an excellent example of why it is so important for people in urbanized areas to create wildlife oases in their own backyards.

Mind you, I'm not saying that I support bans on native plants. What I support is creative compromise, a search for ways of meeting both the needs of humans and the needs of wildlife without causing too much damage to either one. One possibility is to ban certain plants in agricultural areas only, while encouraging or even mandating the creation of wildlife oases in urban zones. But that's not the only option.

Another might be the "lemons into lemonade" approach: Why not turn a plant such as milkweed into a commercial crop? Common milkweed has been cultivated in Europe as a source of fibers* that can be used to make paper, cloth, rope, or a soft insulating material that was used in life jackets during World War II. The flowers have been used to make wine.

The point, again, is that we can find solutions to (apparent) conflicts, as long as we are open to creative compromise. What we cannot afford is simplistic solutions or solutions that pit one group, such as farmers, against another group, such as wildlife lovers. If that happens, both will lose.

* According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Milkweed stems are collected after the stalks senesce in late fall-early winter. The dried stalks are split open to release the fibers; milkweed fibers are sometimes mixed with fibers of Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum). The bark is removed and the fibers released by first rubbing between the hands and then drawing the fibers over a hard surface. Twisting the fiber opposite each other and twining them together forms the cord. Often this is accomplished by rolling the fibers on the thigh while twisting them together."

Meet the Natives: Common Milkweed, part one

2007-09-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

This beautiful photograph of a monarch butterfly on milkweed is by garden blogger Jodi DeLong. Check out her amazing photographs of monarchs emerging from chrysalides here and here.

WANT IT, CAN’T HAVE IT. That’s the tragedy of my relationship with common milkweed, a plant that is beautiful, easy to grow, almost essential for monarch butterflies … and banned in many places, including Nova Scotia, where I live. When I first learned about laws forbidding me to grow this plant, which is so important to the life cycle of a beautiful and threatened butterfly, I was appalled: How could authorities be so backward? Now that I’ve looked into it a bit more thoroughly, I think I’ve come to understand why the laws exist. I still think the laws probably need to be changed, but I now hope more for a compromise than for a complete end to all restrictions.

But before I talk about laws banning milkweed, let me give you some background on the plant.

Description

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) has thick, erect stems that grow quite tall (4-6 feet) and bear 4-inch pompoms of smaller flowers that look pink to me but are sometimes described as mauve, creamy white, or purplish. As is characteristic of milkweeds, the individual flowers have an unusual hour-glass shape, with some petals pointing downward and others pointing up. When injured, milkweeds “bleed” a milky sap—hence the name.

Common milkweed closely resembles swamp milkweed (A. incarnata), which I’ve written about previously (and which, fortunately, is not banned in Nova Scotia). However, the flower clusters of common milkweed are round and carried up and down the stalk, and the plant has coarse foliage; the flowers of swamp milkweed are flat-topped and carried on the top of the plant, and the foliage is more fragile.

Common milkweed flowers from May to August, the flowers being followed by attractive seed heads that are popular with crafters. The blooms are fragrant; the odor has been described as “heavenly” and as being like that of “hyacinths and lilacs.”

By now no doubt you can begin to see why I want this plant so badly! And yet there’s more.

Value to wildlife

The U.S. Department of Agriculture offers us the following enticing quote: “This is a wonderful horticultural plant for landscaping to attract butterflies (particularly monarchs), whose numbers are declining and migratory routes changing due to lack of appropriate habitat.” Monarch butterflies will lay their eggs only on plants in the milkweed family because the plant contains a chemical called a cardiac glycoside, which is mildly toxic and makes the caterpillars and adult butterflies taste bad to potential predators.

Once upon a time, common milkweed was plentiful in the northeastern United States and lower eastern Canada, and monarchs had all the plants their tiny insect hearts could possibly desire. However, development and agriculture have destroyed many of these stands, leaving monarchs and other butterflies with fewer plants to feed on. Today common milkweed is most often found growing primarily in untended fields and pastures, ditches, and roadsides.

Where, at least in Canada, it is often treated as a weed. Yes, sadly this important plant is banned outright in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia.* In addition, Minnesota allows individual counties to ban common milkweed if they wish to do so, but there is no statewide ban.

The bans in Ontario and Quebec are of particular concern because these provinces are in the heart of monarch breeding territory. Nova Scotia supposedly is on the fringes of this zone, but as Jodi DeLong's photographs attest (see photo above), monarchs definitely do breed here.

Why a Weed?

OK, milkweeds are toxic. But common milkweed apparently is toxic only when ingested in large quantities. (Some of the other milkweeds apparently are more toxic.) And besides, milkweeds taste so bad that animals usually don’t want to eat them. (This is, remember, precisely why monarchs like them so much.) How poisonous is milkweed? The only documented, naturally occurring (that is, not involving nasty force-feeding of the plant to livestock) case I’ve been able to find took place in Maryland during a drought and was recorded in 1942. Evidently some sheep ate milkweed and died, but they ate the plant only because it was the only food available at the time, because of the drought.

Although anyone who wants to ban milkweed will mention its toxicity, the primary reason for banning it seems to be that it causes problem for farmers. As the province of Nova Scotia explains on its website, "Common milkweed is a competitive weed and can absorb nutrients and water more efficiently than many crops. Therefore, it can reduce crop yields significantly. Because of its rapid spread, it can quickly become a nuisance weed on farmland. Once a field becomes infested, it is very difficult to control. At harvest, the thick sap of common milkweed can clog combine parts. The fluffy seed may also clog air intakes."

