It's tough to drive safely around here when summer gardens are at their peak! I'm sure other gardeners can relate to what I call garden rubbernecking, when you really ought to be watching the road but wow! did you see those dahlias!! and WHAT is that gorgeous tree? oooh! beautiful hanging baskets! Recently I've been carrying a camera on my travels, snapping photos of front-yard gardens and the colorful containers and window boxes that are in their full glory right now in the Worcester area. Here's a selection of some small urban gardens and container plantings that I consider habitat-friendly. In other words, they don't just look pretty, but their flowers, seeds and foliage supply food, shelter, structure and other resources to a variety of birds, beneficial insects and even amphibians that will visit an urban habitat.

First stop on my tour is downtown Spencer, where Appleblossoms has beautified its corner of Main and Mechanic St. for the past several years with these stunning window boxes.The flowering penta, impatiens and bacopa bring hummingbirds, butterflies and other pollinators right into the urban landscape, and the lush and colorful display must cheer many an early morning commuter along route 9:



Next stop is a side street just uphill from downtown, where I noticed this sidewalk retaining wall planted entirely with colorful hummingbird and butterfly-friendly annuals, including spider flower (Cleome) and blue and pink salvia:



I'm sure this garden attracts hordes of hummers all through the day. It certainly brings color and beauty to a once-elegant but now sadly neglected area of Spencer.

On to West Brookfield, where the historic town common features several large flowering containers worth a mention. This one is made up of scarlet runner bean vine (its orangey-red flowers are a hummingbird magnet) and bacopa (with tiny white flowers that bees love), plus other foliage plants that provide shelter and a resting place for tiny forms of wildlife through the summer:



I'm not sure who waters and maintains these containers, but their enormous size enables them to withstand drought much better than your average patio pot or window box, which in hot weather usually needs watering once or even twice per day. When it comes to containers, the larger the better, unless you use self-watering containers or automatic irrigation.

A few miles to the east in Worcester, here's a front-yard garden near Tatnuck Square where, instead of wasting an otherwise unused space on a bit of ailing lawn, the homeowners have filled the front with plants that flower right through the seasons, providing a small oasis of biodiversity smack in the middle of a busy city intersection:



Granted, this might be a little too 'naturalized' for some urban tastes, and the curb is overgrown with weedy, invasive stuff that most people don't want in their yards, but this garden certainly grabs the attention as you pass through, and might even encourage a ponder about the possibilities, and wasted opportunities, of the typical American front yard. There is probably more life per square foot in this garden than anywhere else in the city of Worcester!

Last but not least, I love this charming front-yard garden on a side street of Worcester's West Side. You can see that this little garden is lovingly tended, and with its colorful variety of shrubs and perennials, I'm sure it has something blooming right through the season. The hydrangea, pink garden phlox, purple coneflower, coreopsis are all great nectar plants to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and the dense shrubbery protects songbird nests from bad weather and predators.The annuals sweet alyssum, blue salvia and orange marigold fill in the gaps for an eye-popping show of refreshing color during the dog days of summer. I'd love to live across from this gardener's house!



So...my message is that you really don't need a lot of space to invite wildlife and nature into your lives. Whether you garden on a 1/4 acre or just a porch railing, you can bring the beauty and life-sustaining qualities of plants into the smallest of garden spaces. In the process, you'll be making your little patch of the earth a little healthier, prettier, and friendlier to all those who pass...

Good news from Turkey Hill Brook Farm! The monarch butterfly chrysalis shed its skin and finally metamorphosed into its adult butterfly form about a week after Herbert the caterpillar turned himself into a cocoon on August 8th:

I missed a few days of checking his progress on the milkweed plant, but on August 14th, you could clearly see the orange and black markings forming on the butterfly's wings inside the chrysalis:



I never saw the adult butterfly emerge, but on the evening of the 16th, I checked the leaf and Herbert was gone, and all I could see of this amazing metamorphosis was his tattered skin, showing that he had emerged and flown away!



I've seen some fresh-looking monarch butterflies flying around our butterfly gardens this week, so I'm hoping that Herbert is one of them and hasn't already been eaten by a hungry bird or other predator. As for whether he is male or female, I'll never know, but a recent garden visitor pointed out a tiny monarch butterfly caterpillar about 1/2" long and perhaps 3mm wide dining on a leaf of the same milkweed plant where Herbert did his changeover. Could Herbert have used the same plant to lay her eggs? If so, she might need a name change...maybe Hebe?

Since then, I haven't seen the second caterpillar again, so it could have been parasitized by a tiny predatorial wasp that uses the bodies of caterpillars as a host to lay their eggs, which then hatch and begin feeding on the caterpillar from the inside out. Kind of gruesome, I know, but nature isn't always pretty, and the predator/prey relationship is what keeps nature in balance. Without parasitic wasps to keep monarch caterpillar populations in check, the cats would probably eat their own milkweed food plant right out of existence. And no milkweeds? No monarchs!

