We are all gardeners

...riety of means to both irrigate the garden and charge the groundwater. The plants in the loving landscape promote biodiversity and the local ecology. They are largely native, but not dogmatically so. The landscape represents the unique spirit and history of the region. The plants serve the larger ecology, feeding insects and birds and providing habitat for small animals, birds and reptiles. Loving landscapes join together from house to house to fo...

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2014, a Year in Comments: Plant Thievery, Loquats, Breakfast Cerial and the Apocalypse

...t of researching the issue was discovering the Garden Professor’s Facebook page, wherein brainy horticulture types engage in a dialog on newfangled ideas. Use the search function on that page to find the subject you’re interested in. Who would have guessed that Facebook is useful for more than sharing cat photos and speculating about caftans? 5. Non-GMO Versions of Grape Nuts and Cheerios Less Nutritious Than GMO Versions. This may seem to be a po...

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Bidens rebuttal

...busy cloud of insects buzzing around this mystery plant: honeybees, little native bees and flies and these tiny orange-ish moths that I’ve never seen before. Good pollinator plants remind me of space stations (the kind in movies, that is): complex structures full of vehicles of different sizes approaching, docking, departing, filling the airspace with frantic activity all the day long.This was definitely a good pollinator plant, an important sourc...

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Capparis spinosa – Capers

...ants that belong in a climate similar to your part of the world. We’re not native plant fascists and will gladly source plants from other similar climates, but we don’t believe in nursing sickly plants that can’t take our heat, or need lots of water. This season we’ve pledge not to be tempted by the allure of the seed catalogs. We’re going to grow edible and useful plants that thrive in Mediterranean places. Thankfully that includes a lot of inter...

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Pl@ntNet: “Shazam” for Plants

...ifying Malva parviflora. It was not able to identify any of the California natives I tried, but I don’t think the program has a database of these plants yet. Pl@ntNet is the work of four French research organizations who have a vision for a kind of expansive botanical citizen-science project. I can definitely see the potential for Pl@ntNet to create a huge database to track biodiversity, the effects of climate change and the distribution of plant...

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