Hi Plant People!

Happy Corn Moon! This edition of Grow Like Wild is shorter than usual because I am headed to Mongolia this weekend!!!! I’ll be traveling with foragers, botanists, chefs, and artists, as part of a cultural exchange with the nomadic people of the steppe region. A full 30% of Mongolians remain nomadic and they have much to teach the rest of the world about how to adapt to shifting climates. Personally, I cannot wait to learn about the flora of the home of Chinggis Khan. I look forward to reporting all about in the next edition!

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August’s Garden-side Chat was… perhaps the most chaotic event I’ve ever hosted. But fear not! I’ve hired technological support and this month we’ll have a special guest: Heather Liljengren, seed collector extraordinaire!

Heather was the seed collector for NYC Park’s legendary Greenbelt Native Plant Nursery, and now teaches people and institutions to gather wild seed ethically, legally, and ecologically. It’s not that easy! You have to know which plants in a population to target, and how much you can take without harming them. I’m a big fan of just grabbing things from the side of the road, but is that really allowable? Come find out!

Seed Collecting Garden-side Chat: Monday September 21, 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

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• The Xerces Society has launched a new web tool for finding plants to support Monarch butterflies in your zip code. Oh? You already know about Milkweed? Of course you do. But this tool also has favorite nectar plants with a focus on migration blooms. Plants are searchable by color, size and site conditions. Enjoy!

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• The Regional Invasive Species & Climate Change management network (aka RISCC) has launched curated collections with lectures, management recommendations, and research summaries for widespread, harmful introduced plants. First up: Itadori knotweed. Looking forward to more of these.

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• Can you ever have enough native plants? IMPOSSIBLE. Once we have some, we want more and more. Many of us have become home propagators, seeking to spread the beauty and share the wealth of our gardens. Thankfully, the Native Plant Network has developed a searchable database of protocols for propagating thousands of native plants - woodies included.

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IN THE NEWS

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• All too often, gardeners and landscape architects see our work as imposing our will on the land. How refreshing to find people willing to take it slow and work with a site to beautify and diversify over a lifetime. Gardenista covered landscape architect Marissa Angele’s approach to caring for her Hudson Valley property and pulled out useful techniques for us to try:

  • Observe before planting: take a year to watch what the land does before designing.

  • Embrace the soil: match your plants to the soil rather than vice versa. It’s less work and more effective long term.

  • Don’t plant: wait and see what is in your seed bank before planting plants. There are likely many wonderful flowers just waiting to wake up.

  • Tie gardens into the landscape: find regional ecosystems to base your plant pallets on. Of course you can add flair! But gardens will knit better aesthetically when they are anchored.

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• The Washington Post made a cute guide of native plants for every state, tying in the plants of this land to the country’s 250th anniversary. While I appreciate the effort, linking native plants, patriotism, and founding fathers makes me nervous. Yes, Jefferson used native plants to cultivate a sense of national identity, but the goal of his efforts was to harm this land and the people of it. We can take care of land now and support biodiversity without tying our work into hackneyed nationalist propaganda. We can celebrate the diversity in biodiversity and ground our work in cycles older than nations. Still, the tool is great and brava to the folks who made it happen!

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• How do you grow plants in space? In something called a “small plant pillow” - rooting packets that contain a substrate, fertilizer, and seeds. Astronauts on the International Space Station recently posted videos of them eating Red Russian kale and Wasabi mustard greens that they grew under the magenta lights of their space greenhouse. “Smells like Earth,” said astronaut Jessica Meir, noting that sometimes leaves grow in different shapes under zero G!

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• The tick is the natural enemy of the gardener. My reverence for the natural world flies out the window at the thought of eradicating ticks from the planet. Nearly half a million people are diagnosed with Lyme disease each year and I’ve been among them multiple times. A new study from the Cary Institute reports on 35 year of research into the ecology of Blacklegged Ticks infected with the Borrelia pathogen. Takeaways include:

  • Mice matter far more than deer. Deer density is not related to Blacklegged tick nymph populations. But a strong year for White-footed mice increases tick populations by 40%.

  • Oak mast years (when they produce an abundance of acorns) boost rodent populations the following year, which then boost tick populations the year after. When you see mast acorns, note it, because ticks will be bad in two years time.

  • HOWEVER, large mouse populations don’t necessarily mean more Lyme. There are more ticks, but less are infected, because ticks are also biting other animals and the bacterial gets diluted.

  • Extreme cold does not kill ticks. Warmer years make for less ticks. Dare we hope for a climate change silver lining?

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• Ecological gardeners cultivate land so that it is lovely for humanity as well as welcoming for wildlife. But sometimes the reason wildlife isn’t using land is because we are also using it. A massive new study in Science tracked >4,000 individual animals of 37 species and compared them to cell phone location data to see how they reacted to the mere presence of humanity. 67% of species were effected by us, mostly restricting their range to stay away (Wolves, Coyotes) but sometimes moving closer to us (Ravens). Bears apparently, could care less, which honestly tracks. Researchers were not able to assess what people were doing during the study (hiking vs hunting vs leaving food around) but it’s still fun to know who generally considers us a threat, a resource, or a potential friend.

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• Birds of many species have been found to include fresh green leaves and stems in their nests. Researchers have speculated that green nest plants might keep pests and parasites at bay, serve to attract mates, or even be “an extended expression of the birds themselves.” A new meta-analysis failed to provide a single answer, indeed there likely is not one, but did find that green plants in the nest resulted in healthier, larger birds. Hooray for leaves!

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• Our evil government is chopping down trees and bulldozing canyons all in the name of white supremacy, aka “boarder security.” While the harm being done to people should come first and foremost, the environmental damage is also breathtaking. Good people are fighting back and winning. Protestors from across the political divide organized at Big Bend National Park, forcing the government to halt destruction. And queer land defenders set up tree sits in southern Arizona, protecting centuries-old Cottonwood trees from removal for a new stretch of boarder wall. We’re in scary and dangerous times, but when enough people stand together, we can win. Stay strong out there.

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• A new garden in Queens, New York invites visitors to climb a stairway into the rectum of a giant teddy bear, then slide through the body listening to poetry, exiting on the bear’s tongue. Precious Okoyomon’s installation at PS1 MOMA is a surrealist garden against control, entitled Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation. The surrounding landscape contains > 2000 plants and 50 trees, native and introduced, wild and cultivated, planted and blown in from the sidewalk. Okoyomon collaborated with the Rhode Island experimental nursery issima to breed and grow plants often seen as antagonistic, but still often found growing together. Okoyomon, a lover of the side-of-the-road meadow, believes, “gardening is actually a practice of future making and world building,” cultivating a landscape that will reflect and support New York City’s climate a decade from now. On view at PS1 through 2028.

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• Some types of gardens change the world, healing people and plants at the same time. Those engaged in this work are the best of us, and bring me hope for the future. The New Garden Society works with incarcerated gardeners, helping them learn the craft and gain good jobs when released. Jennifer Jewell interviewed co-founders Erika Rumbley and Renee Portanova on Cultivating Place this month and if you’re feeling down, it’s a wonderful reminder of the power of gardening.

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• Introduced and escaped grasses change fire regimes by increasing fuel loads and connecting flammable landscapes. We often think of this as a western problem, but northeastern regions are vulnerable as well. Researchers looked at 12 harmful introduced grasses that promote fire and some of them are unfortunately familiar. Stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), invades forest understories and creates a flammable layer of thatch. And Miscanthus grass was associated with significantly larger fires, particularly after senescence. Yet another reason to remove these plants from both managed and wild lands where feasible.

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• Record-breaking droughts in England parched sod that revealed hidden gardens and structures of the past. The ornate patterns of the “lost parterre” of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire emerged from pathways still buried underground. It’s easy to see these elegant curves and get nostalgic, but look at the entire 17th century landscape and - yikes - let’s burry that deeper.

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• Science round up:

  • An Asian Saxifrage (Saxifraga candelabrum) was found to be carnivorous, opening up the possibility that other Saxifrages with sticky hairs on their stems, might also use them to digest trapped insects.

  • Female songbirds in North America have a 12% lower survival rate than males.

  • 80% of global butterfly species have expanded or contracted their geographic range, or shifted altitude, due to climate change and extreme weather. 27% of species have seen their ranges shrink.

  • Tobacco Hawk Moths can smell with their wings. To prove it, researchers used a new technique named “electrowingography.”

  • Gamma rays have been successfully used to map tree mortality from drought in Australia.

  • A new-to-science Holly was found in Vietnam a decade ago. Ilex decapetala has pink flowers and was described in PhytoKeys at last.

  • Neonic insecticides used on farms can drain into wetlands, get taken up by insects, and then eaten by Swallows, where they accumulate.

  • Just like spiders can produce different types of silk for various tasks, snails can generate different slimes depending on how slippery they need to be.

  • Osprey populations along the Atlantic coast have plummeted >80% this year, likely due to over-fishing Menhaden for the profit of one single corporation.

  • In Germany, urban grasshoppers were found to be bolder and faster at escaping than their rural counterparts.

  • Facebook is the single largest venue for illegal wildlife trading.

  • More urban coyotes get mange than those from rural regions.

  • The presence of mountain lions reduced deer-vehicle collisions by 67%.

  • The global South faces more severe impacts from harmful introduced species than does the global North.

  • On the full moon, the white feathers of Barn Owls act as camouflage because prey cannot distinguish the light reflecting off feathers from the bright background sky.

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• Congrats readers! You’ve made it to the end. At this point, none of us should be surprised at the abilities of Bumblebees. They’re natural puzzle solvers, who will play games for fun, can do remedial math, and use tools. They’re basically fuzzy toddlers. New research has found that they can also detect rhythm! Researchers set up two blinky lights, flashing in different patterns. One light offered a sugar reward and the other did not. Bumblebees were able to figure out which pattern of blinks held the reward, even when lights were switched and sped up, showing that the bees also understood tempo! Only birds, chimps, and a few other mammals have shown this ability. Not so bumbly after all! Our interspecies dance parties just got more interesting.

UPCOMING EVENTS

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• CT Horticultural Symposium: Gardening for All Ages

  October 24

  In person and open to the public

  I am so excited to lecture in Connecticut! Please join me as I share about supporting biodiversity in the toughest of environments alongside friends Karen Bussolini, Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, and many others.

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Support Grow Like Wild here!

Hi Supporters!

Please join me for the Echinacea Garden-side Chat this Monday August 17th at 6PM ET.

We’ll delve into everything Echinacea, from ecology to evolution, to medicine and design. One of you called Coneflower the "gateway flower” to ecological gardening and I can’t imagine anything more perfect. What is it about this pink beauty that excites li…

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At long last, the new podcast episode is published. People, are you really listening to this? I get around 4,000 downloads a month. Which is GREAT. But not amazing, you know? If you’re a podcast person, and know of tricks and edits for making a podcast successful, I’d be much obliged for advice. Luddite podcasting is not the easiest…

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ANWAY, I’m studying Echinacea this month. Like all asters, flowerheads are a composite of tiny individual flowers (“florets”), with functional reproductive parts but no petals. You can see their yellow stamens sticking out below. I love to notice how the bees walk in a circle around the flowerhead, hitting each tiny bloom. As they’re fertilized, and seeds start to grow, the cone raises up higher, and the inner rings of florets bloom, forcing the bees into tinier and tinier circles.

If you’d like to learn more about this gateway flower into ecological gardening, please come to the Echinacea Garden-side Chat, this August 17th, at 6PM ET.

‎These monthly zoom presentations and hang outs are for supporters of Grow Like Wild. It’s $50, but then you get to come to every Chat for a year!

Become a Supporter Here!

Did you know that no one is really sure how many species of Echinacea there are? It’s true. 💗

Hi Plant People!

Happy Buck Moon.

I’ve got hummingbirds on the brain. It’s a fun problem to have. There’s a male with two ladies living around my house and I’m installing a big garden just for them. Of course butterflies and hummingbirds will both nectar on many of the same flowers, so the garden has been named The Butterbird Garden. It’s a delight of pinks, reds, and oranges and I can’t wait to show it to you soon. In the meantime, I’ve gone off the deep end researching hummingbird ecology and their various flowers. In North America, all red flowers are adapted for hummingbird pollination. But in Europe and Asia, who don’t have hummingbirds, that’s not the case. Tulips, Poppies, and Anemones all evolved to be pollinated by beetles, who are much better at seeing red than bees. You might occasionally find bees on your red flowers at home - everyone’s an opportunist! - but they have trouble differentiating red from green.

Hummingbirds aren’t difficult to attract to our gardens, but to truly support them, they need more than flowers. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds can eat up to 2,000 insects a day, sometimes snatching them out of spiderwebs. They’ll also grab the web itself, using the silks to weave their magical nests of lichen, lined with soft seedheads or the fuzz of fertil Cinnamon Fern. As usual, a biodiverse landscape, rather than a simple feeder, can help these tiny jewels thrive.

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I’ve been trying, unsuccessfuly, to figure out what the spiny bracts on the cone of Coneflowers are actually for. You know them, they are bristly and protect the flowers from SOMETHING undetermined. Come and see if I figure it out at this month’s Garden-side Chat, which will be a deep dive into Echinacea ecology, pollination, medicinal use, cultivation, and design.

Echinacea Garden-side Chat: Monday, August 17th, 6PM ET.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like support this work or join our monthly, virtual chats please become a paid supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

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• Rare pollinators often require specific pollen sources to feed their young. Using community science and field research, the Gegear Lab at UMASS Dartmouth compiled a list of the most important plants for threatened northeast bumblebees, solitary bees, and butterflies. Also listed are preferred nectar sources and host plants, as well as the growing conditions for all plants mentioned. A great list to keep on hand.