My hubby tells me that there are thousands of readers waiting on the edge of their seats for the next update of Herbert the Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar ...is he being sarcastic, I wonder? Anyway, the good news is that Herbert is alive and well and living in chrysalis form near our wildlife pond. I moved him out of the container onto a milkweed plant outdoors because we were going away for a few days and I didn't think Herbert would travel well. Here are a couple of pics of his transformation.

Here he has fixed himself with a tiny silken thread to the bottom of a leaf and formed the shape of a "J", beginning the process of shedding his caterpillar (larval) skin and turning into a chrysalis (this is called pupating):



Two days later, he had morphed into a chrysalis, which is a cocoon from which the adult monarch butterfly will eventually emerge after about 10-14 days (if all goes well).



Hard to believe that this strange alien-looking life form with glowing yellow and black dots will turn into a gorgeous butterfly!

Stay tuned for Herbert updates! In the meantime, I am seeing more fresh-looking (ie newly hatched) adult monarch butterflies flying around our butterfly gardens, so things may be looking up for this year's southward migration from New England to Mexico!

Meet Herbert, a Monarch butterfly caterpillar that I noticed last night in a bucket of garden trimmings headed to the compost pile. He looked feeble from being separated from his milkweed foliage, which is the only thing he can eat. I'm pretty sure he was a victim of over-zealous weeding on the outskirts of our veggie gardens, where milkweed pops up here and there, so I decided to try to save him by putting him in a "bug viewer" with some fresh milkweed leaves as a food source. This morning, he'd revived, and was actively feeding on the foliage:



Usually I wouldn't go to this much trouble to save a single caterpillar, but the Monarch butterfly species is under great threat. Devastating mudslides in the monarch's Mexican winter habitat this past year wiped out large numbers of migrants, and it remains to be seen whether their populations can rebound from these losses. In my central Massachusetts garden, which is certified as a Monarch Waystation, I have only seen 2 adult monarch butterflies all summer, and just the one caterpillar (Herbert!) so far. Usually we see them flying here by the dozen. I am anxiously watching this year's statistics from citizen scientists on how populations have fared this summer. Hopefully enough gardeners will have planted milkweed along their migration routes, because clearly these guys need all the help they can get if they have any hope of avoiding extinction.

I often hear from people who raised monarch butterfly caterpillars as children as part of their school curriculum, but this is my first attempt to hand-rear a monarch. What I do know, from observations in my own garden (where we grow 4 types of milkweed ), is that monarch caterpillars are usually found on fresh, new milkweed foliage, so I'll be picking fresh leaves every day or two to ensure that Herbert has what he needs to morph into his next phase of life, the chrysalis from which a butterfly will hopefully emerge...

Since he is over an inch long already, and monarch caterpillars usually start to shed their skin and pupate at about 2" in length,  I'll try to update my blog as Herbert's transformation into a butterfly continues...

Dark colored foliage is something of a rarity in the roster of plants native to New England, so I'm always interested in trying out any native plant cultivars that I find with with burgundy or dark leaves. I love the contrasting color that dark foliage brings to any style garden, so over the past several years, I've been trying out two cultivars of the native shrub Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) in my central Massachusetts habitat garden.

In three words: I love 'em! 

Their white snowball-like flowers are in bloom now, and have been attracting lots of swallowtail and red admiral butterflies. Below is the cultivar 'Diablo' (aka 'Diabolo'), which I picked up as a 2-gallon container plant at Lamoureux Greenhouses in Brookfield, MA (worth a trip for their tremendous selection, huge water garden displays, their quirky but cool fence made of old bicycles, and lots of other interesting stuff...) As you can see, in our rich, moist, pondside location, Diablo is deliriously happy and has grown to 12' with a spread of 20'  in five years...




Unfortunately, this sized shrub may be a little too large for most garden situations, although in my experience, drier soils definitely temper Diablo's exuberance and size. Pruning for shape is not recommended for ninebarks, because part of the attraction of this shrub is its long arching stems covered in white flowers.

The good news is that a newer cultivar, 'Midnight Wine', grows to a much more manageable height for garden use: (these are a little past their peak bloom)



I bought these two Midnight Wine ninebarks as small shrubs from Bluestone Perennials 3 or 4 years ago, and they seem to be topping out at a much more controllable 3-4 feet. They enjoy the same garden conditions as their native sedge companions, which is moist soil in a mostly sunny location.

Unfortunately I've had had trouble locating this cultivar recently for my clients, so if anybody knows of a source of Midnight Wine (or a similar short ninebark cultivar), please let me know!

