Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens
Healthy Gardens. Healthy Planet
While collecting scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata) seeds in my garden this week I was pleasantly surprised to smell chocolate! Then I remembered that the beautiful Nuttall’s sunflowers (Helianthus nuttallii) that surrounded me have the amazing fragrance of chocolate. I’m sure the pollinators agree that it is a fragrance that must be experienced. Plants have an amazing […]
A couple of months ago I wrote about the effect of the dry spring and early summer on our native plant garden and woodland. Since then you’ve probably seen photos and heard about the severe wildflowers that have burned hundreds of square miles of eastern Washington. Fire has even burned a large swath of forest […]
Recently I shared my thoughts about how green roofs in the city can provide important habitat to endangered native plants with The Nature of Cities. While there are many other contributors on the TNOC website with wonderful articles, my thoughts are posted below (as well as within the TNOC site). And while some may brush […]
The folks at Comedy Central contacted me earlier this year, and I’m pleased to say I’ll be a correspondent for The Daily Show this fall as their native plant expert. As such, I find it necessary to end my time here at the most wonderful of places on the internet, where so many of us […]
Red is an eye-catching color in the garden, and it’s also the main light wavelength that hummingbirds, those “jewels of the air” beloved by habitat gardeners respond to in searching for nectar. Feeding hummingbirds by planting native nectar-bearing wildflowers is much healthier than providing sugar-water in a feeder. Nectaring at a wildflower provides a full, nutritious meal […]
When Americans think of fall color, one of the first trees to come to mind is the maple, particularly our stately east-coast native sugar maple (Acer saccharum). But it’s still summer and I live on the west coast, yet we’re already enjoying some spectacular reds from the whirligig seeds of vine maple (Acer circinatum).
It’s a fact. Plants want to grow up, become mature, and raise a family; and that’s exactly what they do unless we make it impossible for them. Which can definitely happen. However, in this mini garden, things did grow. They really grew. And, true confessions; things didn’t turn out the way I envisioned them – […]
Next to the patio I have a patch of Paintedleaf a.k.a. Fire-On-The-Mountain a.k.a. Wild Poinsettia (Poinsettia cyathophora; synonym: Euphorbia cyathophora). This area gets morning sun and begins to move into the shadow of the carport in early afternoon. It is amazing the amount of activity that takes place each day at this beautiful native plant […]
Keeping your wildlife garden blooming through the summer can be a challenge especially during periods of drought and high temperatures. The colors of the spring garden rapidly fade but there are ways to keep plants attractive and blooming all season long. First, your garden should include a variety of plant species that bloom in different […]
On my twice weekly runs on the Monarch Spur Trail, a former railroad bed turned popular walking/biking/running route that threads through my small town, I count monarchs on the patches of milkweed that have sprung up alongside the trail as part of our town’s trailside habitat restoration project. Yesterday as I chugged along, watching for monarchs, I […]
