Self-Planting Garden Residents

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This self-planting willow shades our pond and makes sitting beside it more comfortable.

Plants of various types rub shoulders in my garden — perennials, annuals, small trees, veggies, and vines. Most of these I planted. A few self-planting plants, however, I did not. Or in two instances, I planted the plant where I wanted it, and it moved to where it wanted to be. Here are brief descriptions of my uninvited or pushy, self-planting garden residents.

Willow Tree

The biggest example among my self-planting plants is the willow (salix) tree beside our pond. The seed of this tree floated in on the air and planted itself where it still stands. For several years, we cut it way back to keep it small. It, however, as willows do, wanted to grow big. Today, it is about 15 feet tall, and it shades the pond beautifully, making the chairs beside it much more comfortable to sit in throughout the day. We prune it rather severely each year to keep it at this size. ... Read More

The Best Way Ever to Deal with Yellow Jackets: A Serendipity Gardens Story

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Yellow jackets 1

Hard to see, but this hole was swarming with yellow jackets.

A Problem Revealed

While working at my desk a week or so ago, I noticed lots of activity near the sidewalk. Small creatures of some sort were flying up and down and in circles, over and over again. They reminded me of popcorn kernals flying in a popcorn machine.

I went outside to investigate. There, dug in below a Bath’s Cheddar pink dianthus that normally serves as a ground cover, was a hole about six inches in diameter. The flying creatures appeared to be bees of some kind, and they were as busy and active as could be. Unknown to me, they must have been there most of the summer. ... Read More

Sowing a Butterfly Habitat at Serendipity Gardens

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One of the things I resolved to do this spring to attract more wildlife to Serendipity Gardens was to plant more wildflowers. My husband had long said that he would like to convert the field behind our house to a prairie, replete with wildflowers. Who wouldn’t like to gaze upon nearly two acres of beautiful flowers? But the process and the work required for a project this size made that an elusive goal.

However, we did have a small area, roughly 20′ X 15′ that we used last year for vegetables. This year, we decided to convert just that area to wildflowers … food for the critters rather than food for us! ... Read More

Thoughts about “Going Native” in Serendipity Gardens

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Alien and native

Quite a few years ago, I learned how much I enjoy watching the antics of birds and frogs in Serendipity Gardens. I patted myself on the back because I did not use pesticides, did not rake leaves in the fall, and left lots of seedheads for birds through the winter. “I am gardening for wildlife, and I want to share my expertise on this topic with others,” I said to myself. Thus I began Serendipity Gardens, the blog.

How little I knew!

Being coached (thanks to Molly Greene)  that Twitter would be one of the best ways to draw traffic to my blog, I began looking for Tweeps to follow who were interested in wildlife gardening. Suddenly, I was in a whole new world, and I realized that my own garden, with its mixture of native and alien plants that you can see in this photo, was not nearly the haven for wildlife that I had assumed it was (though it does host quite a few).  ... Read More