Good news from the New York Times

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.

Wildlife Gardening and Deer

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

More Good News

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