Guest post by Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon Shows Off Her Wildlife Garden
I moved into my boyfriend’s rural North Carolina home in 2008, and found myself with both the best and the worst conditions for wildlife gardening. The lot was 2.5 acres, much of it heavily wooded, and my boyfriend’s policy of benevolent neglect had left standing woodpecker snags and piles of brush, a lawn full of clover and blue-eyed grass, and a healthy wildlife population from tiny cricket frogs to enormous pileated woodpeckers. Unfortunately, the areas the developer had scraped and leveled to put in the house were nothing but red clay, and the woods were overrun with Japanese honeysuckle, autumn olive, and stiltgrass.
Knowing very little about gardening in the Southeast–my family garden was in Oregon, which is a wildly different climate, and not having gardened much on my own in any event–I rolled up my sleeves, plunked a large island bed in the middle of the lawn, and proceeded to plant one of just about everything.
A year later, through trial and error (and error and error…) I have a marginally better idea of what lives and what dies. (Apparently I don’t have to xeriscape here. Actually, I have to plant bog plants. If it needs good drainage, it needs to live somewhere else. This place is WET.) I’ve expanded the bed and put in a prairie planting on a dry clay hillside, killed enough honeysuckle to perfume a battleship, and started the laborious process of digging a frog pond in the backyard.
A couple more years, and I might actually get the hang of this…
The bee in the photo is on anise hyssop, a North American prairie native that, while not native to my neck of the woods, has done well in my garden and is absolutely beloved by pollinators.
I’m a children’s book author and illustrator, I live in North Carolina…err. I have cats. (I never know what people want to know in these things…) And I blog at Red Wombat Studio.
Show Off YOUR Wildlife Garden
[Note: Guest post by Ursula Vernon. This is the first in a series from "Show off Your Wildlife Garden” Your garden could be next. We’d really love to see what you’ve got. So head on over and submit your favorite wildlife garden photo:
Show Off Your Wildlife Garden
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About Carole Sevilla Brown
Ursula – thanks for sharing your gardens. Red clay and swampy is pretty challenging garden conditions for sure! Benevolent neglect, that is a great way of describing a style of gardening that’s often favorable to birds and pollinators…
The anise hyssop looks very similar to something I grow here in New England, which is Korean mint (Agastache foeniculum) which I call bee sticks because the pollinators love them so much….:-)
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