EcoGardenista
Committed to expanding native flora and fauna populations with a particular focus on increasing caterpillar biomass (inspired by Doug Tallamy and the Home Grown National Park movement)
Monday, October 9, 2023
Summer Joy! California Fuchsias and Bees
Saturday, June 3, 2023
May Moonglow
Monday, January 2, 2023
Still Life
The land we live on is a small patch of coastal scrub in San Carlos, California. When we moved here in 2007, it looked like a picture from a magazine, with Japanese maples, Chilean jasmine, French (via China) roses, all kept in a tidy corral by an English Box hedge (from southern Europe).
But the garden was just that, a picture. A "still life." The plants were picture perfect, tidy and pruned. They would have fed the ecosystems in their native countries, but here, far from the insects they co-evolved with, they were simply pretty objects for us to look at. Our gardener came and meticulously clipped the plants, mowed the lawn and aerated it. He clipped seed heads from our Mexican sage and kept things looking, well, picture perfect.
But as it turns out, this picture has a very steep price.
My husband and I were so busy working that it did not occur to us that there was something seriously wrong with our 'picture garden'. This all changed in 2020 when things slowed down a bit during the pandemic. We started to spend more time in the garden and wondered why there wasn't more life there.
The French word for a still life painting is "nature morte" or "dead nature" and I think this best describes gardens like ours - filled with imported plants that do not feed anything. Our garden seemed nice, but it was a food desert to the starving bees, butterflies, salamanders, birds and mammals. These species have been here for thousands of years and co-evolved with native plants so that they are specialized to eat certain ones. like monarch caterpillars eating only milkweed. But my house and imported garden replaced their habitat. When we multiply this by the vast number of gardens like ours across the country and the globe, these food deserts quickly become a starving planet.
A Western Monarch nectars on a Showy Milkweed shortly before laying eggs on it. The monarch and this plant co-evolved together and it is the only food source for caterpillars for this butterfly and for the Queen butterfly as well.
So, in the fall of 2020, we decided to turn this around. We added native 'keystone' plants to our garden first. These are the plants that support the greatest number of caterpillars as these are the biggest converters of plant material to the entire remaining food chain. Native local varieties of buckwheat, manzanita, ceanothus, coffeeberry, currants, gooseberries, filled our garden. During this first year, we started noticing a wider variety of bees and butterflies visiting the flowers.
As we worked, we also discovered that our landscape was not entirely 'dead.' A massive Valley Oak produced acorns and leaves that fed mammals and insects alike. But we had not realized that in the past, we'd been working against nature through our obsessive tidiness. As soon as the insect laden leaves, acorns, and small branches landed on the ground we would sweep them up and put them in the green bin. As our bounty was hauled off to create methane in landfills, our local birds starved. The insects, especially caterpillars, are the only foods their babies can eat.
As soon as we learned this, we started leaving the leaves. The biodiversity exploded! In addition to bee and butterfly diversity, we noticed moths of all sizes. There was even a humorous moment as I tried to capture a short video of an elusive but colorful one, resulting in a 'high speed chase' through the thick blanket of leaves. It escaped its opportunity for fame. With the moths came a wider variety of birds. We had never seen western bluebirds in our neighborhood before but here they were, scouting out nesting sites in our oak and foraging for insects among the leaves. Hummingbirds visited the flowers for nectar, and hovered around the oak, flicking their long tongues to catch gnats in the air (80% of their diet is protein from insects).
We left the acorns on the ground, and they were eaten by deer, blue jays and woodpeckers. Acorns also provided food for three orphaned baby racoons that moved into a hollow part of the oak's trunk and a squirrel family in a hollow limb. I gathered some acorns to start new trees to give away, but had to choose carefully as insects would bore into them immediately, again providing food that would move its way up the ecosystem.
A young orphaned racoon finds a home and food sources in the embrace of a Valley Oak (Quercus lobata). Note that the leaves are from a soon-to-be removed Japanese maple that grew next to the oak, but has no wildlife value.
Now, as we enter our third year of embracing this new, yet ancient, way of gardening we look out our window and see something quite different. It is not a static still life, but rather a living breathing and excitingly vibrant vision - a "nature vivante" that is teeming with life.
Habitat Revolution - California Native Plant Society (cnps.org)
Some SF Bay Area Resources:
Gardening info « Bringing Back the Natives Garden Tour
Design your garden here:
Calscape - Bay Area Garden Planner
Handy Habitat Checklist:
NWF_Garden-Certification-Checklist.ashx
Ahhh, sit back and enjoy the birdsong - so much nicer than our old boring lawn!
Monday, September 19, 2022
The Bring Back Bay Area Bees Butterflies & Birds Garden
Monday, September 5, 2022
Australia - Birds of the Blue Mountains and Sydney
A recent trip to Sydney and the nearby Blue Mountains region with the family provided the opportunity to explore the ways that Australians are promoting habitat gardening and biodiversity in this region.
We stayed at a lovely AirBnb in Leura, NSW, in the Blue Mountains. Most of this area is a massive wildlife reserve and is rich with biodiversity. The variety of birdsong, especially in the mornings, was amazing. Here are a few of the ones that we captured on camera, though we could hear hundreds more. They are the most active before dawn and at dusk, so images were hard to capture. If you go, I highly recommend staying in a place that has an adjoining wild space so you can fully experience the wildlife here.
Grandson, Charlie, took a picture of this red and green King Parrot in the back yard:
At a lookout near Leura, I saw these beautiful birds but have not yet identified them.
We returned from a long walk along Lindeman Road to find Crimson Rosellas in the garden at our AirBnb. This one perched in the same quince mentioned earlier.
Saturday, August 6, 2022
It's Working! The Leafcutter Bees Have Arrived!
At last! We have leafcutter bees in our garden! We have been busy and traveling, so did not actually see them take some of these leaves for their nests, but we are so happy to see that they have found our garden in any case. We're watching for them now, noting that leafcutter bees are striped like a honey bee, but carry pollen on their abdomens (see image below).
They are solitary bees that cut circular pieces of leaves from plants such as Western redbud, rose and azalea. They then use these pieces to line their nest and also plug the spaces between their egg cells. You can find them nesting in wood, hollow stems from plants, or in other natural cavities. It is easy to encourage them to nest in your garden by providing them with some of these natural materials or even a 'bee hotel': https://beegarden.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/How-to-build-and-use-bee-blocks.pdf
California is home to over 1,600 species of native bees - more than any other state. These bees have evolved to specialize on certain native plants, and play unique roles in our complex ecosystems. Learn more about the types of bees here: https://arboretum.sf.ucdavis.edu/blog/beyond-honey-bee-learn-more-about-california-native-bees
I hope you'll be inspired to grow some native plants to benefit these amazing beneficials!
Happy (native) gardening!
Jennifer
Remember: Never use pesticides. Even the organic ones kill bees that pollinator our plants. Encourage your neighbors to stop using pesticides that will kill your butterflies and bees when they visit those gardens as well. Avoid herbicides which will damage the ecosystem you are trying to build, and pose health risks for humans, too.
Summer Joy! California Fuchsias and Bees
The California "Moonglow" poppies have ceded the stage and the California Fuchsias are having their moment. Known also as Epilobiu...
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The land we live on is a small patch of coastal scrub in San Carlos, California. When we moved here in 2007, it looked like a picture from a...
-
At last! We have leafcutter bees in our garden! We have been busy and traveling, so did not actually see them take some of these leaves...
-
The California "Moonglow" poppies have ceded the stage and the California Fuchsias are having their moment. Known also as Epilobiu...