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• Obsessing over climate catastrophes? You can track wildfires all over the world with this handy and stressful webtool.

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• We all know how it goes: you’re hiking and find a Bedstraw that iNat can’t ID to species. You go for your faithful dichotomous key but remember you left the 4 volume set in the car. No worries! There’s an app for that, and it just had a massive overhaul. FloraQuest is arguably the best app for eastern plant geeks. It’s overseen by superhero Alan Weakley and has 4 regions covering 19 states. The app works offline to help you identify plants while learning botany and regional ecology.

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• You strike me as someone who is interested in incredibly long and nerdy botanical newsletters. Might I also interest you in Gather & Sew? A fantastic monthly investigation at the crossover of botany, agriculture, and the culinary arts. This month is all about brambles: Rubus and their many fruits, the ubiquity of Driscoll’s and their efforts to eradicate berry stamens, and why every rose does not in fact, have its thorn. Worth the long read.

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IN THE NEWS

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• A writer I really liked wrote an article I really didn’t. Ferris Jabr detailed the incredibly long and winding saga of his native plant journey for the New York Times Magazine. Some ecological gardeners found it encouraging, some thought any press was good press, and some, like myself, were honestly surprised it made it through editing. The piece is an attempt to “both sides” the ecological value of native plants, giving equal weight to a small cadre of anti-native plant researchers and the entirety of the rest of the field of ecology.

  Jabr’s a sceptic, who finds Doug Tallamy while researching the “supposed virtues” of native species and goes on to pan him as a “spiritual leader,” an unabashed and polarizing “extreme nativist” who is “against migrants” and refers to introduced plants as “ecological tumors.” It might be funny in a different political climate, when the effects of ecological collapse and realities of extinction weren’t so crystal clear, but in today’s context, Jabr’s framing is irresponsible and simply inaccurate. Tallamy famously encourages people to plant 70% native plants, leaving nearly a third for exotic ornamentals. That is in no way extreme. As Jabr writes far later, Tallamy even concedes that introduced plants can be beneficial at times. And when Tallamy talks about harmful plants as a cancer, it’s a metaphor to illustrate how herbicide is only smart in targeted instances - “like chemotherapy,” he says.

  Seeing someone I deeply admire treated with such derision was hard to stomach, but worse was Jabr’s treatment of the data. Over and over, scientific consensus is attributed to Tallamy’s personal opinion, from the relationship between plants and animals to the roots of the “so-called” insect apocalypse. It’s not easy for entomologists and ecologists to agree on things, but I was part of an NSF effort in which dozens of researchers studying insect decline assessed causes entirely independent of Tallamy.

  When Jabr does talk about the ecological harm from introduced species, his examples are A) Chestnut blight (fair) and B) a snake brought to Guam in the 1940s. Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching the eradication of Ash trees, fearing for Sassafras and Mountain Laurel, dealing with ticks encouraged by Barberry and Garlic Mustard, while Cheatgrass-fueled fires rage. There are many causes of our current predicament but the unprecedented disturbance and mixing of global species is actually one of them. Jabr claims that long term, new relationships and dynamics will form, hauling out California’s fennel eating Swallowtails to show how adaptable insects can be. The problem with this narrative is that, while swapping host plants is sometimes possible, it’s also rare. Some lucky species can adapt to new communities and climates, but the vast majority will suffer greatly.

  This whole “the Earth is healing itself” view accepts mass extinction as somehow romantic. I’m just not willing to concede that. So what is Jabr’s big problem with proponents of ecological gardening? False hope, apparently. He’s worried that Tallamy has us hyped up to save the world - “smug and naïve” - when we’d be better off accepting our impotence in the face of ecological collapse. He spends a full paragraph minimizing the possible impact of ecological gardening, focusing on the 20 million acres of lawn Tallamy proposes to convert to habitat rather than the >500 million acres of American yards that exist. But even if our sphere of influence were far smaller, that doesn’t make this work less worthy.

  Surprisingly, at the end of the piece, Jabr plants native plants in his garden and watches as caterpillars and nesting chickadees move in for the very first time. In a development most of us can relate to, he decides to plant more, while keeping many of his ornamental plants. So who knows, maybe all that parade-raining will help new flowers grow after all.

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• Kelly Norris and David McKinney’s stunning Iowa garden was featured in Better Homes & Gardens and it feels like a victory for all of us. Few ecological designers have the ability to create gardens that read as beautiful to the general public and Kelly is one of the best to do it. His gravel garden, entitled The Romp, features 125 species of drought-tolerant, climate forward, predominantly native plants, many of which he collected himself. It’s truly wonderful to see this work amid the English Roses and Lilacs of grocery store magazines. Hooray!

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• Folk singer Jesse Wells just canceled and rescheduled his show tonight at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Virginia so that fans wouldn’t have to cross a picket line. Hort staff are on strike to gain a living wage, asking for $3.50 more per hour, with the Garden offering only $0.50. Gardeners are asking the public to postpone visiting and cancel memberships. Public gardens, take heed: paying less than a living wage is A) unethical and B) so much bad press. You can sign a petition here.

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• Very few of us think of thriving biodiversity when we imagine suburbs, but it does not have to be that way. Researchers in Orlando, FL surveyed two new, very different suburban developments for pollinator abundance and diversity. As you can likely guess, one neighborhood was landscaped with commercial ornamental plants, and the other is an experiment, designed with minimal lawns and planted with the flora of Florida. Both developments were similarly floriferous, with near equal levels of plant richness and floral abundance, but the origin of the plants made all the difference: the native plantings attracted 2 to 3 times more pollinators, who were 2 to 3 times more diverse. The conventional landscapes hosted generalist pollinators, who also visited the ecological landscapes alongside many specialists. When researchers moved pots of native plants and one Texas sage into the conventional yards, they saw pollinator numbers and diversity climb. It all makes logical sense, these plants and animals have depended on each other for thousands, if not millions of years. Truly caring for land, and supporting the ecological communities we are a part of, is best done with the plants who evolved here.

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• The Whitney Biennial closes next month and with it, your chance to see Malcolm Peacock’s work, “Five of them were hers and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls.” The piece is a massive Redwood trunk, woven of 3,500 hand-braided strands of synthetic hair that took Peacock 10 months to weave. It’s an exploration of Black communal knowledge and togetherness, with excerpts from the works of Frederick Douglas and Malcom X pinned to the tree.

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• Assisted Migration is a trendy strategy. It’s when we help species expand their natural range, usually northwards, so that they can get ahead of the heat and drought that climate change brings. It’s controversial, and rightly so: some researchers are busy populating cities with southern tree species, assuming that they’ll be the only ones standing in a century. While others want to give local populations the chance to adapt. Often a plant’s ability to evolve for new conditions relates to how far and quickly they can reproduce, as well as the genetic diversity within populations, so of course it’s widely variable. A new, massive study in Nature shed some much needed light on the conversation. They looked at 3,000 plant species over a million plots and found that, already, half of them were living in regions for which they were not ideally suited, as a direct result of climate change. However, they also looked at the effect of land disturbance and found that nearly every species (99%) was living outside of their ideal range because they had been pushed out by disturbance. Researchers write, “Although climate change shifts the spatial distribution of climatically suitable conditions, disturbance regimes mediate whether species are able to realize these conditions.” Which is fascinating! I am as guilty as the next person for planting Southern Magnolias and American Hollies in New England, welcoming these “climate refugees” to their new homes with a somewhat fabricated sense of ecological duty. But I’m also looking for Black Maples to plant in place of Sugar Maples as it gets too hot for them in CT. So now, imagine if the Sugar Maples here are not just miserable because of heat and drought, but also because they’re living in my front yard, or a new forest on an old pasture, as opposed to the deep and fertile loam they evolved to live in? It completely shifts the work of climate-informed planting over to making sure that plants are properly sighted and protected, and that our farms, cities, and suburbs leave as much space undisturbed as possible.

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• Birds in Ukraine have begun collecting the fiber optic cables used to make drones untrackable to weave their nests. Nest researchers think the cables might entangle birds, but could also make nests much stronger.

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• I found a Snowy Tree Cricket by my house, which is amazing because they are the most accurate cricket species to use to tell the temperature. They live across the continent and make the “chirp chirp chirp chirp” calls that many of us associate with a warm summer night. They sing by rubbing their wings together, often using strategically located leaf holes to amplify the sound. The warmer the night, the faster the crickets chirp! In 1897, a scientist named Amos Dolbear published his method for converting their cricket chirps into temperatures: first count the number of chirps in 15 second’s time, then add 40. That number is approximately the temperature outside!

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• Many of us have read about the health benefits of public green space and access to nature; we know it makes us happier, less stressed, and even less lonely. But newer research shows that we need to stop thinking of trees as “nice to have” benefits and more as critical public infrastructure. Nadina Galle wrote a round up of the many ways healthy environments cultivate healthy people and found that, for every 100 trees planted, we save someone from an early death. What’s more, researchers have now shown that when neighborhood trees are biodiverse, with more species and structural variety, asthma rates and childhood leukemia are lowered even further. The leading hypothesis is that diverse trees host diverse microbes and that complexity keeps us healthier. Galle gives us a solid “state of knowledge” on tree health benefits with a focus on environmental inequality and economics - apparently people who live around less trees spend $374 more per year on healthcare. It’s a strong argument that urban tree planting is the best public health investment we can make aside from national healthcare.

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• Are you mowing and watering the strip of sad turf between your sidewalk and the street? ? For the love of gods, WHY? The good folks at North Carolina’s M.A.R.S.H Project gave a demo to Garden & Gun Magazine on transforming that “hellstrip” into a thriving, beautiful habitat. Hellstrips are a great location for reclaimed space because “no one is tossing a ball—it’s a strip of weedy grass, and we can turn it into a community center and wildlife habitat with natural beauty and joy,” says educator and plantswoman Sharleen Johnson. Hellstrip conversion tactics include:

  • Checking local regulations and rules, as well as utility infrastructure

  • Choosing plants that consider the height of car doors and sightline safety

  • Prioritizing compact native species no taller than 3’

  • And remembering winter interest, all season bloom, and self-sowers.

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• The Trump Administration approved 3 new “forever chemicals” for use on food crops, adding to the two others approved prior this year. “PFAS” like these never break down and have been shown to persist in the environment, spread to water, and accumulate in our bodies causing cancer, birth defects, autoimmune issues, and liver and kidney disease. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling last month limiting our ability to sue chemical companies when harmed by them, it’s more important than ever to buy and grow organic food, both for us and the people who grow it.

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• A tiny town outside of Montreal has extended legal rights to the trees of their community. While rivers and mountains in New Zealand have been recognized as legal persons, stingless bees in Peru have legal rights, and the rights of nature are written into the Ecuadorian constitution, legal protections in North America are more sluggish. Which doesn’t make a ton of sense. Corporations here have personhood. A boat can be a party in litigation. So why not a tree? In 2018, the White Earth band of the Chippewa Nation adopted the “Rights of the Manoomin” law securing legal rights of wild rice, a traditional staple crop of the Anishinaabe people. But federal, state, and municipal efforts get a lot of push back. Conservatives at the “Center on Human Exceptionalism” (which is actually a real place) are worried advocates for nature are trying to subvert humanity’s dominance (spoiler alert: we totally are). So what is it like to live alongside a legally protected tree? The Quebecois community has yet to figure it out, but they have begun strengthening canopy protections across municipal planning and will soon distribute trees to schools, businesses, and residences in recognition that trees “are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”

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• Science round up:

  • They’re just like us: bumble bees who taste something sweet stick out their tongue-like glossa. But when they taste something salty or bitter, they shake their heads and wipe their mouthparts.

  • More colorful songbirds are at greater risk of extinction.

  • Half of all migratory birds on Earth are in decline.

  • 200 million years ago, volcanos started a massive extinction event that wiped out 80% of life on earth. But apparently the humble Tree Fern is responsible for spreading and sustaining flames over much of the planet.

  • Mosses are able to transmit electrical signals across their entire colony, despite being made up of individual organisms with no vascular tissue.

  • As CO₂ rises with climate change, large flying insects like bumblebees will suffer, but tiny insects like solitary bees will thrive.

  • For the last 40 years, experts have estimated that there are 6 million species of insects, but new research out of Costa Rica claims there are likely 3 times as many, up to 20 million.

  • We have all heard about how climate change is causing pollinator populations to drop, but it is also, somehow, causing food crop “pests” to thrive. For every degree of warming, documented bee species richness has declined by ~25% since the 1990s, while pest-induced crop losses increase by 10–25%.

  • A lotion made of 6% Catnip oil has been found to be just as effective at warding off mosquitoes as Deet, and far less expensive.

  • Even brief exposure to the wireless radio-frequencies emitted by power lines, electrical substations, and cell towers can severely impact the flight patterns of bats.

  • Hummingbirds are fantastic pollinator partners because they just drink nectar and move on. They don’t groom themselves of pollen the way bees do.

  • Songbirds craft their songs from just eight basic acoustic motifs, like trills, whistles, and harmonic notes.

  • People listening to birdsong reported that they were happier when songs had greater tonal and spectral variability - which means that they shift in pitch, timber, and swoopiness over time.

  • A threatened Japanese butterfly has begun to use introduced Sedum sarmentosum as a host plant. While butterflies reared on the Sedum survive at the same rates as those on native succulents, the spectral reflectance of of their wings shifts, and wild males approach females less.

