Create Wildlife Habitat. Protect the Environment
Humans are blessed with the capacity to learn from situations, assess the consequences, and alter our behavior in the future. We can learn from our mistakes. Unfortunately, when it comes to the environment, we rarely exercise that capacity (Can we say Oil Spill?). We have refused to learn from our mistakes way too many times [...]
Guest post by Michele S. Byers, Executive Director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation [Editor's note: this article originally appeared in the NJ Conservation Foundation newsletter. I am very grateful for their permission to reprint it here, because it fits so nicely into our "Most Hated Plants" feature]. Mother Nature can be a capricious mistress. In [...]
Invasive Chinese and Japanese Wisteria Chinese Wisteria (Wisteria sinensis) and it’s relative Japanese Wisteria (Wisteria foribunda) are landing squarely on the Most Hated Invasive Plants list. One of my neighbors across the street has this plant in his yard. Not only is it pulling down the arbor in his yard, it is spreading its runners [...]
I’d like to dedicate this post to my blogging friend, Carol at Flower Hill Farm, for her long-suffering with this invasive plant, her nemesis, Bishop Weed, also known as Goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria). But first, a disclaimer. I call this ongoing series “Most Hated Plants,” but some have taken issue with “hating” poor defenseless plants. Most [...]
The Most Hated Plants series is devoted to the worst of the worst invasive plants. These plants are causing great ecological harm and habitat devastation for wildlife, plus the cost of managing these plants is billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year. Knowing these plants will help you make much healthier decisions for your [...]
Winter is over, now it’s time for the native spring ephemeral wildflowers, those that grow, flower, and reproduce before the woodland trees leaf out. But, thanks to some of the worst of the most hated plants, some invasive plants prevent this from happening. One of these is Ranunculus ficaria (Lesser Celandine, Fig Buttercup). Now, you [...]
So you’ve decided that you want to help wildlife in your garden. Congratulations! You didn’t remember to read How to choose the best plants for your wildlife garden. Oops! You head over to your local bookstore and find several books about wildlife gardening and you pick the one that is filled with beautiful photographs and [...]
By now you all must know that I have a problem with the continued planting and sale of invasive plants, which destroy native habitat and reduce wildlife biodiversity. I tend to rant a little (understatement, of course) because if we stopped the sale of these plants and stopped putting them in our gardens, we would [...]
Think those ivy-covered towers are pretty? Unfortunately, English Ivy (Hedera helix) is one of the most pernicious, nasty, and destructive of the invasive plants because it not only destroys native habitat, it can also destroy your house. That is why I’ve added English Ivy to the Most Hated Plants list. We can thank some very [...]
We are accumulating a library of the “most hated” invasive plants, which we regularly update. Removal and control of invasive species costs taxpayers more than 32 billion every year. Many of these plants were introduced for sale by the horticultural and landscaping industry to satisfy a seemingly insatiable desire to have the most exotic plants [...]
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