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Why Yes, I Do Talk About Non-Native Plants
Just, um, not lately. I’ve been on a bit of a native plant kick in recent days, given that so many of my loveliest natives have been putting on a crazy spring show lately. Anyway, if you’re not sick of hearing me bang on about regional character in landscape design, and supporting wildlife, and how…
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Regional Flair: Bring it Home With Native Plants
***This is a bit of a local rant, but I do have a point that relates to designers and anyone who expresses themselves artistically in the garden.*** I’m lucky: my college town’s somehow managed to stay funky, cool, small and walkable, and above all, different from any other town in the world. Because us Arcata…
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Book Excerpt: Energy-Wise Landscape Design
Energy-Wise Landscape Design should be a required read for anyone going into the landscaping field. In this book, Sue Reed outlines a number of steps you can take to green your landscape. Some steps are easy and can be done right away; others take more time, energy, thought or care. When I reviewed this book…
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Book Excerpt: Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies by Owen Dell
A couple weeks back, I reviewed this deliciously funny and extremely useful guide to sustainable landscaping by Owen Dell. You can check out my video and written review here. I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to share an excerpt with you, so you could get a feel for Owen’s writing style, which is…
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Monday Miscellany: Pruners, Leaf Litter, and Attracting Pollinators
Was absolutely delighted to get this awesome comment from Heuchera on my Hand Pruner Showdown post comparing the different types of pruning shears: Recently I lost my old Felcos and needed to find a new pair. I had owned a different model, so I decided to research the web to see if the No. 2?s…
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Monday Miscellany: Wildlife Gardening
Fall is a great time of year to be thinking about the wildlife. If you can hold off deadheading, leave some fall leaves on the ground for overwintering insects, and make any fall-planting choices good for wildlife, you will have really amped things up for your local butterflies, birds, and other creatures. Here’s some reading…
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The Ten Best Native Plants for Coastal Northern California Wildlife by Peter Haggard
On the heels of our recent Garden Designers Roundtable on Inviting Nature Into the Garden, I wanted to share a resource that I’ve been finding incredibly helpful in recent months. While we all know that planting natives is a good way to attract more life into our gardens, if we only have space for a…
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Attracting Wildlife: Simple Things You Can Do
Recently I was talking with a native plant aficionado, and she was telling me that the turning point for her in going native was when she looked around her gorgeous landscape, and realized it was barren of animal life. She had a garden simply brimming with flowers and beauty – but very little of the…
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Monday Miscellany: Birds and Bees Edition
As a happy chicken-owner myself (except when the ladies happen to lay a 6 A.M. egg and wake me up!), I’m always excited when I find some cool resources that help others learn to keep chickens. Really, they’re great pets, turn table scrapings into eggs and useful manure, and the eggs! Bright orange yolks and…
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Podcast on Natives with Doug Tallamy
Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, wants to change the way we landscape- radically. He’s a native plant buff and makes a scientific case for planting more natives in our gardens to preserve biodiversity. This five-part podcast (it’s only about 45 minutes long all put together) presented some game-changing info that’s making me really…
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How to Make Your Region’s Plants Pop
I hear it again and again: folks think that natives are boring, that they have a short bloom season, that their foliage is dull; in short, that you’d have to be some kind of environmentalist zealot to want to garden with native plants. We’ll set aside the arguments for supporting biodiversity and feeding local birds…