Gardening For Life

Last evening we ended our first Book Discussion Group series with a discussion of Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home. For those of you who have read this book, you might have found it as inspiring and informative as our book group did. Dr. Tallamy takes the complicated relationships that plants have with insects and breaks it down into easy to understand and sensible stories.

Everyone in the group brought different points of view and stories of their own gardening efforts with native plants. One member remarked that they had no idea that suburbia had increased 5905% since 1960. Others brought stories of the increasing amount of development and subsequent lack of insects throughout their neighborhoods.

All in all, most members felt that Tallamy’s book truly inspired them and remained optimistic during this time when biodiversity seems to be decreasing with each passing year. I tend to think that gardeners are inherently optimistic people. Planning and looking towards the future are constant parts of gardeners’ lives. Tallamy motivates gardeners and suburban homeowners to take control of their yards by gardening with native plants to bring back some of the insects and birds that have been displaced in recent years. Several members of the group said that we should encourage our friends to read this book, share the plant list at the end of it with our garden clubs, begin to add more native plants to our gardens, and start to decrease the amount of lawn we have.

Join us here at the Scott Arboretum and listen to Doug Tallamy in person as he describes his research with native plants and insects and offers his vision and hope for the future of biodiversity in our gardens. He will be speaking here this Thursday, February 12th in the Science Center 101 at 7:30pm.