  • Flower pollination by songbirds has been confirmed in the UK and the rest of Europe.

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• Nice work readers! You’ve survived till the end. The reward this month involves one of our most ephemeral and ethereal environments: fog. On still, humid evenings, as the sun sets and the ground cools, heat rises up into the sky and temperatures drop, causing air moisture to condense into fog. Researchers examined those tiny fog droplets and found that it wasn’t simply misty air, but a temporary aquatic habitat for trillions of tiny organisms. Yes, indeed: FOG IS ALIVE. And what’s more, it’s good for us. Methylobacteria, a bacteria commonly found on leaves, was observed actively growing in the fog, all while eating formaldehyde and cleaning the air. While only 1% of fog droplets housed these little guys, they add up: a thimble of fog has 10 million bacteria. When you compare that to other aquatic ecosystems, it’s similar to the level of biodiversity found in ponds and oceans. As stunning as this discovery is, it’s just the beginning. What’s next for fog research? “The sky's the limit," says co-author Ferran Garcia-Pichel. "No pun intended."

UPCOMING EVENTS

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• From Columns to Clicks: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion on Navigating the New Media Landscape

  TOMORROW, July 30. 2-3PM

  Virtual and open to the public

  Hort media is in a strange place. Old methods of information transfer are breaking down and new channels are being built. All while misinformation runs rampant and attention spans shrink. What to do? How to learn? How to TEACH? We’ll discuss it all, with only limited kvetching at this Garden Conservancy panel. Please join me, Margaret Roach, Kevin Cliff, Rochelle Greayer, and Stephen Orr tomorrow!

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• ELA Annual Conference and Marketplace

  August 27 & 28, RI

  In person, virtual and open to the public

  The Ecological Landscape Alliance has supported northeast ecological gardening for decades, as well as thrown some of the best symposia of all time. It’s truly my favorite for meeting and connecting with other practitioners. Their annual conference is pricey! ($400 for members) but it’s massive, with two days of dozens of talks, delicious food, and the latest and greatest tools and plants. The whole shebang is co-keynoted by my favorite arborist, Christoper Roddick, speaking on just how and why everyone should work in horticulture for a few decades. See you there!

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• CT Horticultural Symposium: Gardening for All Ages

  October 24

  In person and open to the public

  I am so excited to lecture in Connecticut! Please join me as I share about supporting biodiversity in the toughest of environments alongside friends Karen Bussolini, Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, and many others.

Support Grow Like Wild here!

Hello Supporters of Grow Like Wild!

I hope to see you this evening at the monthly Garden-side Chat where we will talk all things HUMMINGBIRDS.

I have two couples, one who lives in my front yard and one in the back, each guarding a patch of red and orange flowers. I design my gardens in large part for them, planting every red native flower I can find and …

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Hi Plant People!

The Strawberry Moon podcast episode is officially ON THE INTERNET.

It’s a doozy: delving into how two North American strawberries went to France to create the fruit we know and love today. There’s also tons of research, garden fashion reviews, a media roundup, and the latest statistics on native plant sales.

GET EXCITED.

xoxoxo,

Rebecca McMackin

Hi Plant People!

Happy Strawberry Moon!

Is this the cutest moon name of them all? Do we all imagine a strawberry glowing in the sky? I hope so. Strawberries are one of the great gifts of North America to the rest of the world. We have a tiny, delicious species Fragaria virginiana, the Wild Strawberry, who spreads to all but the coldest and driest parts of the US and Canada. And we have a large, fairly flavorless west coast species, Fragaria chiloensis, the Beach Strawberry, who hugs the entirety of the Pacific coast, from the Bering Strait down through Patagonia. It’s those two distant cousins that were brought to France, of all places, to form the berries we eat for breakfast today.

Apparently, Louis the XIV loved strawberries. There were a couple (very meh) European species but France had been eating F. virginiana since it had been introduced in the early 1600s. In 1714 Amédée François Frézier, a French spy, sent by Louis to Chile, returned with 5 plants of F. chiloensis. The fruits had been cultivated by the Mapuche people for centuries and while they grew giant, whitish fruits at home, in France, they were barren, likely because they are dioecious and Frézier had only imported female plants.

50 years later, Louis XIV financed a 17 year old to collect every strawberry in Europe for Versailles, but still, little came of it. It wasn’t till a decade later, when nameless French farmers began planting all the various species together that the two North American strawberries hybridized, and Frézier found the giant, delicious fruits in a market. The aforementioned 17 year old (Duchesne, now significantly older) named the hybrid after a pineapple, Fragaria x ananassa and that, my dears, is what we buy in farmer’s markets today.

✤

Last month’s garden-side chat was Liriodendriferous! THANK YOU for sharing your Tulip Tree knowledge and celebrating perhaps the best tree with me. Notes, for those who asked, will be out tomorrow.

I am laser focused right now on making my front yard into a hummingbird sanctuary. We have a couple zipping around the Monarda but I want MORE. I’ve been researching for years, what they want out of life and how to make them healthy and happy. If you also recognize that life is just better with hummingbirds, please come to the Hummingbird Garden-side Chat this month where we will dive deep into ecology, evolution, and landscape requirements of these tiny flying jewels.

Garden-side Chat: July 23rd, 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a supporter by clicking below. It’s $50 which gets you into all chats for a year!

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

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• One of the most fascinating books I have ever read was just officially published and I am honored to say I have a chapter in it. The book is Thinking with Plants and Fungi and it’s the physical manifestation of a symposium put on by the Harvard Divinity School last year. If you’re the type of gardener who really thinks about plants, about life on Earth, and how we fit in, I vow that you will love this. Even the intro is marvelous! Did you know that the word “occult” was coined by Thomas Aquinas 700 years ago and he was talking about plants specifically? There are essays by Zoë Schlanger, Giovanni Aloi, Guliana Furci, and Monica Gagliano. My chapter is about promoting the use of native plants without also promoting nativism. It’s the result of a year-long fellowship and amazing to see it in print. Definitely also read Banu Subramaniam’s piece arguing against plant nativity.

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• Bill Cullina, author of some of the most helpful native plant books ever written, is doing a fun series on social media where he writes about a different native plant every day for 2026. It’s often unusual information, as much of his knowledge is from a lifetime of propagation and research. Enjoy!

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• A new native seed source just launched for the mid-Atlantic! The Mid-Atlantic Regional Online Marketplace (aka ROMP) is a network of seed suppliers growing local ecotype plants. You can use the website to sell the seeds you grow, buy the seed you need, or list seed you’re looking for. It’s a similar network to one long established in the northeast.

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• The Landscape Performance Series is a large database of landscape projects that are searchable by feature. Looking for recent projects on shoreline restoration? Carbon sequestration? Habitat creation? There are hundreds with photos, full case studies, and performance information. It’s helpful to browse but you can also submit your projects here.

IN THE NEWS

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• Jamaica Kincaid plants peonies and okra wearing her son’s hand-me-downs while Fergus Garrett only wears pants from Pakistan. Georgia Hilmer wears Dickies and Wambui Ippolito switches between Aigle or Wellington boots depending on the weather. Pamela Anderson is all about baskets and Martha Stewart, to no one’s surprise, prefers her own line of clothing. Abra Lee rocks a bright pink jumpsuit because she’s cooler than all of us and APPARENTLY Rebecca McMackin wears her formal Carhartts with the gold hardware topped with anything from Gamine. 40 gardeners were profiled to document their favorite fits in this shockingly helpful piece from NY Magazine’s Secret Strategist. Yes, don’t worry, there are lots of links.

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• And because gardening is so chic right now, Vogue featured the arborists of Central Park in a sweet and not-really-about fashion exploration of what they do all day and why they work with trees. For one: they’re always looking up. It was inspired by a viral IG video on Magnolias and the whole things is super wholesome.

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• Native plant sales are up and continue to rise. While there isn’t a ton of good research, what we do have is optimistic. Get ready for a data dump! Grist reported that Prairie Nursery sales increased 7% last year, while Prairie Moon Nursery tripled business over the last 7 years. A survey from 2022 reported that US homeowners are divided into thirds, with roughly equal percentages of us averse to, curious about, or enthusiastic for native plants. That’s pretty amazing considering that 37% of American’s don’t believe in evolution! Even still, those averse still spent a quarter of their plant budget on native plants just because they’re just pretty and reliable. A new study shows that conventional nurseries are still growing 63% non-native species (10% of which are known to be ecologically harmful). Of the native plants they did offer, 75% were cultivars. When you look at all US nurseries, 44% of the plants they grow are native, up from just 33% six years ago. A survey of Nursery Management Magazine subscribers, which includes everyone from propagators to botanical gardens, found that 46% of plant inventories were native, with most respondents reporting increased demand in the last 5 years. Both growers and buyers prioritize environmental benefits and adaptability, while buyers also find native plants surprisingly beautiful. The biggest challenge with stocking native plants is availability, but nurseries found they take less chemical inputs to grow. Because this survey was funded by Proven Winners, they asked about native cultivars (AKA “nativars”) and found that a quarter of buyers only want straight species. Phew! What does all that mean? People, we are not a trend. This is a slow burn as we increase ecological awareness and shift the whole industry. Nice work everyone!

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• Urban flower farmers have a new strategy when it comes to land access: borrow their neighbors’. Micro flower farming has become a viable career in cities where land is hard to come by. The Washington Post profiled 3 heartwarming operations in San Diego, Norfolk, and Memphis all of which started by gardeners approaching neighbors and offering to transform their yards into a floral bonanza. How could they say no? It sounds like few of them did and all of the gardeners now have successful, hyper-local cut flower operations spread across their neighborhoods. Of course it’s not always easy: they have to replace stolen plants and schlep wheelbarrows full of compost from house to house. But they’ve filled their communities with flowers and delighted everyone with birds and butterflies. I’m hopeful that we’ll see more of this soon. (paywall free link)

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• We’ve known for decades that gardens add to the value of homes. Real estate agents often recommend planting foundation shrubs and resodding before listing a property, which can up a sale price by >10%. Our wild ecological gardens however, have never once been part of that calculation. But that seems to be shifting. The New York Times reports that native plant gardens might actually be good, great even, for home sales. Despite the concerns of listing agents, a Maryland ecological gardener sold his home for $20k above asking, with the buyer requesting a list of plants. And a home in suburban New Jersey with a meadow for a front yard sold for 30% above asking - the buyer was, of course, an avid gardener. The times, they are a-changing!

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• It’s only logical that, as insects disappear, those who eat them will follow. But it’s always jarring to see the data. The Long Point Bird Observatory in Ontario has been tracking wildlife populations since the 1970s and reported that insects populations have decreased by 60% in that time. Local tree swallows, who lay eggs timed for peak insect abundance, have also been dwindling. Researchers could see that years with far less insects resulted in less eggs and smaller birds. What can we do? Garden like hell, protect biodiversity, and as usual, bring down capitalism.

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• It just blows my mind that there are now caterpillars on the Today Show. The good folks at Plan It Wild were invited on to talk host plants, chickadees and encourage people to joint the Less Lawn More Life Challenge. Have you signed up yet? It’s not too late to join 30k people to shrink your lawn today!

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• Want to get rid of mosquitoes? Start a club. The Washington Post wrote a helpful piece on mosquito management that covers all the basics (get rid of standing water, make a Bucket of DOOM, plant native plants, and don’t spray anything except your body). But the author highlights the most important step: talk to your neighbors. Imagine you kill all the mosquitoes in your yard, they will simply fly in from next door. The only effective management strategies are communal. Check out the Itty Bitty Mosquito Population Committee to see how it’s done. (paywall-free link) (H/T Linda H!)

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• I hope your June was gay as could be! It’s hard to figure out exactly how to celebrate Pride with gardens because its all so thoroughly queer. I’ve gone with camp of the pinkest variety: flamingos! The first plastic lawn flamingo was made in a MA factory in 1957. His name was Diego. You can’t deny it, these tacky birds are part of our collective garden culture and some of us secretly adore them. Kirk Gordon begins his 3 part series on flamingos describing the moment when he first opened his original Featherstone specimen: “This ancestral chanting—Kokomo, kokomo—carried me hypnotically to the backyard where, with the ritual precision of a spear fisherman, I plunged the metal spokes deep into the snow.” Gordon’s thesis is that the flamingos represent a “miniaturized distillation of our nation’s ideals around land ownership, conformity, and collective life” all appropriately played out on the stage of the American lawn. The whole piece is a fun, critical look at yard art and lawn ornament that runs from Gertrude Jekyll to John Waters. I dare you not to love it. No one is immune to kitsch.

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• The New York Times published a heartbreaking story about a gardener in one of the richest areas of New York, who passed away when he froze to death outside his tent encampment. The author, Rukmini Callimachi, marks the contrast between how well Boxwood is wrapped and protected for winter, and how exposed and neglected the people who do the work are. I don’t know which trillionaire Francisco Camey was working for when he froze, but they should be exposed and shamed. No one, much less the hyper wealthy, should hire people for less than a living wage. I never hire crews without enquiring about labor practices and hope you consider doing the same. Every ecological garden practice MUST also support the people who live, use, and work on the land. There is no way around it.

• Bumblebees like to solve puzzles. It’s why complicated, lock-and-key flowers like Baptisias, Gentians, and Lupines so often partner with bumblebees as pollinators, restricting access only those who can unravel a riddle before entry. Many of us were delighted but not surprised when research came out recently showing that bumblebees will play with round balls for fun. A new study has now documented that they will even use those balls as a stepping stool to reach a reward when they aren’t able to fly. Researchers are excited because this shows not only tool use but the ability to plan for the future as well, the first instance documented for invertebrates.

