Category: Beneficial Insects

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Carbon Garden / Evergreen Perennials / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Holiday Plants / Native Plants / Poisonous Plants / Wildlife Gardening / Winter

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Legends, Lore and the Truth About Mistletoe

  From November through May we can admire the living mathematics of the trunks and branches of hardwood trees.   Their leafy crowns have fallen, and their beautiful bark in all its silvery, marbled, textured variety is revealed once again. Looking up, we sometimes see lively green clusters of mistletoe shining in the treetops.  These shrubby, evergreen plants have been a part of myth and folklore since ancient times.  They live suspended between heaven and Earth, rooted into the branches of...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Evergreen Shrubs / Flowering Shrubs / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Invasive Plants / Keystone Species / Native Plants / Native Trees / Ornamental Shrubs / Permaculture / Poisonous Plants / Wildlife Gardening / Winter

 by Elizabeth McCoy

A Winter Wildlife Garden- “Inviting the Stranger”

  Cardinals nest in a large evergreen shrub beside my kitchen window.  Though the shrub, Ligustrum, is frowned upon by many contemporary gardeners as invasive, the birds don’t know that.  They delight in its abundant berries and the insects that visit year-round. We delight in watching the birds come and go, even as they peer in the windows at us.  We amuse one another.  Cardinals, titmice and other birds also perch in the crape myrtle tree a little further out...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Fall / Garden Maintenance / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Wildlife Gardening / Winter

 by Wendy Hamrick, Master Gardener, Class of 2017

Wild Thing, You Make My Heart Sing!

While we are preparing our homes, vehicles, and closets for the cold winter season ahead, let’s not forget about our wildlife friends that bring us so much joy during the more temperate months.  Over the next 90 to 120 days, they will endure bone-chilling winds, frozen ground, and limited access to fresh water or easy foraging.  It is time to get up off the couch and winterize your backyard for their benefit. The most susceptible of our critters, particularly those...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Carbon Garden / Deer / Edible Plants / Evergreen Perennials / Evergreen Shrubs / Fall / Ferns / Flowering Shrubs / Food Forest / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Keystone Species / Lepidoptera / Native Plants / Native Trees / Ornamental Shrubs / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Making the Choice: Native v. Imported Plants

  What do you consider when choosing plants for your home and yard?  We all have a checklist of criteria in the back of our minds.  Our criteria are very personal to our own needs and situation.  You may not purchase and plant as many plants as I do each year, but I’m sure that you enjoy the choosing and the planting just as much.     We gardeners have been encouraged to plant more native plants for quite a...

Beneficial Insects / Fall / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Wildlife Gardening

 by Judy Kinshaw-Ellis, Master Gardener, Class of 2015

Attracting Butterflies

Who doesn’t like butterflies? They are beautiful. They make us smile. They drink nectar from our flowering plants. They are colorful. We love them—even the little brown ones. So what can we do to bring them into our yards? Like other wildlife, if we want butterflies, and let’s include other pollinators, too, we need to provide water, food, and shelter. Lucky for us, the plants we plant for food will also provide shelter. And right now, the fall is a...

Beneficial Insects / Birds / Flowering Shrubs / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Lepidoptera / Pollinators / Sustainable Gardening / Watering

 by [email protected]

Water-Wisely, Choose Drought Resistant, Pollinator-Friendly, Plants

Planting and maintaining lovely gardens, while restricting the use of water, is made possible by using a few watering techniques and a choice of plants. The VCE created a brochure, in 2004 entitled Creating a Water-Wise Landscape and twenty years later it still contains some great advice.

Animal repellant products / Beneficial Insects / Container Gardens / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Herbs / Tender Perennials / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Designing With Lemon Scented Plants

  Picnics with citronella candles, lemon scented furniture polish and sweet tea with lemons all recall happy childhood memories.   Fragrance has a profound ability to create or shift a mood, to trigger memories and create new ones.  Just as cinnamon evokes the holidays; crisp, cool lemon is a summertime fragrance. Most lemon scented plants thrive in warm climates.  Lemon trees, Citrus limon, are hardy only to Zone 8.  Originally native to Asia, they spread throughout the ancient world wherever the...

Beneficial Insects / Flowering Shrubs / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Heirloom plants / Ornamental Shrubs / Permaculture / Pollinators / Summer Color Plants / Sustainable Gardening / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Summer Flowering Trees and Shrubs for Pollinators

  Have you ever watched a bumblebee explore a Hibiscus flower?  Each flower is large enough for the bee to crawl around the depths of its funnel shaped petals to collect as much pollen as possible.  Short, powdery stamens grow like bristles on a bottle brush from a long, tubular pistil. The bee emerges white with pollen and satisfied by the flower’s nectar. Hibiscus shrubs, commonly known as Rose of Sharon, bloom from June through November in our area.  Each...

Beneficial Insects / Container Gardens / Edible Plants / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Larval Host Plants / Native Plants / Perennial Care / Poisonous Plants / Summer Color Plants / Wildlife Gardening

 by Elizabeth McCoy

Designing Plantings to Host Butterflies and Moths

  A friend was excited to buy milkweed plants at a WBG plant sale several years ago. They aren’t easy to find commercially, and few people raise them from seed.  When I saw her again a few weeks later, I inquired about how her plants were doing. “Oh, I must have done something wrong. They’re not looking so good.  Most of the leaves have disappeared,” she replied.     I quickly reassured her that it was unlikely she had done...

American Lady on viburnum

Beneficial Insects / Garden Design / Gardening on the Wild Side: Working in Harmony with Nature / Pollinators / Summer Color Plants

 by Marion Guthrie

June’s Focus: Pollinators

Pollinators, like this American Lady butterfly featured in our June banner, move from one plant to another while searching for protein-rich pollen or high-energy nectar to eat. As they go, they are dusted by each plant they visit with pollen and in turn, they leave pollen behind. This pollen transfer fertilizes the plants enabling them to produce fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. These foods form the foundation for the food chain for humans as well as other species. According to...