June 8th and 12th, 2019
Home of Connie and Jo Alwood
Saturday attendance: 43 members and 19 guests
Wednesday attendance: 29 members, 11 guests
Connie and Jo Alwood eagerly toured more than 100 members and guests through their Ferguson garden, woodland and prairie-style home. The goal for both Alwoods is to attract and support the birds they spend hours observing, photographing and filming.
Connie, a retired English teacher as well as an avid birder, told us of the conversion of their garden and woodland to natives since 2013.
An unexpected bonus for those gathered was a tour by Jo Alwood of their Prairie-style house from whose many windows the Alwoods have watched the 161 species of birds attracted to their native landscape. Their home, built in 1953, is open concept with rows and row of of windows, including clerestory windows. Natural materials are used throughout with built-in furniture typical of the Frank Lloyd Wright design philosophy. Jo is well known for her beautifully narrated and photographed videos of birds on her You Tube channel like, “How to attract Birds to Your Yard in Winter” and ” How Bees Sense Which Flowers Have Nectar”.
Until they retired in 1997 their yard was just a lawn and the woods was filled with honeysuckle. In 2000 they hired Frisellas Nursery to landscape the front and side yards. Afterwards they decided that the backyard also needed to be landscaped. As part of that effort, they had a local resident put in a small plot of native plants. Some of those plants still exist today. In 2002 they had a landscape designer draw up a plan. Within two years they had a fully landscaped backyard-but with mostly exotics.
From 2006 to 2013 they had six major storms, including the Good Friday tornado that damaged much of the airport in 2011. Although it did some damage in their yard-mostly uprooting a few trees, the tornado on May 31, 2013 did extensive damage to their yard and in the neighborhood. Residents of the subdivision estimated that 33% of all the trees were downed. They had two mature pin oaks and a one hundred foot tulip poplar so heavily damaged that they had to be removed.
Just before this tornado, Connie and Jo had been reading Douglas Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home. Tallamy said insects are drawn to natives, but seldom to exotics. Birds are drawn to insects. As a birder, Jo found Tallamy’s arguments compelling. After the tornado they only planted natives. The Tulip Poplar had provided shade for a host of exotic plants. Today that area of the garden is filled with native sunflowers, coneflowers, milkweed and black chokeberries. Since then they have removed numerous non-native shrubs and flower beds, replacing them with native plants. Most of this renovation was done in September, 2018 when Besa Schweitzer designed and helped them plant 200 native flowers. In 2017 they also had Landworks Inc. (in Florissant) install two water features-the running water has attracted 71 species of birds so far.
In their almost two acres of property, half is woods with a creek running through it with two natural springs. Until 2010 the woods was mainly bush honeysuckle and mature sycamores and even a pair of American elms. They were able to remove most of the honeysuckle, especially after they built a bridge across a ditch to allow them access to the rest of the woods. That area had been impenetrable with the horizontal limbs of bush honeysuckle as thick as a pro football player’s calves. Now the woods is filled with jewelweed, Missouri gooseberry, and pokeweed. The outer edge of the woods has a nice strand of elderberry. These last four plants were apparently gifts from the birds, as they didn’t plant any of them!
If you didn’t see this garden, you missed a very special place!
Submitted by Ginny Johnson
