The three yard plants most likely to send a dog to the emergency vet are sago palm, yew, and oleander, and all three are sold without warning at every major garden center in the US. Walk your property with a clipboard, photograph each shrub, and cross-check the leaves and berries against the ASPCA database before … Read more
Quick answer: Stop Japanese beetles in a native garden by hand-picking adults into soapy water at dawn for two weeks during the emergence window, refusing pheromone traps (they pull more beetles in), and skipping carbaryl/Sevin sprays that kill bees on contact. Long-term control means letting parasitoid wasps and birds work the larvae in your lawn, … Read more
The first bed I laid out in 2021 had twenty plants in a four-by-six-foot rectangle. By August, seven were dead. The math sounded right on the tag. Three-foot mature spread, two-foot spacing, room to breathe. But I’d missed the rule that matters more than any number printed in a catalog. The dead plants weren’t drought … Read more
Walking out to your garden in late May and finding three hundred unidentified green sprouts is the moment most native plant gardeners freeze. Pull the wrong one and you lose a $4 milkweed plug or a self-sown black-eyed Susan that took two springs of cold stratification to arrive. Leave the wrong one and you have … Read more
A six-step verification checklist for native plant shoppers at big-box stores: scientific names, BONAP county checks, nativar red flags, and when chain stores actually win.
On a Friday morning earlier this month, I walked out with coffee and saw what looked like orange pollen powdering the south-facing side of every Asclepias incarnata stem along my back fence. It was not pollen. It was a colony of oleander aphids that had appeared overnight, three to four hundred on a single stem, … Read more
Last May I was drinking coffee on my back porch when I heard what sounded like a small power drill running somewhere behind me. I turned around and watched a fat, shiny black bee hover-fight another fat, shiny black bee over the same cedar joist of my pergola. Within three minutes I counted six of … Read more
I dug out a single poison ivy taproot from the base of an old white oak last May and counted the rings on the slice afterward. Eleven. The vine had been climbing that tree since before the previous owners moved in, threading itself through a stand of native woodland phlox and golden alexanders that I … Read more
Got an HOA violation letter about your native plant garden? A 5-step response plan from a homeowner who has defended the garden and won.
The shiny tin of “American Wildflower Mix” sitting on the box-store endcap is one of the most expensive mistakes I have ever made in my own yard. I scattered three tins of it across a freshly cardboarded patch the spring I bought my house, watered it like a religion, and waited for the meadow that … Read more
