Today’s Friday Film features an inside look at the New Wild Garden from the 2011 Chelsea RHS Flower Show designed by Nigel Dunnett filmed by Dusty Gedge. The garden features a great many elements for wildlife including a stone wall for habitat with built-in insect shelters as well as an insect wall for solitary bees and [...]
This is an excerpt from my latest post at the Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens blog. Click the link below to visit the full post. Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest It seems that any time I talk with somebody about landscaping for wildlife or make a book recommendation, this is the first one [...]
There are over 3 million gardens in Greater London which offer an ‘untapped potential’ to make the city more resilient to climate change and better for wildlife, according to the London Wildlife Trust. How do we begin to exploit this potential? According to LWT’s expert gardener Elaine Hughes, gardeners should be a ‘bit less tidy’. This [...]
You would never know that Common Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) is not a native plant of North America considering how abundant it is in certain regions like the Pacific Northwest. This flower was introduced from Europe and is found in gardens, and has naturalized to spread to roadsides, fields, forest edges and other disturbed sites around the [...]
Wildlife habitat certification is offered through many organizations as a way of creating, improving and monitoring wildlife habitats both nationally and regionally. They also come in a variety of settings from backyards to commercial sites to golf courses and entire communities. Some programs offer incentives and assistance while others offer tips and advice and yet [...]
Readers may or may not realize that there are hundreds of design resources here on The Metropolitan Field Guide. On top of this website is a drop-down menu titled ‘Design Resources’ where you’ll find documents for designing butterfly, bird, bat and other wildlife species habitat categorized by species as well as region. You’ll also find [...]
While you may not always associate succulents with cool, temperate climates, the Pacific Northwest has several native sedums which live and thrive in exactly those conditions. The Broad-leaved stonecrop (Sedum spathulifolium) is one of those succulents which grows only on the West Coast from British Columbia to California. It can be found at low elevations [...]
The pink, heart-shaped flowers of this plant define the pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa). While the flowers are not as showy as some of the popular ornamental varieties, the plant as a whole is still beautiful and offers great benefits to a variety of wildlife. Growing 8-18″ high, the plant is a perennial which dies [...]
Dense thickets of Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) are a common sight to anyone hiking through the Pacific Northwest. It’s often found alongside creeks or in ravines growing up to 12 feet tall. Salmonberry can be found along the Pacific Coast from Alaska down to the Santa Cruz Mountains, most commonly along the coastal ranges. It grows [...]
The California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) is an unmistakable bright splash found everywhere from roadsides and traffic circles to rocky slopes and vineyards. In fact early visitors by ship along the California coastline saw the sun hitting the fields of poppies and declared this was a land on fire. It’s native to the west coast of [...]
The 11th annual Tukwila Backyard Wildlife Festival took place last weekend in Tukwila, Washington. Tukwila has the distinction of being the first community in the state of Washington, and only the fourth in the nation, to become certified by the National Wildlife Federation as Community Wildlife Habitat. In addition to yards, all of Tukwila’s schools were [...]
There are certain plants that are distinctly Pacific Northwest such as the iconic Douglas Fir tree, noticeable for it’s looming forest presence, the Oregon-grape, known for its bright-yellow flowers, and Snowberry, easy to spot because of its white berries. There is one Pacific Northwest perennial plant easily noticeable from a distance, not by its flowers or [...]