Of course, farmers have to contend with many weeds. Unfortunately, milkweed is particularly difficult to control. It spreads readily and has deep roots. "Mechanical control of common milkweed, such as cutting or clipping, simply leads to the creation of larger colonies from the rootstocks of the plant," says Nova Scotia, although the province admits that "continuous cultivation will eventually deplete food reserves in the rootstocks." Common milkweed also does not respond to many of the herbicides used today. However, it can be controlled with glyphosate (often sold under the brand name Roundup), which is generally regarded as one of the safer herbicides in use today. (Many people object to all herbicides; I'd like to sidestep this debate if I can today.)

The bottom line, as the province of Ontario explains on its website, is that milkweed "can have a considerable negative impact to a grower's net economic return."

Tomorrow: Part two, alternatives to outright bans, cultivation

* These and other statements made in this post are based on Internet research. I've done everything I can short of making telephone calls to make sure that my information is accurate and up to date.

Autumn: The Only Question

2007-09-19T07:08:00.000-04:00

The following poem by Burton D. Carley is taken from the 1997 Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association worship materials guide. I encountered it via Panhala, an e-mail newsletter that puts a quotation (usually a poem) in my inbox every morning.

I do not know if the seasons remember their history or if the days and nights by which we count time remember their own passing.
I do not know if the oak tree remembers its planting or if the pine remembers its slow climb toward sun and stars.
I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall's gathering or if the bluejay remembers the meaning of snow.
I do not know if the air remembers September or if the night remembers the moon.
I do not know if the earth remembers the flowers from last spring or if the evergreen remembers that it shall stay so.
Perhaps that is the reason for our births--to be the memory for creation.
Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected.
Perhaps this is the only question we will have to answer: "What can you tell me about September?"

To subscribe to Panhala, send a blank e-mail to Panhala-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Burton D. Carley is the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Memphis, Tennessee. For more of his poems, see the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations website.

Relax, It's Fall

2007-09-10T18:23:00.000-04:00

Above: Skippers are in the same family as butterflies and moths, and most people think of them as butterflies. Orange-and-brown, they often rest with their forewings and hindwings at different angles, making them look a bit like upside-down paper airplanes. They’re also easy to identify by their “skipping” style of flight. Skippers tend to show up in large numbers in fall; they’re so friendly that they will let you get quite close, and will even land on you as you work in the garden. Like many other Lepidoptera, they make use of weeds such as the bull thistle shown in the photograph as a source of food. Photo by Bruce Marlin via the Wikipedia, under a Creative Commons license.

FALL CLEANUP? NO WAY! As a wildlife-friendly gardener you are free to enjoy autumn in the garden with little or no guilt about chores left undone. In fall, nature is busy making preparations for winter, and most maintenance chores merely interfere. It's a perfect excuse to find yourself a comfortable perch and enjoy the last warm days and lovely flowers.

Here are a few things the wildlife-friendly gardener does not need to do in fall:

Weeding: Well, ok, you can. But weeding is likely to interfere with the butterflies (or their caterpillars or the chrysalides in which they change from caterpillars into butterflies) you spent the spring and summer trying to attract, so why not put it off?

Cutting back dead stems: A no-no in the wildlife-friendly garden, removing dead stems destroys shelter that various creatures need in winter, as well as food from seed heads.

Raking dead leaves: What? Dead leaves are nature's fertilizer and mulch for trees and shrubs. Why would you take that away? Besides, dead leaves provide cover for spiders and other invertebrates, which birds often rely on for winter food.

Pruning: Once again, you're just removing shelter animals will need during the winter months.

Removing stumps, dead trees, brush, fallen branches and logs, or rocks: See above.

Filling wet spots, alter drainage patterns, divert or impound water, or re-channel streams: In my view, this is a mistake in any season, but you're really asking for trouble if you do this sort of thing going into the wet months.

Anything involving pesticides: Butterflies are insects, too. Anything you do to kill insects in the garden may very well kill butterflies, or their caterpillars, including use of Bt. Besides, birds need insects for food.

Mowing the lawn: If you have a lawn, you must mow it. But that, in my view, is a good reason to not have one. If that's too radical a suggestion, at least for now, do keep in mind that mowing can kill snakes, frogs, and other creatures that might be hiding there. The caterpillars of many skippers feed on grasses, for example. So consider letting your grass stay as long as possible.

What can you do? As the days grow short, we say goodbye to many garden friends. Some, like chipmunks, will probably be back again in spring. Others, like almost all the bumblebees, will die come first frost. For me, this is an ideal season for reflection. This is a good time to recall that nothing is perfect, or should be. The wildlife-friendly garden may not be perfect in the sense of “perfectly tidy,” but it offers abundant beauty. There is the glimpse of deep red Clematis "Niobe" blooms glowing in a patch of sunlight the plant has twined upward to reach. There is the joy of seeing a red-striped garter snake sunning on a gravel path, or hearing the flutter of a small brown wren searching for insects in a pile of brush. There is the freedom that comes with giving up ideas about how things should be and learning, instead, to enjoy them as they are.