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• The American lawn depends entirely on “noise and poison’ says Edwina von Gal at the Perfect Earth’s “Killer Lawns” conference last month. Researchers and science reporters weighed in on the dangers of turf care and Melissa Ozawa pulled takeaways for Gardenista:

  • US turf care is a $21 billion business that dumps 80 million pounds of pesticides on the ground annually.

  • Turf pesticides are associated with Parkinson’s disease. If you live within a mile of a golf course, your chance of getting it increases by 126%. Children are uniquely vulnerable because they’re close to the ground, roll around, and put everything in their mouths.

  • Many landscaping companies sneak in herbicides when they claim to apply fertilizers, which also can contain PFAS and microplastics.

  • Want to go organic? Start with the Perfect Earth turf guide here.

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• I truly believe that Richard Dawkins, with his selfish-gene hypothesis, has done mind-boggling levels of damage by convincing nearly everyone that self-interest runs the world. Charles Darwin even argued that empathy and cooperation are also primary drivers of evolution alongside competition. But still today, there’s a whole industry of nay-sayers who pop up to chide when anyone suggests that species sometimes work together, and that could benefit everyone. That competition is “natural’ is taken as fact, while cooperation is considered anthropomorphization - somehow sentimental, feminized, and requiring preposterous levels of “evidence” before we’re allowed to accurately describe what is clearly going on all around us. Well, there’s a new study to show how and why plants work together. Researchers looked at diverse Mediterranean plant communities made up of drought-adapted, small flowering plants. When plants lived in low density populations, some otherwise conservative species used their resources to enrich soil health, benefiting other, struggling plants and maintaining diversity. Researchers dubbed this the “helper trait.” However, when all plants were packed closely together, those generous plants switched tactics, using more of their energy to grow themselves. Obviously planet Earth is not entirely warm and fuzzy but this study shows that diverse communities do work together when conditions are right, sometimes with no apparent personal gain. There’s a lovely book that delves into this topic further if you’re into it: Sweet in Tooth and Claw.

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• I am always so joyful when horticulture makes its way into national politics. Two weeks ago, some rogue used herbicide to write “8647” in giant letters on the National Mall. I can’t tell you what that code means but search engines will, and the Trump administration was understandably displeased. They immediately dispatched the police to comb the lawn with guns and magnifying glasses. They painted over the numbers with green paint, which only made the numbers more visible. I await, with bated breath, to see if they resod.

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• The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (aka SPUN) has launched a new webtool mapping the density of arbuscular mycorrhizal networks all over the world. Massive is an understatement: a teaspoon of soil can contain 32’ of hyphae which adds up to 110 quadrillion km of fungal networks when laid end to end. Why is this important? Oh, you know, just that life on Earth depends on them and they move 11% of human CO2 emissions into the soils each year. A surprise to me is that 40% of all arbuscular fungal biomass is found in grasslands. You can see the density in the Florida Everglades above. Croplands often take over grasslands but they lose roughly half of their mycorrhizae in the process. Hopefully, this map will spur broader conservation efforts. More here.

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• Science round up:

  • A study of >500 tree communities from multiple continents found that “mast years” (when trees produce bumper crops of fruits and nuts) are almost always 2 to 3 years apart.

  • Mosquitoes exposed to artificial light at night stayed active and biting months later in the autumn than mosquitoes living in natural light conditions.

  • When their classrooms were filled with plants, eighth grade students in Taiwan reported that their learning environment was friendlier, more attractive and comfortable. Students in plant-y classrooms also took less sick days and misbehaved less.

  • A review of 54 studies found that urbanization makes for less arthropod pests and more fungal diseases.

  • As Beech trees decline, they produce less fine root hairs, which alters soil ecology, decreasing ectomycorrhizal fungi and encouraging more saprophytic fungi.

  • As mountain lions returned to a California preserve, deer pressure dropped. While the deer didn’t all necessarily leave or get eaten, they did behave differently, allowing young woody plants to thrive.

  • Water quality researchers in Montana found more herbicide, insecticide, and fungicide hotspots downstream from suburban communities than from agricultural areas.

  • Stem nesting bees in Australia have a greater ability to withstand extreme heat than ground nesting bees.

  • The top 10% of global consumers are responsible for 47–56% of biodiversity loss.

  • Masturbation is widespread in bird species of all genders.

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• Congratulations readers! You’re finally at the end of this epic edition. The reward this month is super dirty. There’s a French biochemist who’s been trying to kill soil for 15 years. He’s tried everything, heat, pressure, even gamma rays, and his jars of soil continue to respire, breathing in oxygen and releasing CO₂. He’s now concluded that soil is essentially a zombie, undead and active even when entirely sterile. During metabolism, sugar is broken down into smaller carbon molecules, from which electrons are liberated and then consume oxygen. This is known as the Krebs Cycle and it’s always been thought to happen exclusively within the confines of a cell. Everyone is now debating how this could possibly be real. Some researchers think enzymes might be hanging around in the soil, breaking down carbon outside of cells, while others retort that enzymes couldn’t function for that long. It’s seems as if it’s time to question whether this critical metabolic process is possible without life itself, perhaps even predating it! And how wonderful to look down at our feet, at the soil in our gardens, and marvel at how it works to sustain us. 🤎

UPCOMING EVENTS

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• Chanticleer: Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  July 15, PA

  In person and open to the public

  I am overjoyed to lecture for Chanticleer this summer. If you needed an excuse to visit the most romantic gardens of the region, this is it. I’ll be speaking on cultivating habitat in ornamental landscapes, from city lots to pleasure gardens. Hope to see you there!

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• Woody Plants Conference

  July 17, PA

  In person, virtual and open to the public

  ‎The Woody Pants Conference looks fantastic this year and I think it might be a record for most women speaking at a tree symposium (3, there are 3. It’s a low bar, ok?). There are lectures con community-oriented forestry, the anachronistic Osage Orange, death, and Magnolia math.

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• ELA Annual Conference and Marketplace

  August 27 & 28, RI

  In person, virtual and open to the public

  The Ecological Landscape Alliance has supported northeast ecological gardening for decades, as well as thrown some of the best symposia of all time. It’s truly my favorite for meeting and connecting with other practitioners. Their annual conference is pricy! ($400 for members) but it’s massive, with two days of dozens of talks, delicious food, and the latest and greatest tools and plants. The whole shebang is co-keynoted by my favorite arborist, Christoper Roddick, speaking on just how and why everyone should work in horticulture for a few decades. See you there!

Support Grow Like Wild here!

So often, when we plant for pollinators, we forget about trees. I’ve been documenting every animal who visits the Tulip Tree outside my office window for a month. There have been birds, butterflies, dozens of bees, beetles, wasps, flies and a whole host of predators. It is a BONANZA for beauty and biodiversity and I believe we should plant them more. My…

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The Blue Moon edition of Grow Like Wild is out in the world!

This month explores everything amazing about Tulip Trees, explains why biodiversity will lead to less tick diseases, and provides you with far more information than you’ve ever thought you needed on how World Cup soccer pitches are grown. Get ready to impress your soccer friends.

If you find yourself as enamored with Tulip Trees as I am, please come to this month’s Garden-side Chat on Monday Jun 22, at 6:00PM EST. We will cover all there is to cover on Liriodendron evolution, ecology, nectar imbibing, and use in the landscape.

If you’d like to attend this and every virtual Garden-side Chat’s for AN ENTIRE YEAR, click below to become a paying supporter.

xoxoxox,

Rebecca

Support Grow Like Wild here!

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Hi Plant People!

Happy Blue Moon. Today marks the second full moon of May, coloring this moon one of the rarest colors in nature. It took humanity thousands of years to see blue as its own color, with very few ancient cultures naming it. In the Odyssey, Homer refers to the “wine-red sea.” Despite ancient indigo fabric and Egyptian glaze, it wasn’t until the 6th Century invention of Ultramarine (from ground lapis lazuli) that the idea of “blue” began to spread. Even still, it barely exists. In almost all animals, blue is a mirage rather than a pigment, produced by clever cells and a trick of the light. Despite what rose breeders may tell you, blue is also rare in plants: <10% of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers. Those that do, use anthocyanins, pigments that change color with pH. You likely know them from Mophead Hydrangea but they’re also in Virginia Bluebells, California Bluebells, Salivas, and Camas Lilies. Fruits and leaves most often get their blues from powdery waxes, thought to function as sunblock or attract pollinators. Any time you see “glauca” in a plant name, it refers to this wax. As a full-tilt glaucophile, the hunt for blue is life-long. I’m overjoyed for the moon this evening.

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It is not easy to write this newsletter with a Tulip Tree blooming outside of my office window. How am I supposed to type when there is currently an entire flock of Cedar Waxwings drinking nectar from the flowers!?!? I’ve been documenting everyone who visits the flowers and studying as much as I can about this most beautiful of ancient trees, and I’m going to report on them for this month’s Garden-side Chat. The leaves feed Silk Moths and Tiger Swallowtails, and the flowers put out so much nectar it literally drips from the trees. This tree is an absolute marvel and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Garden-side Chat: Monday, June 22nd at 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a paid supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• Adorable sticker alert! Artist Anna Brones makes these cuties as stickers, postcards, and prints. ‎

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• I would be hard pressed to stick to my environmental ethos if someone gave me the option to wipe mosquitoes off the planet. But even still, I would never, ever fog spray to get rid of them, for two reasons: A) It doesn’t work. Fogging only kills mature mosquitoes and larvae replace them in a few days. And B) Fogging does kill everyone else. Even natural treatments harm all the insects they touch, damaging the ecological webs that keep mosquitoes in balance. Thank goodness we have mosquito dunks and now is the time to use them! Homegrown National Park and Doug Tallamy have issued a new challenge: make a mosquitos bucket. They provide clear instructions, methods to help other insects escape, and an option to map your bucket. Remember: these efforts are far more effective when your neighbors do them as well.

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• All life on Earth evolved to live in our shifting cycles of day and nighttime. Much of that life is confused by the volume and breadth of light pollution at night. More than 1/3 of humanity cannot see the Milky Way and 80% of Americans literally never have. Light pollution makes plants bloom earlier, causes migrating birds to crash, and can reduce moth populations by 30%. It’s also getting worse, increasing by 10% per year. Thankfully, this is the easiest form of pollution to solve. Light should be useful, targeted, warm colored, no brighter than necessary, and shine only when needed. The above chart is from DarkSky International, a nonprofit that helps people and cities reduce light pollution. Their website has many helpful resources, approved product lists, and can show you how to assess your home lighting.

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• You don’t get ecological gardening without ecology. And while ecology can be complicated and messy, naturalists are here for us, translating the world into characters with stories. One of my favorite sources is Northern Woodlands Magazine, which comes out each season and is filled with pieces like this one on forest dwelling bees of the northeast. Is it gardening? No. But this is how we develop an ecological gardening practice, by learning what our plant and animal neighbors need to thrive and figuring out ways to support them on the land we care for.

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IN THE NEWS

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• Every spring, I armchair quarterback the Chelsea Garden Show, kvetching about the extravagance and waste while ogling the beautiful designs. This year, there wasn’t a single garden that jumped out of my computer screen and stole my heart. There was a bat garden and a “sexy” garden that were fine, but I don’t think it’s them, it’s me. It’s getting harder and harder to delight in luxury and excess. I want the high design, playfulness, and celebration of Chelsea but I also want it to mean something, to do something real. For the past 5 years, a mysterious philanthropist gave the RHS $23 million so that gardens would fund worthy charities and could then be reinstalled somewhere permanent after the show, but now that money is gone. Others have advocated for a traveling show, that builds real gardens in different towns and cities every few years. I’ve never been to Chelsea and am sure the experience is its own wonderful and overwhelming thing, but from my armchair, I much prefer to peruse the Landezine International Landscape Award submissions and see all the cool new parks, gardens, and playgrounds from all over the world.

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• All too often ecological gardening is presented as a moral obligation in retribution for our disastrous environmental legacy - a duty we have to plant asters and goldenrods. And while that isn’t entirely wrong, it is a very small part of why anyone should do this work. Ecological gardens are stunningly beautiful, fascinatingly dynamic, and incredibly fun. I feel like we’re perpetually throwing a fancy party, and get to marvel at the flowering and flying guests who show up. Melissa Ozawa collected the many ways these gardens bring us joy in her new piece for Gardenista. Claudia West delights in the Luna Moths who fly through the evening sky, Page Dickey watches winter Juncos feasting on the seeds of her uncut Monarda, and Nancy Lawson finds her first Zebra Swallowtail 20 years after she planted Pawpaws for them. This is work that unites beauty with meaning.

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• Earlier this month, the New York Times published what was perhaps the worst gardening article ever written. Entitled, the Right Way to Much, the author proceeded to recommend the wrong way to mulch: 4 inches of dyed red wood chips around all plants, followed by synthetic fertilizers. Commenters set the paper straight, and thankfully, the following weeks were followed by quality garden reporting. Reporters went to the Arnold Arboretum to ask actual gardeners about their favorite tools. An article threw a bit of shade on the “chaos gardening” trend while giving Robin Wall Kimmerer the last word. And the Times Magazine included iconic garden styles in their “How to be Cultured” series. There are more important things happening in the world (and at the Times) than bad garden advice, but I’m so grateful for all of you keeping this movement on track and orange mulch out of the picture.

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• An exciting new garden was installed at the entrance of the Colorado State University Arboretum. Entitled THE FELL, the garden imagines a blown down tree and the life that emerges afterwords. Designer and gardener Kevin Philip Williams used trees salvaged from campus and worked with students to grow plants and staff to build it. Importantly, the garden was mostly improvised as the land and materials came together, rather than meticulously designed. It will be fascinating to see how the composition grows and what it becomes over time.

