Native plants feed the insects and birds that live near you. These guides cover what to plant, when to cut it back, and what to do when something won’t bloom.
In April 2009, dozens of cedar waxwings turned up dead in a yard in Thomas County, Georgia. University of Georgia pathologists examined five of them and found guts distended with nothing but nandina berries, plus bleeding in the lungs and…
A single oak can host hundreds of kinds of caterpillars. A single Bradford pear hosts almost none. Both are “trees.” Only one of them feeds the chickadee on your fence. If you’re going to plant one tree, plant it this…
A bird eats an autumn olive berry, flies off, and drops the seed along your fence line. Repeat that enough times and you’ve got a thicket. That’s the business model for a lot of invasive shrubs and vines. The plant…
Deer eat milkweed. They don’t love it, they won’t always touch it, but they eat it, and the gardener who planted three butterfly weed plants for the monarchs and found them chewed to the crown by June is not imagining…
Growing milkweed is legal almost everywhere in the U.S. The Monarch Joint Venture says no state lists milkweeds as noxious weeds, and the Xerces Society says the same. What’s left are local rules: a few North Dakota counties, some city…
The conversation around planting milkweed for monarchs has produced something that was probably inevitable: a huge amount of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason, with the wrong plant. Walk into any garden center in spring and you’ll…
Most people who plant cardinal flower think of it as a hummingbird attractor. That framing is accurate, but incomplete. The ruby-throated hummingbird doesn’t visit cardinal flower because it’s a pretty red flower that happens to be nearby. It visits because…
Goldenrod gets blamed for a lot of August misery. The sneezing starts, you look outside and see a field of bright yellow, and the conclusion writes itself. It’s a reasonable assumption that happens to be wrong for the vast majority…
Before the plant list, one thing worth saying: hummingbirds spend the overwhelming majority of their time hunting insects, not visiting flowers. Nectar is energy. Insects are protein, fat, and calcium — everything they need to raise young and survive migration.…
Native plants are not, as a category, difficult to grow. They’re well-matched to the conditions they’re planted into, they don’t need fertilizer, and once established they tend to take care of themselves with minimal intervention. That’s the accurate description of…
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