Nature Ideas, Tips & Guides

‘PLANTS TELL the story of a place,” says field botanist and native plant nursery owner Jared Rosenbaum. “If you want to be rooted on the earth you live on, you can look to plants to interpret that story.”

Are you looking for family-friendly jokes and clever puns with a feathered theme?  This bumper list of bird puns and bird jokes has all you need to get everyone smiling.

Are you in need of some sunny floral inspiration?  Look no further than this list of one hundred fantastic quotes about sunflowers and sunflower captions for instagram.

ARE YOU THINKING about the possibility of transitioning an area of your lawn into something more diverse, like maybe a meadow? A question I’m asked a lot is how to go about it—the actual preparatory steps. So I invited Benjamin Vogt, a specialist in natural landscape design, to walk us through the process.

I SUSPECT every gardener has for years now over and again heard the warnings about the most widely used pesticides in the United States, neonicotinoids—or neonics for short. In 2013, the American Bird Conservancy issued a report warning of their impact on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and especially the ripple effect their use was having on birds. The Conservancy has issued an updated report with a telling headline, “Neonicotinoid Insecticides failing to come to grips with a predictable environmental disaster.” So where are we now with limiting the use of these pesticides and what can we as citizens and gardeners do to help in the effort?

INTEREST AND AWARENESS around native plants has been trending in recent years, and it makes them feel almost new. But of course natives are the original plants of an area, and even in certain specialty corners of the nursery industry, they’ve been around far longer than they’ve been making headlines.

MOST PEOPLE call in an arborist when they think it’s time for a tree to be removed, a costly process both financially and environmentally, since trees are critical drivers of diversity. Today’s guest runs a tree-care company and also a tree-focused nonprofit that emphasize other services instead of removals, advocating for the planting of young trees, for caring for our trees with smart structural pruning, and regular inspections to get to know them better and stay ahead of any problems, and for thoughtful support of dead and dying trees as important forever members of our ecosystems.

TODAY’S TOPIC is orchids, but not the ones you might be growing as a flowering houseplant. Our subject is native terrestrial types that are more often than not under great pressure in the wild, their numbers dwindling.

Are you searching for the best flower quotes and flower captions?  This list has over one hundred beautiful flower sayings and inspirational floral quotes to lift your mood and put a smile on your face.

IN A RECENT phone call, Tim Johnson used the phrase “bio-productive gardens,” and it stopped me.

MAYBE MORE than any other topic, the use of native plants has consistently figured among the top garden trends in recent years. Just how popular is the movement toward a more ecological focus in the way we design and care for our landscapes?

WATCHING BIRDS lifts my spirits, as it has for decades, and who couldn’t use their spirits lifted right about now? But there’s another much bigger potential benefit, which is that sharing my sightings helps scientists understand what’s going on with bird populations in a changing world.

AS SHE OFTEN DOES, naturalist and nature writer Nancy Lawson—perhaps known better to some of you as the Humane Gardener after the title of her first book—caught my attention the other day.

Wildlife-friendly gardening is a simple yet impactful way to bring nature closer to home. This isn’t just about having a pretty garden; it’s about helping the environment right on your doorstep. Whether you have a big garden or just a small space, you can make a difference.

These homemade bird feeders are a great way to give your local wild birds a real treat. You can make a bird feeder at any time of year, but it’s particularly important to support wild birds in winter.

If you’re looking for tree jokes, tree puns, and tree proverbs, you’re in the right place.

I’M CELEBRATING New Year’s in the company of a rare bird and the flowers of the first of the witch hazels, neither of which is supposed to be here right now.

LIKE EVERYONE around this time of year, I get into a “looking back while looking ahead” combined mindset. Today I want to do just that, but with a sort of ecological filter, taking stock of how things in the garden fared in the bigger environmental picture and what opportunities lie ahead for me to read nature’s signals even more closely and be an ever better steward of the place.

MOST OF US may automatically think “monarch” after hearing the word “milkweed,” or vice versa. And that’s in fact a critical and intimate relationship, the one between monarch butterflies and native milkweed plants.

REDUCING THE footprint of our lawns has been a key environmental message for gardeners in recent years, since lawns lack biodiversity and involve huge amounts of pollution between fertilizers, herbicides, and the gas used in mowing. But what to cultivate instead? That is the subject of a nearly 15-year native lawn research project at Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, New York, with some interesting insights.

