Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guide
Author Janet Marinelli makes the case right up front: "I've read a lot of wildlife gardening books over the years, and they are all big on generalities ... but distressingly short on useful specifics. That's why I wrote this book," she says.
In The Wildlife Gardener's Guide (Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2008), Marinelli gives you detailed instructions on how to attract birds, bees, butterflies, and beneficial insects into your garden. In the chapter on bird gardens, she lets us know that in the eastern part of the country, at least 300 trees, shrubs, and vines are dependent on birds to pollinate the plants and disperse their seeds.
Helpful plant lists are included for each region of the country -- plants that will attract birds, bees, moths, bats, hummingbirds,and more.
One of my favorite chapters in this book is on Stopover Gardens for Migrating Songbirds. And these kinds of gardens are more necessary than ever, since developers have destroyed so much of their important habitat, all in the name of more shopping and unnecessary consumption. Marinelli points out that the US Fish and Wildlife Service now estimates 12 percent of neo-tropical songbird species are in peril, and the population of another 68 percent is on the decline. So we all need to do whatever we can to create hedgerow habitats for migrating birds. One example Marinelli outlines uses black and white oaks as the canopy, filled in underneath with flowering dogwoods, elderberry, chokeberry, sassafras, native honeysuckle, arrowwood and wildflowers.
Other chapters lead you through the process of establishing an evergreen refuge for birds, building flower borders to attract wildlife, container gardening and water for wildlife, and how to build birdhouses for six birds that have suffered significant declines in population.
If you don't have this book already, you definitely need to buy it.
(click on image to purchase book through Amazon).
Thank you for recommending this book. I'd like to make our yard a haven for birds and butterflies. I hope there are some ideas for keeping the safe from Dog.
Posted by: Lee | February 28, 2008 at 06:08 PM