Native Plants

Monday Miscellany: Pruners, Leaf Litter, and Attracting Pollinators

October 25, 2010 0 comments
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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

October 11, 2010 10 comments
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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

September 3, 2010 8 comments
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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 (Garden Designers Roundtable on Nature)

August 24, 2010 11 comments
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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

June 7, 2010 0 comments
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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

February 16, 2010 9 comments
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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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Garden Designers Roundtable: How to Make Your Region’s Plants Pop

January 6, 2010 19 comments
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This month, a number of talented landscape designers are giving their take on the subject of regional diversity in design. Read to the bottom to see what other designers have to say! I hear it again and again: folks think that natives are boring, that they have a short bloom season, that their foliage is [...]

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