Mannie~
this might be of some interest to you
and may even strike you as rather amusing.
yesterday, i was out wandering around my gardens and
the fields beyond -- mainly looking for tree frogs
and insects.
i stopped to check the undersides of some half-eaten
red oak leaves on a sapling that i planted about 15
months ago. it's coming along great and was part
of an order of several hundred trees that i planted
in spring 2005 - white, bur and red oaks, black walnut,
butternut, highbush cranberry, native elderberry,
and in the conifers - balsam, white pine, red cedar,
white cedar.
anyhow, i'm looking at the red oak leaves and see
that quite a few of them are half eaten, and i smile
in satisfaction at the sight. then, a couple of seconds
later, i think of how odd that might sound to many
gardeners or groundskeepers. but for me, everything
that i plant is with the intention that some creature
might either want to eat the leaves, the berries or nuts,
or live on or inside of the tree, bush or plant.
in fact, i've just been thinking that i'd like to
plant a bit of the farm in a mix of beech, ironwood,
yellow birch and blue beech (carpinus caroliniana)
as that would be the type of forest where the salamanders
seem to thrive.
this morning, i'm just heading out to start planting
all kinds of nuts that mr. croc has been gathering
when we've been out on our walks around the countryside.
i have shagbark hickory, bitternut hickory, walnuts,
as well as all of the different native oak acorns to plant.
i'll try to get some beaked hazelnuts this weekend.
all of this makes it sound like we aren't moving any
time soon -- but i figure it's worth planting the trees
even if it turns out that we leave to go out east to
live in nova scotia. it will be a bit like Johnny Appleseed
leaving all kinds of food crops for the wildlife.
anyhow, all of this got me to wondering if, in your work,
you find that there are people who want to create gardens
that go beyond the "butterfly garden" level, to something
that is planned to provide serious habitat for wildlife?
there's a lot of that kind of thing going on here -- things
like land stewardship info booklets for landowners and
farmers who want to create fencerows for wildlife, etc...
and also info on building osprey platforms, wood duck boxes,
and so on -- all of this being available at a land-owners
information center in one of the towns in my area.
it's nice to see the osprey platforms go up.. and also to
see that so many of them have been occupied in recent years.
~croc |