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• Ticks are, without a doubt, the single worst part of being outside. They’ve changed our relationship to gardens, meadows, and forests, instilling fear with places and plants that people desperately need. Many folks mow down plants and spray their land with pesticides, trying to keep themselves and their families safe. And I get it, Lyme and Alpha-gal are terrifying. But these efforts bring very little, if any, real protections and over time, could lead to more disease! Dr James Shepard, an infectious disease researcher at Yale, breaks down how this works in a presentation for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. All over the world, areas of low biodiversity have high infectious disease transmission. That’s because of something called the “dilution effect.” Monocultures allow disease to spread through individuals easily, but diversity and genetic variability disrupt spread. With Lyme Disease, not every animal a tick bites will infect them with the bacteria. White-footed mice and Eastern chipmunks can be Lyme reservoirs, while deer, rabbits, and lizards are not. When land is fragmented and developed, mice abound and Lyme can spread through them unabated. But when land is diverse, carnivores keep mouse populations down, predators keep tick populations down, and there are many more animals for ticks to bite besides mice. Biodiversity dilutes Lyme in a system. As Dr. Shepard says, “Your environment dictates far more than the pleasantness of your garden. It dictates what infections you’re going to get.”

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• We talk a lot about how birds + berries and bees + pollen evolved together, shaped by and for each other, and not enough about how humans have done the exact same thing. A new study in Nature Communications reveals how entangled we really are. The Quechua people of the Andes Mountains have tons of an enzyme in their saliva that breaks down starch - they’re unusually fantastic at digesting carbohydrates. They also domesticated the potato 10,000 years ago and ever since then, the people and the plant have been adapting to life together. It’s an important reminder that we are part of these ecological webs, tenders of them even, and should take that responsibility seriously.

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• The entrance of a California Ritz-Carleton had to be closed after a tiny guest made her nest on the door. People Magazine has the exclusive.

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• Meadows are one of the prettiest and most popular ways for people to shrink their lawns. Among the northeast gentry, they’re THE thing to have, but it’s not easy to grow a meadow! And we’re all still collectively figuring it out. Charlotte Lorick at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia tracked and detailed their process diversifying an old pasture field without using herbicide or tilling. They sod scraped 2” off the top of two acres of pasture in late Fall. They raked and seeded in native plants and temporary cover crops, then covered everything with straw. The site was mown and spot-weeded in spring for the following two years. While all results remain preliminary, they saw diversity skyrocket and cool season grass go from 100% cover to just 5%, indicating that their sod scraping technique was effective! It’s exciting to have a new potential tool for this important toolbox and I look forward to hearing about your sod-scraping project soon. (H/T to Jared Barns and his fab newsletter Plant.Ed)

  ‎‎

• A new film tracks a Ginkgo tree in Germany over the course of a century, exploring the mysteries of plant and human connection.

  ‎ ‎

• OK, this is literally the exact opposite of everything this newsletter is about but nonetheless fascinating: Science News took a deep dive into what it takes to grow the grass for World Cup soccer pitches and it is a level of technology that I did not know existed. There are 16 stadiums all over the continent, but all have to play the exact same on sod that will be just two weeks post-install by game day. With such a short window, normal sod cutting can’t work - grass goes into shock when the roots are cut. FIFA sod is grown on in a thin layer of soil that sits on top of plastic racks. Roots are essentially air pruned and peel off the racks easily when it’s time to ship. Sod is then installed on top of a vacuum ventilation system that pumps air to the roots, keeps them warm if it gets cold, and sucks out excess water when it rains. To assure all pitches play identically, a robot foot covered with sensors tests cleat traction and sound analysis software is used to measure how well balls bounce on the turf. But all of that pales in comparison of what it takes to get the grass to grow: massive banks of bright pink lights are rolled out each day. The light is mostly red but that makes for a long and thin blade of grass. A bit of blue is used because those shorter wavelengths grow short and sturdy grass, better for playing on. All of this effort is of course intended to be completely invisible. And you thought front yards had too many inputs!

  ‎ ‎

• Science round up:

  • Leafcutter Bees are using fluorescent flagging tape as nest material.

  • When leaves in German forests were eaten by herbivores, the trees were able to respond by delaying budburst the following year, reducing herbivory by 55%.

  • Smarter male chickadees sing more.

  • Researchers tested >40 species of urban European birds and found that across the board, they were more scared of women than men.

  • As introduced warm-season grasses push out native plants in western sagebrush-steppes, bird species initially diversify, but shift from specialist to generalist species.

  • Your potted Kalanchoe looks like it might just be the next big antibiotic.

  • Some Monarch butterflies are migrating to Florida for the winter rather than Mexico.

  • As temperatures warm, forest pests increase.

  • Wildlife gardens in Australian cities had more native bees diversity than conventional gardens and remnant wild lands. Researchers believe this was because native plant diversity in wildlife gardens was higher.

  • Daddy longlegs have been revealed as bloodthirsty killers… of frogs.

  • Carbon dioxide pollution is making the plants we eat less nutritious.

    ‎ ‎

• Nice work, readers! You’ve finally made it to the end. This month’s reward is awfully warm and fuzzy considering it’s about plants eating animals. Researchers have long characterized carnivorous plants as preying upon the insects who fall into their traps through bait, pitfalls, and sticky globs. But California Pitcher Plants seem to have a more wholesome tactic: they treat their prey well and keep them around. Researchers noticed that the wasps who made up most of the plants’ victims only rarely fell into their traps, spending most of their time drinking the generous nectar the pitchers provided. Analysis showed that pitcher nectar was indeed a major part of wasp diet, and that perhaps this was more of a mutualistic relationship rather than a competitive one. It’s lovely to think of these dynamics in such kind terms but far more fun to imagine that Pitcher Plants have simply discovered animal husbandry.

UPCOMING EVENTS

‎ ‎ ‎

• The Future Now Summit: Taking Action for People + Planet by Design

  June 2-6, Detroit

  In person and open to the public

  I won’t be able to attend this landscape architecture summit, but I hope you do. It’s all about cultivating a city and planet for people and biodiversity. I honestly cannot think of the last time I’ve seen any conference with such a diverse, local, and appropriate lineup of speakers. It literally gives me hope for the future, that the critical task of passing over the levers of power to the people best positioned to cultivate the future we all want, is happening. At least in this small corner. Let me know how it goes!

  ‎‎

• Conway School Graduation

  June 27, MA

  In person and by invitation only

  I’m honored to be giving the commencement address for the Conway School’s graduate program in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design. I haven’t met them yet, but I already know these students are going to change the world.

  ‎ ‎‎

• Chanticleer: Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  July 15, PA

  In person and open to the public

  I am overjoyed to lecture for Chanticleer this summer. If you needed an excuse to visit the most romantic gardens of the region, this is it. I’ll be speaking on cultivating habitat in ornamental landscapes, from city lots to pleasure gardens. Hope to see you there!

Support Grow Like Wild here!

Hi Gardeners!

I’ve got good news and bad news.

Good:

Here is the link for the Garden-side Chat this Thursday the 21st at 6PM EST.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83480992333?pwd=vR6a5j6AphBjUOoqjv4Y9vHCUvZDQg.1

I’m trying something new and there’s a passcode to get in. It’s 999.

Bad: My brother (the fancy cook) has bailed on the garden side chat. He has a good …

Read more

The podcast is super late this month! What can I say, I’ve been outside! I hope you’re there as well.

I’ve been pulling Garlic Mustard for WEEKS - determined to clear it from the entire forest behind my house. I’m actually having great luck so far and do think I have an effective method. It boils down to this: take it seriously. And remember that seeds can live in the soil for 5 years, but only 4% of seedlings make it to reproductive age.

If you’d like to learn more about how to get rid of this delicious and pernicious weed, consider attending this Thursday’s Garden-side Chat, a monthly, virtual lecture and discussion group for supporters of Grow Like Wild.

It’s only $50 and you get to attend every Garden-side Chat for a year! As well as support the efforts that go into making this newsletter and podcast.

Click to support Grow Like Wild!

What does weeding have to do with phalanx warfare? Find out this Thursday May 21st, at 6PM EST. See you there!

Hi Plant People!

Happy Flower Moon! And happy May Day! How lovely to have them both together. May Day originated with the ancient roman holiday Floralia, where people ran around naked and threw flowers at each other in honor of the goddess Flora. Soon there were maypoles in England and debaucherous Lords of Misrule. As a McMackin, I prefer Beltane, where everyone and their cow jumped over a fire, but most cultures had a spring party of some sort. Early American colonizers tried to celebrate May Day, but the Puritans shut it down and chopped down the pole. It wasn’t until after the civil war that May Day returned. On May 1, 1886 more than 300,000 workers across the country walked off their jobs to demand an 8 hour work day. Police soon turned violent, killing strikers. Workers protested in Chicago‘s Haymarket Square, but when a bomb went off, all hell broke loose and more people were killed. A kangaroo court convicted 8 men and 4 were hanged. As a result though, the 8 hour day became a labour demand all over the world and May Day became International Workers’ Day. In the US however, Eisenhower tried to call it “Law and Order Day” so that we’d forget that we are all one people everywhere, working together to create a better world. Happy May Day, gardeners! I hope you’re dirty and surrounded by flowers.

✤

We had a record-breaking Garden-side Chat last month with arborist Chris Roddick, walking us through the process of selecting, planting, and pruning young trees. This month, we’re focused on less desirable flora, with an entire hour dedicated to GARLIC MUSTARD. Yes, Alliaria petiolata is a fascinating, delicious, and ecologically harmful plant that we should all work to get rid of in North America. I’ve eradicated it entirely on multiple landscapes and am happy to share my process BUT, we’ll also be eating our weeds, with the help of a Michelin Star chef and my brother, Gabe McMackin. GET EXCITED.

Garden-side Chat: May 21, 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

‎ ‎‎

• The Less Lawn More Life challenge is back and begins next week with a keynote by Robin Wall Kimmerer! There are weekly challenges, lectures galore, prizes and even land assessments. You can learn about native plants but also water conservation, art, and navigating the dreaded homeowners associations. It’s all free and more than 8k people have already signed up.

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• In England, they call ecological gardening “rewilding” and it’s different: they focus more on animals and very little on native plants. Still, they’re doing great work and an entire conference on the topic was posted online for free. The Wilding Gardens symposium took place this January and featured all your favorite British rockstars. I recommend John Little, Kate Bradbury, and Fergus Garrett. Enjoy!

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• Chances are that you don’t live in Minnesota. Neither do I, but we share a lot of bee species, which makes Heather Holm’s new website on the native bees of Minnesota so incredibly helpful. It’s beautifully designed, incredibly educational for new-bees and bee nerds alike, and features posts like this one on the first bees of spring. Every state needs a Heather Holm.

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• The Garden Conservancy has a new grant intended to support small organizations gardening ecologically. It has an adorable name: The Nibbled Leaf. Applications open today and end July 15th.

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• Do you know people who are still confused about when to cut down all their garden stems? Xerces has a pamphlet for that, but really the answer is never.

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IN THE NEWS

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• It was a sad month for horticulture. We saw the passing of three pioneering and inspirational practitioners.

  • Topiary artist Pearl Fryar passed away at 86. Fryar was self taught and one of few people able to take horticulture to the level of artistic expression. His garden in North Carolina contained hundreds of works, many of them rescued from nursery compost piles and grown into visionary sculptures. Fryar grew “Love, Peace & Goodwill” and a wonderful documentary about him, A Man Named Pearl, is now free on YouTube.

  • Botanist Peter Raven passed away at 89. He’s best known for leading the Missouri Botanical Garden for decades, conserving and collecting plants. But Raven also helped transform our perspective of plants, from seeing them as individual organisms over to members of vast ecological webs. Alongside Paul Ehrlich, Raven coined the term "coevolution" in a 1965 paper examining how butterflies and plants reciprocally influence each other's evolution.

  • British designer Nigel Dunnett passed away far too soon, at 63. He was without a doubt one of the best garden designers of all time, an absolute genius of atmosphere and delight. But he also took beauty seriously and understood its potential to change people’s lives. His work in cities, creating sustainable, ornamental plantings as critical public infrastructure, inspired many of us. Like Fryar and Raven, Dunnett taught and trained the next generation, and his work and influence will live on.

    ‎

• Want to see a bunch of ecological gardeners come to fisticuffs? Walk into a room of us and say the word “cultivar,” then run like hell because it will go down. Are they helpful? Are they harmful? Are they even pretty? Everyone has strong opinions and they will fight you. Sam Hoadley and Margaret Roach revisit the current thinking on “nativars” in her NYT column this month exploring Mt. Cuba’s research on the topic. Cultivars of course aren’t always selected for ornament: they’re sometimes shorter, disease resistant, or cold hardy. But they do have serious drawbacks: they can bloom too early for pollinators or have foliage unpalatable to caterpillars, but most importantly, they’re almost always clones adapted to one place on earth, which is never ever where you’re gardening. New research backs this up: Nicolas Dorian and others tested 4 species of native forbs against 13 cultivars and found that wild plants were always equally or more attractive to pollinators. Of course, attraction is not nutrition. We don’t know if the bees who collected cultivar pollen had as many healthy offspring as those from wild flowers, or if local caterpillars could digest foliar compounds, or if birds got enough fat from the seeds. The gold standard is always wild type plants that come from as close to you as possible. That said, there are plenty of reasons to use cultivars! Sometimes they are all that’s available. And sometimes they are unavoidably beautiful. I use cultivars, (in fact I love them) but I count them towards the 25% of my garden that I reserve for non-native plants.

