Grow Like Wild #3: Beaver’s Moon

Beaver’s Moon Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

Happy belated Beaver’s Moon. It was a big month! A pair of podcast interviews (one and two) that I did with Growing a Greener World host Joe Lamp’l were published and honestly, they’re great. We got to dig deeply into topics that I usually just hit with soundbites and talk about the reasoning behind various strategies. If you’re not a podcast person, you can read about the interviews here and here.

I was featured in a piece in the New York Times on wildlife returning to New York City. BBP Gardener Pawel Pieluszyński was photographed tagging monarchs and his discovery of the Blueberry Digger Bee in the park was used to illustrate how city residents can support urban wildlife by planting blueberries!

An Italian NYC newspaper wrote a charming piece on me and BBP. Google translator makes for some lovely quotes: “My favorites are the migratory sylvanians which I can never identify as they all look the same to me but I am learning slowly. Sometimes they are curious and come hopping near. I am enchanted. They are precious creatures, so kind and naive that my task, assisted by brave people, is to protect them from cars, cats and offer them a place to rest " If only I was this poetic in english!

Lastly, an article in the Berkshire Eagle discusses our work at BBP. It was promo for a conference in which I presented at the Berkshire Botanic Garden this month. I was pretty nervous to be back in a room full of people, but honestly it was marvelous. There is nothing like lecturing and teaching in real life.

GARDEN NOTES

Leaf blowers are having a moment, in that many people hate them with the fire of 1000 suns and are organizing against them. Towns, cities, states and even whole countries are banning them with good reason. They’re noisy, bad for wildlife, and absolutely terrible polluters: “a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck.” Gas-powered lawn equipment creates more pollution in California than ALL CARS. At the very least, switching to electrical blowers can keep you from angering your neighbors, but even then, why not a rake? Why not leave the leaves where they fall to insulate wildlife, increase water infiltration, and build the soil? No matter your approach, do NOT be this guy. Landscape workers are often exploited and working as fast and hard as possible at the command of the companies they work for. If you want to complain or even educate, talk to the bosses.

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

Heather Holm’s new book on Wasps is an invaluable resource. Here she is doing a public lecture for Wild Ones. They have other marvelous and free webinars on their website. If you don’t have time for a lecture but want to help these beautiful creatures, Heather has posted regional lists of plants that support wasps.
If you’re in the Northeast, you can make good use of UConn’s free, downloadable Native Plant and Sustainable Landscaping Guide. It goes beyond traditional plant info to provide lists for lawn replacement, biocontrol, salty soils, and pastures.

IN THE NEWS

It’s marvelous to see media finally begin to recognize the rich history and culture of Black gardening in the USA. This NYT piece has 5 important stories by Abra Lee, Ron Finley and others.
New, totally solid, New Yorker piece on insect decline that also deserves a thorough critique. It’s filled with the usual doom and gloom but told with these lovely stories about EO Wilson’s fight with James Watson and various species’ wild reproductive strategies (“Female jewel wasps sting their prey—large cockroaches—to induce a zombielike trance. Then they chew off the tips of the roaches’ antennae, use the stumps to guide the stupefied creatures back to their burrows, and lay their eggs inside them.”) In the end, it’s interesting, as it applies Wilson’s theories on island biodiversity to the remaining fragmented habitats many species must endure. But it does not paint a great picture of our abilities to respond well to the scale of the problem beyond dumping toxins on the ground and making everything worse. We all know by now that publishing apocalyptic stories with no actionable path for change just reinforces the sort of climate grief that leads people to despair. But the two solutions presented by the piece are both problematic and inadequate. The first, Wilson’s half earth campaign, which “returns” half the earth to non-human use, sort of sounds cool but really seems impossible given that we can’t even pass paid family leave when 84% of people and 64% of republicans support it. It takes the biodiversity crisis out of the realm of actionable problems that individuals can address and places it along climate change as a global catastrophe beyond our personal control. This is both lame and untrue. As Doug Tallamy points out, 60% of land in the USA is privately held. We have 40 million acres of lawn. If individuals just focus on their own little piece of earth, we can create massive change. The second “solution” is even worse! The author encourages us to “grow dandelions while the world burns.” I can’t even begin to unpack that here but please know that I’ll post my treatise against dandelions in the spring.
This Anthropocene article demonstrates the right way to write about biodiversity collapse. If you remember, there was a study out of Germany a few years ago that showed a 75% decline in flying insects in nature preserves. This piece shares studies that provide nuance to that terrifying number,: farmed areas tend support the same amount of insects but loose species diversity, especially rare species, while cities loose biomass but species hold steady. This points to land use as the main culprit, rather than climate change, as insects tend to proliferate in hotter temps. And again, land use is not impossible to address! You can literally do it in your back yard while advocating for change on larger scales.

UPCOMING EVENTS

ELA's Ecological Plant Conference
December 3, 2021
9:00AM - 3:30PM
Virtual
The Brooklyn Bridge Park Hort Lead Team will make up a panel at this year’s Ecological Plant Conference. We’re going to discuss ethical management in horticulture, what we’ve learned, what we’ve seen work well, and why it’s important. Speakers include Dr. Carolyn E Roberts, Kelly Norris, Duncan Himmelman, and Veronica Tyson-Strait.
Lexington's Living Landscapes
January 26, 2022
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Free, virtual, and open to the public.
This lecture will be on pollination ecology! Lexington’s Living Landscapes is a collaboration of groups who organized “to promote, encourage, and support sustainable landscaping on private and public lands in Lexington.” Rebecca will speak on The Language of Flowers. An Introduction to Pollination Ecology.