News — native plants

Let the mint do its thing (part 377485 of “All-grass lawns are evil”) Americans spend $887 billion going camping and hiking and visiting national parks to view the beauty of nature, and then they go home and mow and spray and weed and fertilize and do everything they can to stop that nature from existing in their lawns and in their gardens.  Veronica Shukla. “For the Love of Mint in all its Spreading Glory.” The whole article at Think Outside the Lawn is worth reading for why to unlearn what you’ve been taught about the necessity of rigidly managing mint in your garden...

Urban Ecology Center takes lesser celandine, which is non-native to the U.S. and is now classified as a nasty invasive, as its case study in this blog post to illustrate why we should care about growing native plants and why we need to be so careful about growing non-native ones. I’ll just quote a bit of a summary paragraph, but you should read the whole post. So, we’ve got an aggressive plant with no natural predators to keep its population in check. This plant emerges sooner than native spring ephemerals, and therefore has the advantage of size when competing for space and...