  ‎ ‎

• Pollinator gardening could not be hipper, but have you heard of spider gardening? It’s not just for goths - spiders are critical members of the ecological communities we support with our gardens. Spiders contain tons of an amino acid called taurine, which is critical for bird eye and brain development. Bird parents prioritize feeding spiders to hatchlings during their first week, when taurine matters most. Spiders are also major predators of ticks, reducing lab populations by a third. So between self preservation and baby birds, can we all agree that spiders are welcome in our gardens? If so, supporting spiders could not be easier: literally do nothing. The biggest threat that spiders face is us and our leaf blowers. When we remove leaves from our landscapes, we also remove 67% of spiders! So leave those leaves and those spiders. (H/T Dave Bishop)

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• Gardening is in fashion AGAIN. Vogue highlighted all the most useful garden gear, from a $2,000 trench coat to a white sweater. While the New York Times Magazine reviewed fashion houses that used outrageous, realistic florals in recent times. It’s part of a garden-themed series including a piece on floral films and a garden-style quiz. But all the writing is really vibe-y, with so little substance. My theory is that it’s what happens when people who have gardens want to pretend that they garden. It’s awesome that gardens are hip! But why not also treat the discipline with respect?

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• When people compare the biodiversity of ornamental gardens to native landscapes, a key factor they often ignore is that one group of plants is in a garden and the other is not. That means the ornamental plants studied are likely in rich soils, with minimal competition and attentive irrigation, while native plants are left to survive on their own. A new study out of Florida corrected this, taking a group of native plants and a group of exotic plants in the same genus, then watering some and weaning off others. They found that more native pollinators were drawn to the native plants while also showing that irrigated native plants produced healthier pollen and more nectar. We often think of native plants as happy with whatever water falls from the sky, but one finding here is that they do appreciate a little extra.

  ‎ ‎ ‎

• We plant Milkweed for Monarchs and Violets for Fritillaries, but have you ever planted Trillium for moths?!?! I know, as if we need another excuse to plant Trillium... But just because spring ephemerals disappear in summer, doesn’t mean there aren’t enterprising caterpillars enjoying their foliage. Moth-er Seabrooke Leckie did us all a favor and mined Doug Tallamy’s new host plant database, pulling out Lepidopterans who use spring ephemerals and writing about them here. They’re rare, as ephemerals are so often chemically defended against herbivory, but I’m so happy to have this knowledge and will love spring ephemerals even more now.

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• A Massachusetts beekeeper was thrown in jail for trying to protect her sick, elderly neighbor from eviction. As sheriff’s deputies attempted to serve the neighbor, Rebecca Woods drove her truck of beehives to his house, opened them up, and encouraged them to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” around the deputies. She was tackled to the ground, hives were toppled, and everyone got stung. Woods was sentenced to 6 months in jail but is appealing.

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• I know the world is rough right now, but I generally try to focus this newsletter on the things that we can do something about and present horrors in ways that radicalize people to action, rather than lead us to despair. That said, this month was a doozy, and it puts our work in context. The federal government dismantled the entirety of the USGS Ecosystem Mission Area, and is gutting the EPA. They’ve effectively shut down the US Forest Service, and opened up Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness Area to foreign mining. They gave cattle grazing priority on public lands twice the size of California and are building the border wall through the National Butterfly Center. They’re supporting the Israeli military as they destroy a fifth of Lebanon’s farmland and murder more children. AND it looks like the Farm Bill will block people’s ability to sue pesticide companies as well as states’ rights to regulate pesticides at all! It’s bad out there. And clarifies the importance of our work. Certainly our gardens cannot repair the breadth of destruction above, but they can help our tiny corners of Earth. If it was ever unclear, no one is coming to save us. We save ourselves. And as people and butterflies and public lands are harmed, we can care for them where we live, protecting and cultivating community in our states, towns, and back yards. When I despair about the world, I remember that times of great upheaval also have the potential for great transformation. And while the old order is dying, and it’s terrifying, a new world is also growing, and it’s our job to fill it with flowers.

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• Phew! Here is a collection of 15 ecological projects good people are working on in their communities. From ripping out lawns to harvesting rainwater, there is so much we can do. Of course we must also claw back the levers of power and use them for justice and biodiversity, but in the meantime, planting trees is important work.

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• When the trees of our landscapes get old and weak, they are so often disappeared without a trace - chopped, chipped, and ground as if they were never there. Artist Jean Shin’s new installation, Offering, honors fallen trees while allowing them to continue nurturing the future. After two massive oak trees came down at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, Shin returned them to the Earth, buried under mounds reminiscent of Korean tumuli. An April ceremony invited participants to plant native wildflowers and shrubs into the mound. As the trees decompose, they will nourish fungi and bacteria, build soils and cultivate two interconnected ecosystems that support the plants above. “I just wanted everything to have ceremony,” said Shin. Her work celebrates the trees “as part of our lineage, as opposed to treating them like some other thing that is no longer useful.” Rather than disappearing the trees, they simply change form, allowed to offer themselves back to their environment, and making visible the way that decay and growth are always intertwined.

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• New word alert! The “phyllosphere” describes the realm of microorganisms who live on leaves. Similar to “rhizosphere” (the tiny habitat around roots) phyllosphere describes the microbiome of foliage, which, while underappreciated, is absolutely everywhere. A single gram of leaf tissue can host ten million organisms, and all together, leaves on planet Earth comprise a billion km² of surface area, making leaves the largest terrestrial habitat, more than six times that of all land. So who are these tiny guys all around us? Mostly bacteria who live off the leaf’s metabolic byproducts, but also fungi, yeasts and algae, as well as the protozoa and viruses who prey upon them. Writer Sam Knowlton details this hidden world of biofilms and makes the argument for their cultivation in ecological agriculture.

  ‎ ‎

• Science round up:

  • Metallic Sweat Bees change color from blue green to a golden olive as humidity rises.

  • A study in LA found that yards planted with native plants hosted 4 times more pollinators, hummingbirds included, with more complex and diverse ecological networks, when compared to traditional yards. The effects held regardless of neighborhood income.

  • A nocturnal Australian Bull Ant was found to navigate using the light of the moon as a compass.

  • Cultivars of native grasses were not nearly as effective at outcompeting introduced Cheatgrass than their wild counterparts. Researchers speculate that cultivars are selected for above ground traits, while wildtypes are able to grow more underground.

  • More than 5 million ground nesting Miner Bees were discovered living in a cemetery in Ithaca, New York, making it the largest aggregation in the world.

  • Individual New England Asters around Toronto were found to have reduced pollination when exotic vines colonized populations and reduced Aster density.

  • Birds do not provision their nestlings as well when temperatures rise.

  • Organically fertilized lawns release 8 times less nitrous oxide than synthetically fertilized lawns.

  • Artificial light at night can force flowers to bloom up to 10 days earlier.

  • Salmon exposed to levels of cocaine often found in urban wastewater swam nearly twice as far per week as sober salmon.

  • Spiders stress out when they live around too much traffic.

  • Walking outdoors makes people less lonely.

  • Emerging cicadas find trees to climb by searching for shadows, an inclination known as skototaxis - being drawn to the dark. 🖤

    ‎

• Congratulations, Readers! You’ve made it to the end. The reward this month will make your May showers more delightful. Scientists have discovered that certain seeds can hear rain drops. And while the sound of rain tends to put us to sleep, it wakes seeds up and encourages them to germinate. Researchers at MIT put 7,860 grains of rice in shallow tubs of water and drip dropped water nearby. Seeds exposed to the sound of raindrops germinated 30 to 40% faster than silent seeds. They suspect tiny organelles called statoliths drive the process by settling down to the bottom of a cell like sand in a glass jar. When vibration hits and the statoliths are jostled, they encourage the seed to begin to grow. That’s all for this month, dear Readers. May your statoliths be jostled by the spring rain as well. 💚

  ‎

UPCOMING EVENTS

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

• The Future Now Summit: Taking Action for People + Planet by Design

  June 2-6, Detroit

  In person and open to the public

  I won’t be able to attend this landscape architecture summit but I hope you do. It’s all about cultivating a city and planet for people and biodiversity. I honestly cannot think of the last time I've seen any conference with such a diverse, local, and appropriate lineup of speakers. It literally gives me hope for the future, that the critical task of passing over the levers of power to the people best positioned to cultivate the future we all want, is happening. At least in this small corner. Let me know how it goes!

  ‎

• Conway School Graduation

  June 27, MA

  In person and by invitation only

  I’m honored to be giving the commencement address for the Conway School’s graduate program in Sustainable Landscape Planning and Design. I haven’t met them yet, but I already know these students are going to change the world.

  ‎ ‎

• Chanticleer: Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  July 15, PA

  In person and open to the public

  I am overjoyed to lecture for Chanticleer this summer. If you needed an excuse to visit the most romantic gardens of the region, this is it. I’ll be speaking on cultivating habitat in ornamental landscapes, from city lots to pleasure gardens. Hope to see you there!

  ‎ ‎

Support Grow Like Wild here!

HELLO! Below is your link for this evening’s Garden Side Chat - JUST UNDER THE WIRE. What can I say, I’ve been outside gardening.

Tonight features Chris Roddick, who is not only my wonderful husband but was also the head of arboriculture at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for 30 years. He is lecturing on how to pick a tree at a nursery, as well as how to ca…

Read more

I hope you got to see the Pink Moon this month, named for a tiny flower with a big impact: Moss Phlox (Phlox subulata).

Below is another tiny flower, one of my absolute favorites. The glorious Draba verna. These tiny guys are among the first to bloom, but you’d never see them unless you look, because the entire flower is about a centimeter wide and maybe an inch tall. They can fit in a thimble!

Draba verna is from far away, Asia, Europe and North Africa, brought accidentally to North America centuries ago. But they’re so tiny they don’t bother anybody, and teeny flies visit the flowers. The cutest!

Anyway, enjoy the podcast.

xo,

Rebecca

Hi Plant People!

Happy Pink Moon! The first moon to celebrate a flower: Moss Phlox. I can only imagine the breadth of this plant in years past when its bloom was enough to name a moon. Sadly, they can be hard to find now, outside of gardens. Even so, I remain quite jealous of the Japanese gardens that have elevated this plant to its true potential. They call Phlox subulata “Shibazakura,” which translates to “lawn cherry blossom.” 💖 As I watch the full moon rise this evening, I’ll make sure to send a hope for Moss Phlox: MAY SHE RISE AGAIN!

✤

Ecological gardening is what I do with my life, but the true passion of my heart is pollination ecology, essentially the why and how of flowers. There is nothing I love more than sharing how to read them, and how to know what they want out of life. So, I am happy to report that I’ll be lecturing on this topic later this month! And it’s for a good cause. My mother is a member of the CT American Orff-Schulwerk Association, which you can be forgiven for not knowing is a very fun and dynamic way to teach music to children. The talk is on April 21st, virtual, $25, and all funds raised will go to teaching teachers, who then teach children, and the world is better for it.

✤

We had a lovely Garden-side Chat this week, delving as deeply as possible into the fetid world of Skunk Cabbage (so hot right now) (because of thermogenesis!). It’s such a joy to learn literally everything I possibly can about a plant, and then share that with you.

But this month will be more practical: favorite arborist Christopher Roddick will speak on selecting, planting, and training young trees, as he feels that many of you are likely in the process of doing that now.

The young tree Garden-side Chat will be April 20th, at 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

‎ ‎ ‎

• Bluebirds are scoping out the rotting posts of my porch for nest sites and my son has generously made me a bluebird house to lure them elsewhere. As I research bluebirds, I found this fantastic guide to bird habitat requirements from the University of Missouri. The guide details which birds need which age of trees and which plants make seeds during which seasons - very specific info I have yet to find elsewhere.

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• Landscape architects Topophyla worked with designer Gabriel Castro-Andrade to create a kit for worksites that can help protect undocumented people from ICE. Called “The Red Line,” the kits organize worksites into zones with varying levels of access to visitors, shifting responsibility for access away from individual workers, and helping to establish boundaries.

  The kits can be made now by using common items and downloaded signage, but will soon be available to the public by emailing programs@archleague.org.

  ‎

• There are many benefits to using planting plugs rather than pints and gallons: they’re far cheaper, have a lower carbon footprint, and less work to plant. For years plugs were only available wholesale but retailers like Izel have made them available to everyone. However! There is a learning curve, and thankfully Shannon Currey has written all about it in this handy guide to planting plugs. She covers acclimatizing plants after shipping (slowly), watering more at the edge of a flat, and resisting the urge to root prune. She also recommends mulching a site first, and only then planting into it - a strategy I am excited to try.

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• The Native Plant Society of NJ has created a free guide for those interested in planting school gardens. Geared towards parents, volunteers and teachers, the guide introduces native plants, explains their importance, and includes information on design as well as 50 lesson ideas in different subject areas. You can download it online or request a free, mailed copy.

  ‎ ‎ ‎

• My favorite book in recent years has just been published and I’m thrilled to let you know! David Haskell wrote all about flowers, their reason for being, and relationships with others, humanity included. It’s fascinating information delivered though Haskell’s gorgeous storytelling. If you require a teaser, here is the chapter on scent published in Orion Magazine. I’m horribly biased, but I admit that my favorite part is when he details the plant and animal spreadsheets of Brooklyn Bridge Park, describing them as “miniaturist portraits of the relationship between plants and their caretakers.” I could not recommend this book more.

