From our president, Marsha Gebhardt:
Here is Part Two of our member Jo Alwood’s video series The Importance of Putting in Native Plants. The title of this one is What You Need to Know About Native Plant Gardening. This beautiful and informative 15-minute video has more specific native plant information along with how those plants help support various bugs and birds. She also shows examples of how to use natives in more formal landscaping.
Jo shared her series with Doug Tallamy, who is considering posting it on his website. In addition to acknowledging Tallamy’s book(s), she calls out Wild Ones as a key resource, if people are lucky enough to have a chapter in their community.
Thank you Jo, for this great addition to the education and motivation of native landscaping homeowners everywhere. Jo also mentioned that Cori Westcott was very helpful in finishing this video.
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.
Video Part 1 can be found here
Video Part 2 can be found here
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.
