Jul 06 2010
Attract Wildlife To Your Backyard With Tips On Flower Gardening
Organic gardens involve the use of all-natural compost, gardening tools and pest deterrents. With flower gardening tips, you may want to consider creating an ecosystem where wildlife and other animals can thrive.
Perhaps you enjoy the wonderment of walking through the garden, while gardening with your lawn and garden tools and seeing ladybugs, praying mantises, dragonflies, hummingbirds and butterflies enjoying your natural creation as much as you do. While you are free to incorporate whatever flowers you’d like into your garden, adding a few carefully chosen wildlife favorites will give you much more to gaze upon.
If you’re interested in creating a garden that will attract song birds, then you can add a few special shrubs, annuals, perennials, native and cultivated plants to draw them to your yard. By growing new plants from each group, you can provide fruits and seeds for all seasons to keep your feathered friends singing all year long.
Be sure to add a bird bath and throw seeds out in the winter to keep your bird clan happy. Also, consider that in addition to your flowers, birds like trees for nesting, protection and shelter from the elements. Sometimes the trees even provide food like sap, seeds and berries.
You can consider deciduous trees like dogwood, red mulberry, American mountain ash, sassafras, hazelnut, chestnut and black walnut, as well as evergreen trees like American holly, red cedar, blue spruce, Douglas fir, white cedar, ponderosa pine and California juniper.
Flower gardening is an important source of food for sparrows, finches and other songbirds. You can try perennials like penstemon, tickseed, bee balm, goldenrod, cosmos, purple coneflower and four o’ clocks, or you may try annuals like sunflowers, asters, bachelor’s button, spider flower, snapdragons and cockscomb.
Garden guides also recommend planting shrubs and vines where birds can hide from predators and seek out food. Some tasty plants (like cherries and raspberries) are preferable to our flying friends, but they’re picked clean in a hurry.
According to garden guides at Berkeley University, the most attractive plants for bees are bee balm lilac, manzanita, wisteria, echinacea, helianthus, pride of Madeira, wild lilac, California poppy, toadflax, tansy phacelia, calamint, tickseed, sea holly, lemon queen, Russian sage and goldenrod.
Naturally, flower gardening to attract both hummingbirds and butterflies is ideal. Gardening tips suggest incorporating bee balm, California fuschia, salvia, columbines, daisies, sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias, peas, clover, mint, milkweed, parsley, violets and pansiesthe to increase your odds of keeping these creatures nearby.
Nature stores also sell very effective red and yellow hummingbird feeders that these little winged beauties just love. Since hummingbirds can be pretty territorial, you might want to set up more than one in different locations around the yard if you notice the birds are coming to your home.
