After a long warm fall, the weather has finally cooled down. If you’ve been out visiting the last flowers in your garden you may have seen some of the last of the pollinators visiting them. Most likely they were bumble …
By now, most of us are concerned about the decline of bees and other pollinators. But there’s a myriad of bees that are not honeybees and many are great pollinators. They are native bees, or wild bees. There are some …
Here’s a nice little native plant whose flowers attract butterflies and bees and it starts blooming in mid-summer. Coyote mint (Monardella villosa) is native to much of California, mostly in foothill areas north of Los Angeles up to southern Oregon …
A flower I love to grow is bee balm (Monarda didyma). And my second most favorite variety of it is ‘Jacob Cline’, a brilliant red. Here in our area it blooms by the Fourth of July! And…it looks like a …
I’ve discovered a nice little native groundcover with some good benefits. Two years ago I moved into a new place. When I first looked at it, I saw a big, sunny, almost empty space that would be perfect for a …
Do You Know About This Wild, Native Fruit? There’s a wild fruit tree around here. It’s one of the earliest trees to bloom, usually starting in mid-February, and it’s a cheerful harbinger of spring. It grows in the more open, …
If you’re looking for flowering shrubs to add to your landscape that don’t take much water, won’t get eaten by deer, will feed the birds and the pollinators and is an attractive asset to your landscape…here’s one to get. This …
Violets are the only food of the fritillary butterfly caterpillar The fritillary butterfly lives its larval stage dining only on violets. The best food for the fritillary in our neck of the woods is the violets that evolved in our …
The largest butterfly reserve in America…and it’s plight The largest butterfly reserve in America is in Texas, at edge of the Rio Grande at the southern border. It’s an area that’s said to be one of the most biodiverse areas …
I first learned about incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens) long ago while working with Tree People, a tree planting environmental organization in southern California. One of our missions was to plant smog tolerant trees in the surrounding mountains. Among the list …