IN THE NEWS

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• Great news, Monarch fans! Overwintering butterfly populations increased significantly in Mexico this year and Monarch populations are on the rise! They are still low, about half of what is needed to sustain population health, but these signs are encouraging.

  ‎

• Right now, millions of those Monarchs are on their way north, traveling thousands of miles in search of milkweed for breeding. But so many others are migrating as well, mostly unnoticed: dragonflies, ladybugs, hoverflies, even lacewings! Research into tracking these epic journeys was illustrated and animated by the Guardian, following Painted Ladies 9000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean and Bogong moths as they navigate by the Milky Way. How do they do it? By floating nets up into the sky, analyzing stray pollen grains, and tracking isotopes in wings. One cool thing I learned from this piece is that Painted Ladies mostly float on the wind, actively flying for only 15% of their journey.

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• Gardening is once again having a fashion moment. At the Paris Fashion Week shows alone Louis Vuitton had models walk through a geometric landscape covered in grass, Hermes’s runway snaked through moss and moonlight, while Miu Miu models clunked down a sodded catwalk wearing hiking boots. Vogue claims it’s part of a faux back to the land movement, in which fashionistas touch grass but inside. Meanwhile everyone’s favorite Menswear Guy heralded Monty Don as a fashion icon in a piece on the history and relevance of “gardening style.” Guy writes that garden clothes “normalize dirt, repair and longevity. They prize comfort and function over novelty, while still allowing for a little theatre in colour and silhouette.” Our high waisted pants and chore jackets let fashion men “borrow a bit of that imagined competence” by providing “a visible record of one’s labour, lending the attire the most potent of menswear spells: authenticity.” (cough cough) Still, he’s right. We look great.

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• It is a big deal for gardeners to get to the point where they’re prioritizing native plants on the land they care for. It’s something to celebrate and support. So I’m thrilled that there’s a new book to help the recently converted figure out what to plant when ornament is no longer enough. Plant This, Not That by Elise Howard features over 200 plant swaps to make our gardens more pollinator friendly. Some of the plants to rethink are ecologically harmful, but some, like lilacs, are perhaps not beneficial enough to warrant space in every garden. Margaret Roach interviewed Elise for the NYT and describes how the book organizes plants by function, giving native options for hedges and groundcovers, while also encouraging people to look for native versions of their existing favorites, like Viburnum, Hydrangea, and Rhododendron. It’s a great read and gift for anyone just getting the bug of ecological gardening.

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• It’s almost time for spring flowers! In just a few weeks, we’ll be surrounded with little blue and white bells carpeting the forests floor. You might wonder why so many spring flowers hang downward, making it seemingly difficult for pollinators to access nectar and pollen. The answer is twofold: first, the bells act like an umbrella, protecting pollen and nectar from spring rain and sunshine. Second, the flowers’ orientation strategically inhibits certain pollinators. A new study out of China took one of their Solomon Seals and flipped the flowers upright to see what would happen. Flower visitation increased, but Honeybees and Syrphid Flies were among them, and they are simply not very good at pollinators. Downward hanging flowers can only be visited by the most acrobatic pollinators, bumble bees and other solitary bees, who are faithful and effective pollinators for many bell flowers. By gatekeeping floral resources and limiting visitors, Solomon’s Seal produces better fruit in the end.

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• Cutback season will soon be upon us. And if you’re into that sort of thing, it can be a great time to gather and remove the egg casings of introduced Praying Mantids. These giant mantids eat monarchs, hummingbirds, and 30 bumblebees a week! And what’s worse, they are still for sale. David Bishop wrote a great article detailing the damaged caused by these charismatic animals and making the case for removal. Spring is the best time, as egg casings can be ID’d and removed easily. If you’d prefer not to kill them, casings can be donated to local bird sanctuaries where young mantids will join the circle of life. I highly recommend bringing any adults found in the garden inside to keep as pets. ID can be difficult, but as you cut back, look for large, round egg casings stuck to plant stems. The good folks at Brooklyn Bridge Park made a fantastic guide to help.

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• A new study found that Lemon Eucalyptus Oil is just as effective as DEET for keeping Black Legged and Dog Ticks at bay!!! It’s a real thrill because the formulation tested lasted for days when sprayed on clothing. I’ve been using cedar oil for years, but it fades after 30 minutes. Lemon Eucalyptus oil comes from an Australian Gum tree called Corymbia citriodora, which an Indigenous lead company then formulated into the fabric spray tested. Unfortunately it won’t be on the market until next year but normal lemon eucalyptus oil is also quite effective for a few hours.

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• What sort of criminal puts plastic underground intentionally?‎ Perhaps the worst thing about landscape fabric is that it doesn’t even do its job. I used to find it in Brooklyn parks, buried six inches under a patch of Mugwort. Apparently, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden used landscape fabric in the 1980s and spent the entirety of the 1990’s removing it. Author Cass Marketos gives us a brief history of this worst idea in weed suppression, pointing out that, in the rare instance that landscape fabric does kill plants, it also kills all the soil biology around them.

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• One year after the LA wildfires, Terremoto landscape designer Danielle VonLehe filled paper pouches with the seeds of quick blooming wildflowers like sunflower and California poppy, “all phytoremediative seeds that sequester heavy metals in their roots when seeded with endomycorrhizal fungi.” In this beautiful piece for the LA Review of Books, VonLehe describes giving the seeds to neighbors as they collectively figure out how to regrow a healthy and supportive landscape on now toxic soils and amidst a “villainization of nature” lead by bureaucrats and insurance agencies. After the fires, trees that protected houses were chopped down out of fear, and those that evolved to resprout were uprooted. “What is a garden when it’s defined by “defense”? she asks. Rather than seeing gardens as a front line, they should instead “be a place where we learn to work with nature and respect the powerful forces that govern our natural environments.”

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• A couple of years ago, a bumblebee researcher accidentally submerged her overwintering queens in water for days. Imagine her surprise when, after drying them out, her subjects began crawling around again. Further testing revealed that bees can live underwater for a week! New research shows how they do it: they breathe. The bumble bees were able to extract oxygen out of the water, the first known terrestrial insect to do so.

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• Houseplants are hip and getting hipper. It’s a $50 billion dollar a year industry and growing. But our begonias are all too often grown by exploited immigrant women from Latin America and the Caribbean. Florida immigrant rights group We Count! launched a new campaign called Planting Justice, as well as published a damning report on the Human Cost of Houseplants. Surveys of workers in Florida, who produce nearly 70% of US houseplants, found that they suffer a hidden reality of extreme heat, unsafe conditions, and low wages, with 86% of workers reporting suffering an accident, injury, or illness on the job, and half of women experiencing harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, houseplant owners are good people! 96% of us said we’d avoid buying from retailers and nurseries using harmful labor practices. What to do? Pressure major retailers to sign binding agreements committing to a worker-developed code of conduct. The campaign is currently targeting Home Depot, Lowe’s, IKEA, Costco, Whole Foods, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s. Consider sending an email.

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• How do you get a garden show? First be a major movie star, then learn to garden. A new gardening TV show is in the works and it truly looks very funny but I’m still somehow bitter. US garden media is tanking, streamers don’t want show pitches (as I know all too well), and the only way to get a show is to be Zach Galifianakis. Even then, teaching anyone anything seems a dead art. In “This is a Garden Show” Galifianakis is specifically pitched as someone who is not an expert, exploring how food is grown alongside the audience. At one point he literally asks, “what is a tomato?” Which, sure, but also this sort of edutainment should exist alongside a robust field of North American experts teaching people the things they want to know, just like the rest of the world has. It all feels very anti-intellectual. But still, I’m looking forward to the show.

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• The benefits of charismatic megafauna to biodiversity are well documented - the disturbance of animals like Bison helps entire ecosystems flourish. But what about the tiny guys? As part of a long-running study in Kansas grasslands, researchers fenced and sprayed quadrants of prairie for over a decade, blocking out or allowing communities of small rodents and insects to do their thing. They found that after 5 years, plots with no insects started losing plant species, and continued to decline for the course of the study. Turns out that grasshoppers and caterpillars, munching away, limit plants enough to make room for more plants. It’s a lovely illustration of the interdependence among all members of these systems, even those we might think of as doing damage.

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• Science round up:

  • When you see a long line at a restaurant, you assume that the food is good. A study out of Japan found that bumblebees do the same thing, bypassing the most attractive flowers when they see other bees visiting flowers they aren’t even that into. Researchers are calling it the “bandwagon effect.”

  • A Strangler Fig in Costa Rica has been identified as the single most popular tree for mammals to use as a latrine. Opossums, two-toed Sloths and wild cats - 17 animals in total - have been found to favor this one species, leading researchers to speculate that the animals use the Figs as a method of communication.

  • Grasshoppers do not want to eat red leaves.

  • A study of 6 continents found that environmentally harmful, introduced animals and plants tend to reduce native insect populations by 31%.

  • A study at the Oklahoma City Zoo found that butterfly gardens can diversify and boost regional butterfly populations over time.

  • Parents who lived within 500 meters of landscapes with carbamate, organophosphate, or pyrethroid pesticide applications had babies with lower APGAR scores.

  • A researcher made a fake hand to pester Brown Recluse spiders and found that they only bite when attacked or squeezed.

  • West Coast Monkeyflowers were able to adapt to extreme drought because of the genetic diversity within their populations. It’s important research because many gardeners want to help plants and trees adapt to climate change with assisted migration, but some are clearly capable of saving themselves.

  • New research estimates that there are ~25,000 species of bees on planet Earth. Meanwhile 34% of plant species and 40% of animals are at risk of extinction.

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• Congratulations, readers! You’re at the end at last. Have you noticed that everyone seems to be smoking again? Starlets carry cigarettes like accessories and pop stars have platters for smoking at weddings. Even birds are hip to the trend, now that finches and thrushes all over the world have been documented adding cigarettes to their nests. I too, thought birds were smarter than us but a new study shows that there are upsides to birds’ cigarette use. Researchers placed two cigarette butts into the nests of European Blue Tits (who are BIRDS) and compared the health of the babies to those nests without. Cigarette nests had less blowflies and fleas, and baby birds were healthier. That’s because the compounds in tobacco leaves ward off nest pests and birds know this, even upping the number of cigarettes used with increased pest pressure. But before you go renegade, offering cigarettes to local birds, please remember that they also contain many toxins that find their way into babies as well. Just grow tobacco.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

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• Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  April 7, MA

  In person, virtual, & free!

  I’m thrilled to lecture in central Massachusetts for the Lincoln Garden Club next month! Come see me share all about lessons learned from a lifetime of playing with bugs in the dirt.

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• How to Grow a Better Birdfeeder w/ THE Desirée L. Narango

  April 16

  In person, virtual, & free!

  One the best bird and garden researchers is lecturing for free online this month! Desirée Narango is perhaps best known for her work alongside Doug Tallamy and giving us all the chickadee research we rely on. But she’ll be speaking on how to support birds with plants rather than feeders. See you there!

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• The Language of Flowers: Pollination Ecology

  April 21

  Virtual, $25

  This is a lecture I rarely give but love to the moon. It’s about how flowers work and it will change your life. Also it’s for a good cause! All funds go to support Orff-Schulwerk music teachers’ education.

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• Darrel Morrison’s workshop at the Clearing

  July 26 - 8/1, WI

  In person, open to the public

  Darrel Morrison is the greatest living ecological landscape designer and he teaches a weeklong course in Wisconsin sharing his process and that of the talented but seriously problematic Jens Jensen. It’s waitlisted but if you’re in design, you should figure out a way in. It might be his last year teaching.

Support Grow Like Wild here!

Hi friends,

Alas, I have to postpone the Garden-side chat previously scheduled for this evening. I am sick. I am in bed. Alas.

However! We will talk all things SPRING FLOWERS next Monday, March 30th. Please join me for a look at the first bloomers of the northeast: Skunk Cabbage, Red Maple, Pussy Willow, plus a bonus flower I just learned - Mermaid Weed…

Read more

Hello gardeners! At long last, please find the recording of the latest Grow Like Wild podcast episode - the BLOOD WORM MOON! (cue scary music).

These “podcast announcement” emails are never super thrilling, so I thought I’d spice things up by including a fun friend each month for you to be on the look out for. Above is the Half Wing Moth, Phigalia titea. While they aren’t especially glamorous, they are usually the first moths of spring in the northeast.

This guy is a male and I know that because females only have tiny wings (half, if you will) and do not fly. They both overwinter as pupae in the leaves under their host trees (birch, maple, oaks and others) so leave those leaves!

Adults emerge in the first warm days of spring and have only one thing on their minds. They don’t eat, they just mate. Females lay eggs on the bark of their host trees and, when they hatch, their inchworm babies inch up the tree to eat newly emerging leaves. They can only eat those tender, new leaves. If you feed them old leaves, they’ll starve.

So keep an eye out for the halfwing moth! They aren’t beautiful pollinators but they make great bird food and let us know that spring is on the way.

Hi Plant People,

There was a FULL BLOOD WORM MOON ECLIPSE this morning and I’m pretty sure we should all make some sort of offering. It’s not easy to think about gardens when we’re bombing people again, so it is my sincerest hope that you are reading this on a break from devising some way to stop WWIII. If you’re interested in my take on things non-gardening, I would encourage you to ORGANIZE. There are so many of us now, the vast majority, who don’t want war, who want healthcare and paid family leave, and a safe, healthy environment for our families and neighbors. But we’re fragmented and disenfranchised. We deserve so much more and so does the rest of the world. But we need to organize into groups with real political power. Wouldn’t it be beautiful if garden clubs could be the seeds around which these movements form, like the tiny motes and spores inside raindrops and snowflakes? Here’s hoping. HOWEVER, that moon this morning.

