joene's garden » Bringing Nature Home

On The Bookshelf: The Green Garden: A New England Guide

joenesgarden — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:24:22 +0000

Are you a New England gardener seeking a good gardening book in which to lose yourself during cold winter months? Look no further than Ellen Sousa's book The Green Garden: A New England Guide to Planning, Planting & Maintaining the Eco-Friendly Habitat Garden.

Sousa is a fellow garden coach and a natural gardening instructor. She holds a certificate in Native Plant Horticulture & Design from the New England Wild Flower Society and has written about habitat gardening for National Wildlife Federation and other magazines. Sousa writes for a few blogs, including Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens, and the Massachusetts farm she shares with her husband is a Certified Wildlife Habitat and Monarch Waystation.

She walks the walk and talks the talk.

Now she has compiled an extensive and comprehensive guide for other New England landowners interested in making their property more user-friendly for non-human naturally-residing creatures and, ultimately, more enjoyable for human residents as well.

Sousa explains the what, why, and wherefore of habitat gardening in rural, suburban and urban areas in addition to forests, fields, fresh and saltwater shorelines, and wetlands.

She explains how to replace lawns – or most of a lawn - with diverse plantings needing less human input.

She describes how to begin transforming a patch or a property to a wildlife habitat - perhaps as simply as insuring a fresh water source for birds or planting nectar sources for butterflies and moths- and how continue the multi-year process.

Sousa separates plants as:

· New England natives - growing in New England prior to European settlement. Think violets, goldenrod, hemlock and oak;

· naturalized non-natives - plants that native creatures have adapted to and count on. Think Queen Anne's lace;

· introduced non-natives - cosmos, peonies and nasturtiums - brought to New England as ornamentals or edibles. These provide some nectar, pollen or seed benefits to native wildlife;

· and to be avoided and controlled invasive non-natives like Asiatic bittersweet vines that overpower and destroy trees and the purple loosestrife overtaking many New England wetlands.

Then, so readers are not left guessing, she offers more than 40 pages of specific tree, shrub and plant recommendations keyed for their habitat value (attractive to birds, butterflies and moths, amphibians or mammals) and growth characteristics (light and water requirements, deer resistance, ease of growth, etc.).

Sousa further provides lists and links to more information, source nurseries, public habitat gardens, and wildlife gardening organizations, just in case readers crave even more guidance and learning.

The Green Garden: A New England Guide to Planning, Planting & Maintaining the Eco-friendly Habitat Garden is a wonderful primer for those just learning about natural habitat gardening, but it's also a valuable educational resource for seasoned gardeners seeking to hone their habitat gardening knowledge.

It is one of the books I'll reach for time and again as I care for my property and continue to urge others to garden thoughtfully.

Want to read another great book about habitats and native plant gardening? Check out my review of Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy.

Disclaimer: Ellen Sousa provided this book, free of charge, for me to review. I know Ellen only through her blog and through our mutual membership in a Facebook group. If I did not like her book you would not be reading about it here.

Categories: Gardening, On the Bookshelf, Techniques.
Tags: Bringing Nature Home, habitat gardening, native plants, Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens, Planting & Maintaining the Eco-Friendly Habitat Garden, The Green Garden: A New England Guide to Planning.

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The Earth Day Reading Project–joene’s garden style

joenesgarden — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:00:00 +0000

What have you read in your lifetime that inspired you to a sustainable act or to live green? Can you answer this question quickly or did you have to stop and think a spell? I had to do the later which is why I took up the Earth Day Reading Project challenge - a by-invitation blog meme that asks bloggers to commemorate Earth Day 2011 by sharing at least three books that inspired them to a sustainable act or to live a more 'green' life, and why.

I rarely use event days to precipitate life changes. I don't make New Year's resolutions or use Valentine's Day to tell loved ones my feelings. I prefer to change as the need arises and to frequently express affection. Similarly, an annual Earth Day does not cause me to act 'green' since this is something I try to do on a daily basis.

But I was intrigued by the question. What have I read that inspired a sustainable act or greener living? So I looked through my bookshelves and dug into my memory banks to come up with a list of reading materials. I'm stretching the rules a tad - apologies to the meme's sponsor, The Sage Butterfly - my list includes a catalog.