For butterfly gardeners, ninebark is proving to be a decent host plant for several caterpillar species in my garden. Last fall, I noticed caterpillars pupating on ninebark leaves (below), which they were rolling together over themselves to form a wintertime shelter. As the leaves fell, these little cocoons fell to the ground where they hibernated til spring. Research revealed the identity of these cats as the tufted thyatirid (Pseudothyatira cymatophoroides), a type of moth native to New England's woodlands. They look like cutworms, but they are not known to be destructive to garden plants. It's always fun to put a name to the new species of wildlife we discover, and it's always encouraging to watch biodiversity on the increase in our backyard habitat.

I hear it all the time. "Should I pull this plant? I'm not sure if I like it..."  The answer usually is....it depends. I have some clients who are passionate about restoring their landscape with native plants in order to help rebuild lost or damaged local ecosystems. For them, the answer is easy. If it's not native, yes, pull it up and replace with a native plant. But what if your property already has many nice (and expensive) landscape plants and you're not sure whether they're worth keeping? As a habitat gardener, you can decide whether to keep or remove a plant by answering a few key questions:

- is it listed as an invasive plant in Massachusetts? If yes, definitely remove it to make room for native plants, who may be capable of recolonizing the area. Or, replace it with a native plant suitable for your garden conditions. Invasive non-native plants are a major threat to biodiversity and environmental health. Even if you don't see a plant behaving aggressively in your own yard, many invasive plants are spread by birds eating their berries or seeds and pooping them into nearby natural areas, where they quickly form colonies that crowd out the native plants essential to local wildlife. See IPANE (Invasive Plants of New England) for the plants that are invasive in New England.

- is it healthy without needing fertilization or regular watering? If so, it's well suited to the spot it's in and won't need your constant fussing to keep it looking good.

-Does it attract birds, butterflies or any other forms of wildlife? Do its flowers provide nectar and pollen for butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and other pollinators to use as a food source? Does it form nutritious berries, seeds, nuts or cones that are an important food source for many birds? Does the plant's foliage feed caterpillars and other insects that most birds rely upon to feed their young? Does its structure and foliage provide shelter, protection and nesting sites for many birds and other wildlife?

If the plant supplies at least 2 or 3 of these last few attributes, it is wildlife-friendly and you should probably keep it. Its presence supports declining populations of birds and pollinators who help keep our environment in balance.

On our property, we have several areas planted with Cotoneaster, (right) which is a low shrub often used as a groundcover planting in New England lanscapes. It's not native here, and it's not what I would call a spectacular plant, but I have never considered removing it because it has its benefits...it thrives along a brick walkway in dry, hot blazing sun without any care or attention from us except for a bit of occasional weeding. Its dense twiggy branching structure, especially when it's pruned, is a safe place for overwintering songbirds to dive into when they visit our winter bird feeders. Its tiny pink flowers are a magnet to spring pollinators, who are in turn an abundant food source for migrating birds newly arrived from the south. In the fall, pollinated cotoneaster flowers form large red berries, which although I have never seen birds eating them, the berries persist right through winter and disappear in about March, so some hungry creature is eating them when food is scarce!

For a foundation or walkway planting, you can prune cotoneaster into an attractive low hedge that satisfies even the most formal-style gardeners. My own hubby, who loves a crisp, clean Zen-garden style of landscaping, that often - um - clashes with my own more natural style of gardening, loves our cotoneaster hedge because it gives him that controlled look he craves while satisfying my requirement that a plant in such a visible location should not just look good, but also support the wildlife we invite into our backyard habitat.

Good news for gardeners! Yesterday's full moon, on the last day of February, means that spring is in sight! New England's native Americans, who had a name for each full moon as a way of tracking the calendar, called February's full moon the Snow, or Hunger Moon. This time of year, food must have been tough to come by when you depend upon your natural surroundings to survive.

It's also the toughest time of year for the birds that spend winters in New England. Many seed plants are buried under snow, and the tastiest berries were eaten months ago from the winterberry hollies, dogwoods and wild cherries. Insect populations are at their lowest, making it tough for woodpeckers and other insectivores to keep themselves going til the bugs of spring start to arrive.

Remember this time of year when you plan your gardens. Some shrubs have berries that taste awful until they have been through a few freeze and thaw cycles, meaning that birds won't eat them unless they are starving. My Virginia Rose still has most of its berries (hips), but in the past few snowy weeks, I have finally seen birds picking at them. In some years, birds don't touch our flowering crabapples until late winter, when the cardinals or early arriving cedar waxwings pick them clean. Strangely, in some years these berries disappear well before Christmas...



