Native & invasive ornamental grasses

Landscaping and gardening with ornamental grasses is hot. Ornamental grasses provide home gardens with nesting sites, food, and cover for birds and other animals; pleasing and unusual texture and dimensionality; and garden interest in all four seasons. Some varieties can be used to plant lawns that require less mowing and water.

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Skunk cabbage

Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is staring to leafing out in wetland areas so I know that spring is really here. Pretty soon, the ground in swampy areas will go from brown to green almost overnight as the skunk cabbage leaves unfurl.
Skunk cabbage leaves are pretty cool–big & wide, deeply veinated–but it’s the blooms that [...]

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Why not plant some native fruits?

Fruit trees and shrubs are a great way to expand your backyard food production beyond the vegetable garden. When I was growing up, we had a peach tree, a persimmon tree, blackberries, and wild plums to graze on, and my grandmother kept us supplied us with raspberries, Concord grapes, and apples. For a while, [...]

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Fall field trip: Tower Hill Botanical Garden

Last week I drove up to Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, Mass., about an hour’s drive from Providence. Tower Hill is the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society (that’s Wussta to all you non-New Englanders), a non-profit organization that is the third oldest horticultural society in the U.S.

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Rare ghost orchid found in Florida

Check out the recent find at a Florida nature preserve:

Photo courtesy of Clyde Butcher via the Sierra Club.

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Great resource on gardening and global warming

The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has a lot of interesting programs and information for “citizen scientists” and everyday nature advocates. A recent entry that’s pretty impressive is The Gardener’s Guide to Global Warming. They do a really good job of tying together many of the issues facing gardeners as global climate change becomes a [...]

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Native plant resource

Do other gardeners have the same problem that I do of finding specific plants? I’ll hear about a particularly cool native plant, fall in love with it, must have it…..and then I can’t find it anywhere. This is very annoying. I do not like spending a million dollars for a bareroot plant in a [...]

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Partnership limits invasive species & promotes natives

Poking around on The Nature Conservancy’s website, I found a recent press release about a partnership between TNC and Meijer, a department store in the Midwest that apparently has a pretty big nursery business in the spring and summer. I think it’s an interesting and positive development in light of our recent discussion on how [...]

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Invasive plants reconsidered

I’ve been thinking a lot about invasive plants lately, because earlier this month I attended the Ecological Landscape Association’s winter conference where they were quite the hot topic, and I’m also preparing to write about them for one of my clients.

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Wildlife in the garden

For too many people, wildlife in the garden conjures up images of aphids, snails, crows, deer, or other so-called destructive pests. But these and many other pests are part of the native and natural food chain–they must simply be balanced with beneficial native species. (Although there are still certain invasive pests that you never want [...]

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Why it’s hard to hate invasive plants

It’s hard to be an invasive plant killer because they can be so pretty, dammit. After all, that’s why humans were attracted to them and brought them into areas where they weren’t native in the first place.

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Native plant: pale corydalis

No more politics for now–let’s talk about pale corydalis (Corydalis sempervirens), a native plant usually found in disturbed areas of boreal (cold climate) forests.
A member of the poppy family, pale corydalis has unusual tubular pink flowers with yellow tips and multi-lobed blue-green leaves. It blooms in the summer to early fall. Its foliage looks a [...]

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Native plant: goat’s rue

Goat’s rue (Tephrosia virginica) is a rare native plant (in Rhode Island) that can be found at Wolf Hill Forest Preserve here in Smithfield. A member of the bean family (Fabaceae), goat’s rue is found in most U.S. states that are east of the Rockies, with the exception of Maine and Vermont. In the [...]

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Causes of too much algae: excessive nitrogen

In my last post, I blogged about some of the consequences of too much algae in waterways. Some algae is beneficial, but an excess can cause problems. What causes the natural process of algae production to go into overdrive? Too much nitrogen is usually the culprit.
As usual, too much nitrogen is the result of the [...]

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Aquatic plant invader: Algae & water resources

Not for nuttin’ (as the local says) is Rhode Island called the Ocean State, Rhode Islanders have been blessed with an abundance of water resources. Besides a countless number of rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, we rely on the resources of Greenwich Bay and Narragansett Bay for our livelihoods and enjoyment.

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