Mainland UK is home to many natural treasures. While many are world-famous and are visited by millions of people each year, there are several that many haven’t even heard of, including some locals.

MY, HOW TIMES have changed. That’s what I keep thinking, looking around my own garden in recent years. I’ve been struck by the same thought over and over as I read “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” the latest book by Margaret Renkl (illustrated with gorgeous collages by her brother, Billy Renkl, like the one above), which takes us through a year in her garden 1,000 miles to the south of mine in Nashville.

Are you excited for autumn season? This list of kid-friendly, hilarious fall puns and fall jokes is perfect for helping the whole family celebrate this gorgeous time of the year.

THE QUESTION “What do I do about the Asian jumping worms that are destroying my soil?” has outpaced what was the most common thing I was asked, year in and year out, for decades as a garden writer—the relatively simple challenge of “How do I prune my hydrangea?”

Are you looking for great outdoor games to play with the kids?  This list of fabulous nature games has 35 great ideas to inspire your outdoor fun.

Do you need some fun ideas for keeping kids busy and entertained on a walk? We’ve got 30 great nature walking games to help you do just that.

Collaborative post

I SAW NEWS of a new book called “Pressed Plants” recently, and it got me thinking about my grandmother and one of the many crafts she enjoyed way back when. Grandma made what she called “pressed-flower pictures,” bits of her garden that she carefully dried, arranged on fabric and framed under glass. And some of those still hang on my walls. It also got me thinking of the 500-year-old tradition of pressing plants for science and the herbarium world.

Collaborative post

If you’re looking for easy seeds to grow with children, it’s hard to beat growing sunflowers in pots. If you’re not gardening with children, sunflowers are still fantastic plants to grow, and they make wonderful cut sunflowers too.

“Plants are the mulch,” Claudia said then about making immersive landscapes that engage humans as much as they do pollinators and other beneficial wildlife. So it’s tempting to choose the plants we buy for our gardens based on their looks alone. Claudia and her colleague, Thomas Rainer, of Phyto Studio, who are co-authors of the groundbreaking 2015 book “Planting in a Post-Wild World” (affiliate link), have tougher criteria for which plants

Sarton, who today is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as phrases like “women’s literature,” or covered in women’s studies curriculums, wrote more than 50 books. She actually came to my attention thanks to two men, at different times in my life. I might have missed her altogether if not for a one-two punch by Sydney Schanberg, an ex-New York Times colleague who thirty-odd years ago offhandedly said, “You would like May Sarton,” and then years later my therapist (who gave me “Journal of a Solitude”).It wasn’t her emerging influence on feminism that provoked their decades-ago recommendations. They knew that the natural world, and specifically the garden, called to me, as it did Sarton.“A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself,” she wrote.SARTON, A PROLIFIC POET and author of fiction, also wrote memoir

THE STATE AMPHIBIAN of South Carolina was waiting in the backyard water garden for me today, or maybe for a lover more to his taste. While cleaning the pools of rotted leaves and whatever else blew in, it’s typical to encounter the many frogs who have overwintered with me, but today was a bonanza: Up with a net full of muck came a startled red Eastern Newt, and then also this much larger cousin, the Eastern Spotted Salamander.

A WAY TO GARDEN turns 5 months old this week, and as if to celebrate it reached a milestone: our first 100-comment post (about equal to the number of frogs who share the place with me). No-no surprise for me that it was the post about Garden No-No’s (aka The Complaint Dept.) that took the prize.

EVER HEARD the expression “birding by ear”? Despite my years-old collection of CDs (and even older tapes!), I have never gotten good at telling who’s who, sight unseen, perhaps knowing merely 15 of the 60ish avian voices who visit each year. A new online resource called All About Bird Song from Cornell Lab of Ornithology aims to improve our ability to retain the vocalizations by visualizing them—and also reveals what song is all about: its purpose, its mechanics, and just how amazing a feat it actually is.  

YOU’D THINK HE WOULD HAVE NOTICED when he lumbered up and out of the little garden pond to his favorite perch, that he had an oak leaf stuck to his back, but no. This bullfrog spent the entire day Friday in undercover guise–as if his dull winter skin color wasn’t camouflage enough.