I enjoyed sharing my yard with you all, and discovering things that had just popped up, that even I had not seen!
Thank you so much for coming to my yard and braving the cold wind and rain!
For those who are not familiar with Doug Tallamy, I urge you to explore his work! As I mentioned, he is an entomologist. I discovered him through his first book Bringing Nature Home, that has lots of info about insects. I have not read Nature’s Best Hope, but I have heard that his message of why it is important the plant NATIVE plants, to address the climate and biodiversity crises, is clearer. You can also find a lot more about why it is important to reduced your lawn and plant natives at his website “Homegrown National Park.” The website invites you to join the effort to restore biodiversity by getting on their map and pledging to reduce your lawn.
During our exploration together, Jen shared the insect book that she has been having fun with in getting to know new insects in her yard. It is called Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates, by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney. One of the authors, Charley Eiseman, lives in Northfield and gives talks often in the area.
I cannot remember ALL that we saw, but here is a synopsis of our tour. It started with spring beauties in the lawn (see attached photo). Then we explored my new forest with primarily birch trees (Btw Dave, Musclewood is Carpinus caroliniana.) that has Hobble bush, lots of dutchman’s breeches, and the tiny white flower, rue anemone. Then behind us, we saw foam flower emerging (but not flowering yet), one VA bluebell. Then beyond the Japanese maple, an early meadow rue (thalictum) with its weird gangly flowers, and blue cohosh, with black cohosh just coming up behind it.
While moving to the garden next to the sidewalk, we noticed the bright yellow marsh marigolds beginning to bloom along the stream edge, and a clump of trillium (wake robin). In the garden next to the sidewalk – I talked about the evergreen seersucker sedge that I love, that looked a mess at this stage as it put up its fruiting bodies, and we discovered Bishops cap about to bloom, and a small trillium! Behind that along the north edge of my porch (it NEVER gets sun) the blue cohosh and Solomon’s seal were just coming up.
We then passed by a fairly new area (3-year old) with a witch-hazel shrub, and a few bloodroot still blooming in the cool of the shade! As well as an evergreen marginal wood fern, with foam flowers and strawberries as ground cover. We than walked past volunteer sensitive fern along the side of the house. For the intrepid, we went up the narrow trail on the dry rocky hillside to get a birds eye view of the marsh marigolds blooming in the back swamp, as well as many of the plants we had already seen in the moist “flat land” surviving in this totally different habitat, amongst the logs from invasive trees that I had cut down.
WOW we saw a lot! But more is to come!