Natural gardening and garden visits

I enjoy encouraging the folks in programs that I do to think about gardening for nature and creating a natural garden. 

A Master Naturalist/Master Gardener friend in the Low Country of South Carolina calls her similar program  'Gardening as if life mattered.' It's a much more powerful title, and compelling. Her journey as a gardener,  from understanding how to develop spectacular perennial borders to creating a sanctuary garden (as a survivor of a life-challenging illness) to wildlife gardener is inspirational.

We can all plant more plants 'that matter' -- that is, plants that work for a living, wherever we live in the world. 

It's a joy to have plants whose flowers are visited by butterflies and bees, whose leaves are eaten by caterpillars, and whose fruits are enjoyed by birds, mammals, and others.

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Attracting wildlife (bears! oh my!)

Normally, I think of encouraging toads, woodpeckers, box turtles, chipmunks, dragonflies, butterflies, and owls as a desirable consequence of creating wildlife habitat in our gardens.

Seed-eating birds of all sorts enjoy visiting feeders, of course, and hummingbirds readily slurp up sugar water. There are plenty of adaptable critters, too, that are well-suited to suburban life and can be pesky (think skunks, opossums, and squirrels).

Much to our surprise, though, just before lunch, an unexpected visitor discovered the black oil sunflower seed feeder outside our small house in the mountains.

It didn't take long for this young Eastern black bear to bend down the feeder pole (I should have bought the cast iron one, not the aluminum one) and deftly help himself (probably 'him' not 'her') to the entire contents of the feeder, mouthful by mouthful.

There is a heavily wooded ravine below, but we're at the highest point, and there's not much of an obvious wildlife corridor from there down that would seem to support a foraging young bear.

And even though we're in the mountains, we're also within walking distance of downtown Asheville, hardly bear habitat, I'd think.

But calling to check, the City's philosophy is to take down feeders (at least temporarily), secure garbage cans, clean grills, etc. Quite reasonable, I thought. I never imagined that a 'city' (to us) bird feeder might attract (even a young and hungry) bear.

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Wildlife and subdivisions

I checked on the neighborhood without wildlife this afternoon. The gray skies don't do very much for the neighborhood, which is a typical small subdivision, with neat, well-kept houses.

As I thought, it IS a relatively new development, carved out within older areas of a small historic town nearby, a summer retreat in the 1800's for wealthy planters from the Lowcountry of South Carolina, before becoming a district center for the surrounding area.

There are large oaks and young beeches near the entrance, but otherwise, it's new surburban landscape style, with small lots, manicured lawns, and the same three or four trees and shrubs used over and over.

And the rest of the story is evident from the satellite view; the large area cleared for the subdivision doesn't have enough habitat diversity to support much wildlife activity.


It's a perfect candidate for a community backyard wildlife habitat makeover, to be sure, since the neighborhood is surrounded by older areas with tall native trees and more diverse habitats!

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Where's the wildlife?

I've been thinking on and off today about a question that a nature walk participant asked yesterday.

He wondered why there wasn't any 'wildlife' in his small town (a historic town right next to ours). The rest of us looked at him rather blankly; the walk leader had just been telling us about seeing a bobcat near his house in another small rural town nearby, and talking about the wild boar (aka feral hog) he would be roasting later on that day, which one of his neighbors had shot after it had attacked a number of cows. Aside from these quite 'wild' examples, many of us have plenty of squirrels, birds, mice, racoons, etc. in relatively woodsy neighborhoods, where mature oaks, hickories, and conifers make up the fabric of the landscape.

The questioner went on to say that he saw more wildlife around his former suburban home in Chicago than he did around his house in Pendleton. So where was the wildlife, he asked again?

Another participant (new to the area, too) joked about how the people around here shoot wildlife, suggesting that accounted for it, which didn't strike me as very enlightened; we are in the Southern U.S., where hunting is certainly a strong tradition, but there are hardly people out roaming the yards and gardens of our university town or towns nearby looking for their next squirrel to put in the pot.

Having never noticed any particular lack of wildlife in Pendleton myself, or lack of suitable habitat, I asked him where he lived exactly. He replied with a name of one of the newish sub-divisions with a historic name.

I'm not that familiar with it, but the name provided a clue. I think it's one of those developments that was laid out on a largely cleared landscape and now is filled with houses rimmed with lawns and standard landscape choices, most of which aren't very sustaining to wildlife.

I'll have to go by and see if I'm right. An addendum: here's the follow-up post.

Certainly, we didn't have much wildlife in our immediate landscape when we moved in. Lawn and a few big trees wasn't much habitat diversity (the sidebar photos bear this out and the web gallery version of a wildlife-friendly garden talk illustrates it, too), and a whole neighborhood like that would be akin to a desert for self-respecting Piedmont animals with any ability to go elsewhere. But after adding hundreds of native and a few non-native plants, creating layers with native trees and shrubs, and diversifying habitat, we certainly have a diversity of wildlife to enjoy now. Even the woodchucks....

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A gray fox in the morning

Early this morning, I was walking up to my office and saw an unusual thing -- a very furry animal rolling around vigorously and looking like a dog in the grass scratching his back. Initially, I thought that's one BIG squirrel, but it looked to be the size of a large cat, certainly not a squirrel. Nor are woodchucks so furry.

As I got closer, as the animal saw me, sat up, and looked at me, I recognized it as a fox. It watched me for a few moments before disappearing into the shrub border. One of my paleontologist colleagues saw it a bit later, and identified it as a gray fox - he wrote "saw a Urocyon cinereoargenteus (gray fox) in front of the museum around 9 this morning. Thought it was a big, lean cat at first, but we stared down each other for a minute and I got a good look at it. It tried to run into the museum but hit the glass door – didn’t seem to be phased and took off over to the head frame and hopped the 3ft. wall…"

I always wish I had my camera at such moments, but here's a nice photo from a Maryland DNR Habichat newsletter.

Gray foxes live mostly in deciduous woodland areas (such as our forested areas), and eat quite a varied diet -- small rodents, rabbits, and insects, in addition to a variety of fruits and seeds.

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Basking turtles

Another fun thing to observe in the Garden's pond are the turtles. (I have my own wildlife garden, but the botanical garden where I work is almost 300 acres, so it's a really big wildlife garden!)

We have several species of turtles that live in the pond, with one of the most common being pond sliders. I've counted up to twenty basking on the pine logs adjacent to the Duck Pond. They take advantage of sunny spots to warm up on cool days.

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