At 6AM EST this morning, the earth passed between the sun and the moon, cloaking the moon in our shadow. It didn’t go black, but glowed a burnt red, as sunlight peaked around the edges of the earth, filtering through our atmosphere, and projecting millions of sunsets and sunrises onto the surface of the moon. I couldn’t see it through the clouds, but I hope you could.

✤

Somewhere, under the snow, the roots of skunk cabbage are just beginning to metabolize starches. They generate heat for the flower, arguably the first of spring, so that they can attract flies and beetles with wafts of their warm and putrid aroma. It’s not romantic but it is definitely awesome. We’ll cover more about skunk cabbage, as well as other first bloomers in this month’s Garden-side Chat!

If you’re new around here, I host a zoom meeting once a month for supporters of this newsletter. And this time we’ll examine skunk cabbage, red maple, and pussy willow flowers and flower visitors.

Garden-side Chat: Tuesday, March 24th, 6PM EST.

This newsletter is and always will be free for everyone. But if you’d like to join our monthly, virtual chats please become a supporter by clicking below.

Support Grow Like Wild!

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• The Feminist Bird Club came out with their patch for the year, and it is the cutest thing I have ever seen in my entire life. All proceeds go to support orgs doing frontline work in Minneapolis, protecting people from ICE.

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• It’s time for seed starting in the northeast and many of us want to begin well before we’re supposed to. How to hold off premature germination? A Way to Garden hosts a handy seed starting calculator. Simply find the date of your last frost, plug it into the calculator, and it will pump out a list telling you to hold your horses and don’t start tomatoes till the end of the month, Rebecca.

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• The British Ecological Society has put out a paper detailing everything ever researched about their native Solomon’s Seal. What’s more, there’s an entire database where you can search through similar papers for hundreds of local species, many which have jumped the pond. It is both very cool and totally unfair. We need a North American version.

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• There are times, like now, where it is extremely important for all of us to get out of the garden and get political. But there are also gardens that are fundamentally political, as well as joyful and beautiful manifestations of people taking care of each other and the world around us. Lottie Delamain details 50 of these vibrant landscapes in her gorgeous book, Gardens That Can Save the World. It’s a true cause for hope and a well of inspiration in these trying times. I’m so honored to be included alongside folks like David Godshall of Terremoto and John Little of Care Not Capital. It’s hard to think of a more important garden book for this moment.

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• Native plant floral design is a relatively new arena and that makes it all the more exciting. Gardening blog Nuts for Natives did us all a favor and documented which eastern flowers hold up in a vase, which spill gracefully over the edge, and which are the most dramatic. How will floral design shift and evolve with this new pallet? I can’t wait to find out.

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IN THE NEWS

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• Did anything happen in horticulture this month aside from the Bad Bunny Halftime show? It was such a joyous celebration of all that is good about this problematic country, with the added bonus of GRASSES. It’s hard to think of another time grasses were this big in pop culture. Maybe Children of the Corn? The Bad Bunny team hired 400 people, dressed them as grasses, and had them march onto the field amidst sugar cane, plantains, and palms trees evoking pastizales and the ecology of Puerto Rico. I thought I’d be helpful and ID the grasses for you, but alas they were made of plastic to withstand the rigors of showbiz! Still, graminoid reggaeton fans finally had their day in the sun and we are all better for it.

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• Much of our work focuses on keystone plants, but did you know there are keystone birds? Woodpeckers, what with all their fancy carpentry, are habitat makers for many other species: owls, bluebirds, bats and raccoons can all be found in homes originally made by woodpeckers. Margaret Roach details their generous housing policies in the NYT, as well as what we can do to support them on the land we care for. We can make sure they have water in winter, berries in summer, and acorns in the fall. Of course, the big thing is to let trees get old and even die, reducing canopy if necessary to keep them safe.

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• The coolest Orchid Show ever is underway right now at the NYBG and the designer is masked mystery man, Mister Flower Fantastic. He’s like a florist MF Doom, but with a pollen allergy severe enough to keep him masked and gloved. The installation is a love letter to Jamaica Queens, gilding car washes, brownstones, and newsstands with orchids. The show is clever and hip but it also elevates floral design into the realm of legitimate art. The show in unmissable and runs thought April 26th.

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• Months ago, I wrote an article for the American Gardener boosting advocacy from BIPOC researchers to soften and shift our rhetoric around harmful introduced plants. When we use terms like “alien,” “invasive” and then combine nations of origin with militaristic language about eradication, there are people who will respond to that with fear. I got great feedback, all thoughtful, from those who supported and those who were against the shifts. Then AHS posted it to Instagram last week and all hell broke loose. There were white gardeners upset that anyone might ask them to change. There were ecologists convinced that this would diminish the severity of the crisis. There were exotic plant advocates “agreeing” that we should celebrate Hosta to “even things out.” Someone called me a “liberal.” It was hilarious. And while most people were calm and intelligible, this is the internet and I honestly think people are still fighting. SO, I’m here to set the record straight:

  • There’s an ecological crisis. We need to support the plants that evolved on the land we’re on, and remove any plants that are causing harm. Exotic plants that are not causing harm are FINE.

  • No one is calling in the language police. No one is getting canceled over this. It can be a gentle and awkward shift to kinder rhetoric. No biggie.

  • I am in no way the figurehead of this movement and it’s honestly problematic to put me there because there are awesome researchers leading the way. You can watch a fantastic webinar here where they detail soon-to-be-published research showing how this language hurts people.

  • And lastly, even if you don’t care about the feelings of people in this era of heightened xenophobia, consider that this an opportunity for us to reach outside of our bubble and speak to people who don’t feel they have a place in this movement. Just strategically, using language that allows us to grow and spread this work is in everyone’s best interests, birds included.

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• Brace yourselves, there’s more bad news about bird populations. But there are also indicators for ways to help, so please let this spur you into action rather than lead you to despair. The situation: a new study in Science shows that some bird species are declining faster than previous thought, and a full quarter of those studied are decreasing faster and faster. There are strong correlations with agriculture and climate change: birds are decreasing most in areas with more pesticide and fertilizer use, larger farmland, and warmer temperatures. While researchers don’t yet know all the mechanisms of decline, decreasing insect populations are a big part of it. Some people think climate change is drying out the world, and many insects can’t adapt. Ecologists in the Brazilian rainforest are literally dumping water on the ground to measure bird response, and preliminary results indicate that birds are healthier with less drought. It can be complicated and overwhelming to stop climate change, but we can protect and cultivate habitat to support the birds around us by planting the native plants that will provide the berries and caterpillars they need. Gardening can be a part of serious ecological work.

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• One of the most incredible native plant gardens in Chile was created by a Palestinian designer. Ximena Nazal has been rescuing plants from demolition sites and collecting wild seed on botanical expeditions, growing them in her garden for decades. She sees these rare desert plants as “symbols of adaptation and endurance” that she can help keep safe. Her stunning garden, profiled in the World of Interiors, is “an ironic inversion of the plant-hunter trope…not pillaging for glory and riches, but to protect and nurture species under threat – from neglect, climate change and our avaricious appetite for exotica.” It’s a lovely portrait of a garden practice that hits all the marks: supporting ecological communities, nourishing the soul, and doing it beautifully.

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• Have you ever fallen in love with a tree? If you’re reading this, there’s a high chance that you already know the wonders of truly knowing, empathizing with, and supporting one of these marvelous earthlings. Ned Friedman at the Arnold Arboretum, sees his job as an interspecies matchmaker, encouraging students in his seminar - simply entitled “Tree” - to pick a single specimen among the collection’s 16,000 and learn from it, befriend it, and eventually fall in love. The course grew from Ned questioning how we might “become more connected with the world in ways that might lead us to behave differently, to feel more passionately about biodiversity?” I’m stuck by how simple and achievable his solution is, to encourage people to truly know a single tree. It seems like a wonderful model to spread to students of all ages.

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• Naturalist Brian Pfeiffer wrote a wonderful article on birch tree reproduction. In winter, he explains, catkins mature into whorls of fertile samaras and three lobed scales that look like tiny birds in flight. The scales are distinct to species, so you can impress your friends by ID-ing the trees around you with only these littlest fleurs de lis!

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• Science round up:

  • When Monarch caterpillars eat the young leaves of Common Milkweed, they grew larger and had improved survival compared to those eating older leaves. Apparently young leaves are easier to eat and have more nitrogen.

  • The removal of introduced Buckthorn in upstate NY resulted in a tenfold increase in herbaceous plant cover and species richness, as well as higher arthropod and pollinator abundance. However, the increased leaf cover and litter also encouraged the establishment of the incredibly harmful introduced Fire Ant, who like to nest in leaves.

  • Bumblebees use a massive amount of energy flying around. Thank goodness that their wings also generate a downdraft, keeping their fuzzy bodies cool.

  • A new pink baneberry was discovered hiding in plain sight around Ithaca, New York. And a new to science mining bee was found in Texas and Mexico and is a specialist on Texas sage.

  • A parasitic braconid wasp is able to inject a tamed virus into their doomed host caterpillars, chemically castrating the caterpillar in order to use that energy to feed offspring.

  • A study in German grasslands found that more plant diversity resulted in increased soil carbon accumulation as well as better microbial resistance to drought.

  • Researchers took Canada goldenrod, New England Aster, and Wild Bergamont and warmed them up to mimic climate change. They flowered less and produced less sugar in their nectar. Monarch butterflies who fed on these warmer plants had 26% less fat than those who fed on normal temperature flowers.

  • Bur Oak populations at the edges of their range were found to contain the genetic diversity thought necessary to adapt to climate change. This can be read as both helpful for assisted migration, or an argument against it.

  • Researchers may have found evidence of deep-rooted trees redistributing groundwater, which then benefits the shallow-rooted plants growing under them.

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• My sincerest congratulations, readers, you’ve made it to the end at last. The reward for this month is twofold. I was going to tell you about these tiny parasitic beetles who evolved to smell like flowers so that bees will visit them and they can hitchhike back to their nest and wreak havoc. But it’s honestly been a really tough month, and I want to leave you with something wonderful. So, I’m going to tell you about electricity. The ground has a negative electrical charge. It’s why we “ground” our stereo systems, by wiring them to the earth. Plants (glorified tubes of water) also carry that negative charge. The atmosphere is usually positively charged, and storms, when they really get going, can suck photons out of the ground, and up into the air. It’s why our hair can stand on end during a thunderstorm. Trees, being the tallest things around, are high points for these climbing charges. Researchers have now documented pine trees glowing blue as charges jump out in a phenomenon called coronae. In the pitch black, it’s just barely visible, but under UV light, the whole tree glows as if “fireflies descended on the treetops.” There have been stories of ship masts and church spires lighting up in a storm, nicknamed St Elmo’s Fire, so it makes sense that trees would do the same. I’ll be looking now, on dark and stormy nights, for “swaths of scintillating corona glowing as thunderstorms pass over forests.”

UPCOMING EVENTS

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• "Life in the Time of ICE: Be an Advocate"

  March 3 (TODAY!)

  Virtual, pay what you can

  El Merequetengue, a network of Latin American landscape architects and designers, is collaborating with private firms local ASLA chapters to put on a workshop TONIGHT about how to be an advocate for and with immigrant communities in the landscape industry. There are more events to come so follow El Merequetengue on Eventbrite.

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• Auction to support Homegrown National Park!

  March 9 - 15

  Virtual

  HGNP is doing wonderful work spreading resources and inspiration, supporting people to support the ecological systems they are a part of. Now we can support them by registering for their auction, where you can win books, gift certificates, and me? Yes! I’m donating an hour of virtual landscape consultation and I so hope one of you wins it.

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• Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  March 18, OH

  In person & free!

  Come hang out with me in glamorous Ohio! I’ll be lecturing at the Bexley Public Library, talking about all the ways I know to make gardens that support people and ecological communities alike.

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• David Wagner for Pollinator Pathway

  March 19

  Virtual & free!

  ‎David Wagner is the most amazing caterpillar researcher in North America, and he’s lecturing for free for Pollinator Pathway! If you want to learn more about the threats caterpillars face and how to support them, this is an incredible opportunity.

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• Navigating BONAP

  March 31

  Virtual, pay what you wish

  I use BONAP every single day and am SO looking forward to this lecture by founder Dr. John Kartesz on navigating their new website. I’m sure we’ll all learn a ton but I’m just excited to say ‘thank you.’

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• Adventures in Ecological Horticulture

  April 7, MA

  In person, virtual, & free!

  I’m thrilled to lecture in central Massachusetts for the Lincoln Garden Club next month! Come see me share all about lessons learned from a lifetime of playing with bugs in the dirt.

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• Darrel Morrison’s workshop at the Clearing

  July 26 - 8/1, WI

  In person, open to the public

  Darrel Morrison is the greatest living ecological landscape designer and he teaches a weeklong course in Wisconsin sharing his process and that of the talented but seriously problematic Jens Jensen. It’s waitlisted but if you’re in design, you should figure out a way in. It might be his last year teaching.

Support Grow Like Wild here!

Gigantic clusters of soft flakes are falling outside my window. I almost feel guilty for not racing outside with a macro lens to capture as many as I can before they melt or sublimate. Oh? Have you not heard of snow sublimation before? Perhaps you might consider attending the snow ecology Garden-side Chat on Monday!

GARDEN-SIDE CHAT - SNOW ECOLOGY

Monday,…

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