I started reading Whole Earth Catalogs as an impressionable teenager. I cannot pinpoint a specific article or issue that inspired me to a sustainable act, but I do recall the general impression that each issue was jam-packed full of useful information on how to obtain more useful information - kind of like a mini-search engine in print. The first Whole Earth Catalog reviewed books about organic gardening and solar power, and likely served as my first introduction and fed my continuing interest in both. My organic gardening seed remained dormant until I reached adulthood but I've now gardened organically for more than thirty years (all in Connecticut). The solar seed also took a while to mature but with the recent installation of solar roof panels, my house is now generating more electricity than it pulls from the local electric company (the extra feeds back into the grid). Our solar panels produce electricity even on cloudy days like the one in the photo.

Foxfire Books opened my eyes to rural life among the hardy and self-sustaining people of the Appalachians. The region's high school students, directed by their teacher Eliot Wigginton, collected stories from elders - often their parents and grandparents - on age-old methods for planting by the signs, preserving foods, reading weather, edible wild plants, gardening in general and multiple other less useable to me topics like hog dressing and building an oxen yoke. Wigginton started the story-gathering project to engage his students in publishing a magazine and, thereby, teach them the required high school subjects English and history. The magazine idea morphed into a series of books about real American do-it-yourselfers. I devoured most of the first five or six Foxfire Books. They gave me a genuine appreciation for the waste-not, common sense of people who have lived close to the land for generations.

My first garden design and creation was a circular herb garden divided into four equal sections around a central sundial underplanted with Lamb's ear. I edged the planting areas with vertically placed bricks and planted sage, thyme, oregano, lavender, chives, basil, borage, chamomile, and calendula after studying the properties of each as described in The Rodale Herb Book. The further I read the more herbs I planted into areas well beyond the circular herb garden. My experimentation taught me just how quickly mint, feverfew, and tansy spread, how and when to harvest herbs for drying, and how to make chive and other herb vinegars. I can trace my discovery of foxglove, hyssop, lemon balm, nasturtium, rosemary, rue, scented geraniums and horseradish to this book. The result of consuming every written word in The Rodale Herb Book? Store-bought herbs are a rarity in my kitchen – I grow and preserve most myself. My kids grew up eating foods seasoned with fresh grown or dried herbs and, now as adults, they welcome any extras I can pass on. I'd offer a link to the book here but I think my version is only available from resellers. Instead, check out Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs.

Two more recent publications also led me to more sustainable gardening practices. Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamy which I wrote about last year, explains the important role native plants play in vibrant, balanced plant environments. The other is the clear, concise, easily understood explanation of soil life provided by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis in Teaming with Microbes, A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web. Even a seasoned gardener like me can be wowed by the activity in healthy soil - it's not just worms and bugs you know, it's a life system of millions and millions of interconnected fungi, bacteria, and microorganisms intent upon working together to make healthy soil. If you don't yet compost, read this book to understand why you should. If you spread chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, read this book to understand why you shouldn't.

I urge you to visit Jean's Garden to watch for her Earth Day Reading Project post – thanks, Jean, for inviting me into this meme. Also be sure to watch for posts from Debbie at A Garden of Possibilities and Laurrie at My Weeds Are Very Sorry, two fellow Connecticut garden bloggers I invited into the meme (I asked other blogging friends to join, but heh, this meme is a sizable commitment and other responsibilities prevailed). Then make sure to visit The Sage Butterfly for more Earth Day Reading Project links.

And remember … reuse, recycle, compost, garden organically, and seek other ways to make every day Earth Day.

Categories: Earth Day, On the Bookshelf.
Tags: Bringing Nature Home, Earth Day, Earth Day Reading Project, Foxfire Books, gardening in Connecticut, solar panels, Teaming with Microbes, The Rodale Herb Book, Whole Earth Catalog.

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Make a difference. Plant natives.

joenesgarden — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:07:23 +0000

Garden as if life depended on it! Doug Tallamy wrote these words in my copy of his book, Bringing Nature Home. No, I'm not a special friend or acquaintance, he wrote similar, if not identical words inside all the books he signed that day. On the other hand, though, I am special. I'm a gardener with extraordinary power … I can choose to plant whatever I want. You are also extraordinary, as you have exactly the same power as I. And if we, as gardeners, do just a little of what Tallamy suggests – increase the number of native plants growing in each of our gardens– we, individually and together, may be able to make a significant difference in the nature of our future.