And try to keep as many of your seed plants standing into winter as you can, instead of hacking your perennial beds to the ground in the fall. Especially if you live in an urban area with few natural food sources, your garden's seed heads poking out of the snow might mean the difference between life or death for some of our hungry feathered friends!


Above is a northern junco picking at the seed heads of Agastache foeniculum during a snowstorm. Juncos breed in northern New England and Canada during the summer, but they migrate south to New England to spend the winter! They are cute but tough little birds that rely on the seeds of goldenrod, asters and other native flowering plants to keep them fed all winter.

So look around your yard and ask yourself. Do your local birds have natural food sources to keep them going during the Hunger Moon? Feeders are great for supplementing natural food sources, but they often attract the "wrong kind of birds" and squirrels, and keeping them stocked can get expensive. Invest in some bird-friendly plants and shrubs, and you'll feed birds, for free, for years to come.

Despite a few days above freezing this week, most of our central MA farm is still under a thick blanket of snow. As I look out my front window, I can see the farm across the valley from us, completely free of snow. Why is that? It's all about topography and the angle of the sun as it moves across the sky. Our farm is perched low on the north-facing slope of a river valley. The low angle of the winter sun passing across the southern sky means that this time of year, many areas are in the shade for most of the day. Cooler air also settles at the bottom of the valley, keeping temperatures a few degrees lower than the rest of town. The farm across the valley is on a south-facing slope, and their fields are perfectly positioned to capture the sun's heat all day, melting their snow more quickly. It's no surprise that apples were once grown on that side of the valley, but not on this side. It's too cold!

Melting snow can tell us a lot about our garden conditions. Watch where the snow melts first in your yard in the spring, and you'll learn where the warmer microclimates are. Use them  to your advantage to grow heat and sun-loving plants such as tomatoes and flowering plants that will sulk in a colder spot.

The back wall of our garage faces south, trapping the sun's heat on sunny days and releasing it slowly overnight. The wall also protects plants from cold north winds, keeping the area quite warm and sheltered. This is the only area of my garden where I can grow Mediterranean herbs that need hot, blazing sun to thrive. A mulch of pea-stone gravel also absorbs the heat, warming the ground faster in spring and helping the crowns of plants from rotting in my high-moisture soil.

So watch the snow as it melts in your gardens, and figure out your garden hot spots!

If you're a New England gardener looking for a large-impact shade perennial that blooms in early summer, you can't go wrong with Goat's Beard (Aruncus dioicus). Perfect for a partly-shaded woodland edge, its creamy white flowers are especially striking contrasted with a darker background:


Native to the rich woods of Pennsylvania southward, Goat's Beard grows quickly in spring from a woody crown, with flowering stems that can reach 6' in moist soil. Flowering in late June in my zone 5b central Massachusetts garden, Goat's Beard seems to do best with about half a day of morning sunshine. It usually takes a few years to get established, but once mature, it fills a good size area, so give it plenty of room.

Don't confuse the native Goat's Beard to the commonly planted Astilbe, which is also sometimes called Goatsbeard. Astilbe is much shorter than the native Aruncus, growing only about 2'.

Goat's Beard is a good plant for New England habitat gardens...its flowers are an absolute magnet to hordes of beneficial pollinating insects, and its long seed tassels persist well into winter. Don't these winter seed stems look like a nice meal for birds?


Aruncus dioicus is dioecious, which means that there are male and female plants.  Only the female plants produce the seed heads, and their flowers are slightly showier than the males, so plant several Goat's Beard at a time to ensure that you have at least one female plant. Even if you are lucky enough to find this plant for sale in a nursery, you'll probably get some blank stares if you ask what sex they are! In central MA, this plant is available at Bigelow Nurseries in Northborough as well as Garden in the Woods in Framingham.

What are you doing this weekend? Can you spare a few minutes of bird watching to help scientists understand our wild birds better? Be a citizen scientist and contribute data about the winter bird populations in your region of the United States. Scientists use the information to learn how birds are adapting to environmental changes, and to answer puzzling questions about why bird populations fluctuate in areas from year to year.

Here's all you need to do. Simply make a note (and number) of the birds you see this weekend between February 12th and 15th. Enter your results online on the form at the Great Backyard Bird Count  website. You have until March 1st to enter your results.

For a list of birds you are most likely to see in your region, click here for a checklist. If you need help identifying the birds you see in your yard, use visit the Online Bird Guide.

Here's a shot of one of our winter bird gardens from last January. Look carefully and you can spot at least 3 birds in this photo:




So, look out your windows this weekend at the trees, and write down which birds you see. Even better, take a hike in the woods with a  digital camera and a field guide to birds. Log your tallies online, andsubmit your best photos to the Photo Gallery. And, don't forget to check the GBBC results page later to see which birds your neighbors also saw!