By Bill Brighoff Last spring, a lawn care salesman came to my door and told me I had weeds in my yard, particularly white clover. I told him that I had planted the white clover in my yard, and how could it be a weed if I had purchased the seeds at a feed…
From the Missouri Prairie Journal, Spring 2011, Volume 12, Number 1 (copied with permission) The amount of canopy cover and degree of soil development are key to determining the plant composition of each of these distinct natural communities. Glades, prairies, savannas, and woodlands are distinct natural communities, but share a great deal of the same ground flora. Differences…
UMSL Daily Tuesday, October 18, 2011 A team of UMSL students and faculty members and volunteers from the St. Louis community plant prairie plants on South Campus. A team of University of Missouri–St. Louis students and faculty members recently planted a prairie garden that was meant to be more than a sprucing up of South Campus….
Science Daily (Oct. 7, 2011) www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111007073214.htm Cultivars of popular ornamental woody plants that are being sold in the United States as non-invasive are probably anything but, according to an analysis by botanical researchers published in the October issue of BioScience. Tiffany M. Knight of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and her coauthors at the Chicago Botanic…
From The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation Whether you wake to find mist hanging in damp hollows, snow draping the last of your tomato vines, or sunshine glinting off a warm sea, there is one thing that unites us all this month: pumpkins. With Halloween quickly followed by Thanksgiving, pumpkins seem to define this season….
Which of the following statements are false? Spiders are insects. “Arachnid” is just a fancy name for spider. You can always tell a spider because it has eight legs. All spiders make webs. The orb web (round or “geometric” web) is a “normal” spider web. A “daddy-longlegs” is a kind…
When deer are very hungry they will eat almost anything, but during the growing season they usually have lots of options. That being the case, they often eat what they like best. Following is a list of trees, shrubs, perennial flowers, and annual flowers used by North Dakota gardeners. They are grouped according to…
by Margy Terpstra In 1996, we were close to becoming empty nesters that had run out of projects, and had that itch to find a home with a bigger lot and more trees. We began searching. As soon as we walked through this house and onto the deck, I turned…
by Cynthia Berger Published in National Wildlife, April/May 2002 When her kids went off to college, Kathy Biggs got rid of her backyard swimming pool. But her Sebastopol, California yard still buzzes with activity on warm summer afternoons, because Kathy replaced the pool with a dragonfly pond. Now, instead of kids…
Condensed from: Science Daily (Aug. 22, 2011) Biologist Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., fell in love with the eastern collared lizard that lives in the hot, dry Ozark glades when he was 13. By the time he returned from graduate and postgraduate work, 75 percent of the lizard populations had vanished….
