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No Free Lunch: Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)
Have you got milkweeds around? If not, why not? Have you ever noticed how many insects they attract? Finally, have you ever noticed some of these insects dangling lifelessly from the milkweed’s...
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Where have all the berries gone?
This is what the fruiting head of Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) often looks like after the berries have matured. What berries, you say? Ask the birds that ate them all, especially the robins that...
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Fall Medley #1
The severe drought hasn’t dimmed the autumn colors! All from our backyard!
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Galls Galore
Besides having some spectacular fall colors this year, another thing our drought didn’t seem to hurt was the prevalence of oak leaf galls. I’m not sure why, but we seemed to have a bumper crop of them...
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Winter Rations
Goldfinch Eating Sweet Gum Seeds (Liquidambar styraciflua) I’ve often thought of our Sweet Gum tree as more of a Bitter-Sweet Gum tree, mainly when I rake up piles of the spiky little balls it sheds...
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Pests and Parasites
A very effective agent of biological pest control, this tiny wasp in our backyard is preparing to lay an egg on (or in) the little green aphid.. When the egg hatches, it will live inside the aphid,...
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A Miracle of Monarchs
We have seen very few Monarch butterflies in our backyard for the last two years, but that doesn’t mean they are not there. Caterpillars are showing up on our milkweeds, so it seems that they must be...
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Pawpaws, Mastodons and Zebras
Pawpaw leaves turn yellow in fall Snowed in today and dreaming of warmer times. A good time, it seems to me, to play more catch-up on the backlog of articles on the native plants we have in our yard....
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The Forest Unseen: A Book Review
Where backyards are concerned, size really doesn’t matter. Even a square meter can yield a world of insight. David Haskell’s wonderful award-winning book, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature...
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Going Native
A view from the front (with purple coneflowers and more). Our yard—front and back—is a curious place, located at a cultural and environmental crossroads. Depending on one’s point of view, our yard is...
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