Professor Tallamy chairs the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware in Newark. There he teaches insect taxonomy and ecology courses and researches how insects and plants interact. You can delve into his research simply by searching his name in Google Scholar. You'll see studies like Squash beetle feeding behavior in the journal Ecology, or Effects of non-native plants on the native insect community of Delaware in Biological Invasions … you get the picture, he's an insect junkie. But he's still able to write compelling, and very readable non-scientific explanations of the side-by-side evolution of local insects and local plants that enables them to support not only each other but the many birds and other creatures farther up the food chain … and how non-native plants are simply not as palatable or user-friendly, so to speak, to local insects … and when faced with fewer or no native food, insects either vastly decline or disappear … and when this happens local birds have fewer insects and caterpillars to feed their little bird babies … and weaker or fewer bird babies means fewer birds to feed other creatures farther up the food chain. Ok, any grammar or English teacher reading this is probably cringing at my run-on sentence, but I think I've made my, or more correctly Tallamy's point. Fewer natives = fewer bugs = fewer birds = less food for all.

Time and again Tallamy has found substantially more insect biomass (bird food) surviving on native shrubs, trees, and plants as opposed to alien greenery growing in the same area. One of his students, Meg Ballard, as her master's thesis, conducted a two-year comparison of insect biomass (bird food) found on six herbaceous natives – eastern black nightshade, black-eyed Susan, devil's beggarticks, ragweed, horseweed, and goldenrod – and six herbaceous aliens – lambsquarters, cocklebur, velvetleaf, jimsonweed, pigweed, and cosmos. Compared with aliens, the natives produced nearly 6-times more generalist insect herbivore biomass – that's science-speak for insects that eat just about any plant (generalists) rather than specialize on specific plants and therefore provide a good amount of bird food. This comparison produced no evidence that generalists prefer alien plants, Tallamy writes, or that alien plants produce as much insect biomass (bird food) as native plants.

Some of you are likely thinking, 'You want me to plant plants that attract more bugs?' The short answer is yes. More native plants = more native bugs = more bird food. An example is black-eyed Susans. They grow with virtually no work, offer color throughout mid to late summer, and provide food for local birds.

Tallamy's arguments for planting natives focuses more on trees. Consider oaks (Quercus), the mightiest when it comes to supporting Lepidoptera species (moths and butterflies). Oaks support 534, followed by willows (Salix) and cherry or plums (Prunus) at 456 each, birch (Betula) at 413, poplars/cottonwoods (Populus) at 368, and crabapples (Malus) at 311. Whereas beech (Fagus) support just 126. (Get the book and read the list on page 147.)

Bringing Nature Home includes color photos of native trees, native perennials, and native insects, as well as lists of natives for all regions of the continental U.S. – sorry Alaska, Hawaii, and other island locales - and this alone makes it a valuable reference. It also argues persuasively that gardeners move away from planting only for aesthetics and toward planting more to achieve a balanced food web. Tallamy even cites the success he and his wife have had in converting their own suburban yard from a lawn near-wasteland to a richly diverse insect-laden, bird-friendly, native-plant haven.

Humans have disrupted natural habitats in so many ways and in so many places, and this is increasingly evident in ever decreasing numbers of amphibians, butterflies, birds, and other creatures. But as gardeners and stewards of our land, we are empowered to reverse some of this disruption, simply by planting natives.

I, for one, plan to rise to Tallamy's challenge by planting more shrubs and perennials native to Connecticut. Check out the links below to learn how you can be so empowered as well.

Resources:

Connecticut Native Trees and Shrubs at A Garden of Possibilities.
Gardening with native plants, the Connecticut Botanical Society.
Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group
American Beauties, Native Plants
Dr. Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware – take some time to investigate all the links here.
Bringing Nature Home is available from Timber Press.

Categories: Gardening, On the Bookshelf.
Tags: A Garden of Possibilities, Bringing Nature Home, Connecticut Botanical Society, Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group, Doug Tallamy, gardening in Connecticut, native plants, Timber Press.

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