From our president, Marsha Gebhardt:
Wild Ones St. Louis followers are sure to enjoy and learn from the new two-part video series by our member Jo Alwood. This latest series on her YouTube channel focuses on the importance of native plants and insects in the food chain. Her videos show the striking contrast between native and non-native plants and the amount of life they support.
Jo is a local photographer and videographer who presented at our Winter Speaker Series in 2018. She has made more than 100 short movies on the routines and habits of critters in and around the native plant gardens and woodlands developed by her avid birder husband Connie. Besa Schweitzer designed and helped plant 200 natives for them in 2018. Many of us were fortunate enough to enjoy those habitats during our June 2019 Gatherings.
How I Learned to Appreciate Vanilla Wafers
by Jo Alwood
When a tornado ripped apart my husband’s garden in 2013, the bad news, of course, was that his garden was virtually destroyed; the good news was that … his garden was virtually destroyed.
The reason I call it good news is that he had been reading Bringing Nature Home, and he figured: what better time to put Tallamy’s advice into practice? Not having read the book myself, I didn’t understand at first why he chose what I saw as some real duds—like replacing our flamboyant ornamental grasses with Prairie Dropseed. Far as I was concerned, he had snatched a warm chocolate chip cookie out of my hand and replaced it with a vanilla wafer.
By 2019 I had come not only to understand my husband’s choices but to appreciate them. So last summer I began collecting film of his native plants and the insects on them. The blooms of Joe Pye Weed, Liatris, and Slender Mountain Mint are miniature zoos that we giants usually lumber past. But when I put those tiny critters under the macro lens of a camcorder, I discovered that their freaky deaky, buzzy bongo, creepy crawly antics were intriguing. By that time, of course, I understood that their entertainment value wasn’t even the point.
The point is that they are the crucial link in the food chain: they pollinate plants and, just as important, they eat plants. When they are eaten in turn, the sun’s energy that they gathered from those plants is passed up the food chain. So life on this planet could survive quite well without us humans, thank you very much. It’s those lowly, pesky bugs that matter. And we had better start feeding them what they can eat: Prairie Dropseed instead of ornamental grasses, Rose Verbena instead of hydrangea cultivars, and native oaks instead of Japanese Maples.
So I spent a second summer gathering footage for a two part series about the importance of putting in native plants.
Part one of that series explains the crucial importance of changing suburban attitudes about the habitat we create on our properties. Because of all the close-ups of insects at work, the film is visually compelling. It posted on my YouTube channel August 25th. The name of the channel is
Jo Alwood. Part two briefly recaps the importance of native plants and concentrates on offering suggestions about which ones to choose. It may seem a tad hypocritical of me to offer gardening advice since I am no gardener, but I had my husband’s example to guide me, and it seemed like a video project worth tackling.
I wish all my neighbors would watch this video.