Gardening with the Girls

Serviceberry Blossom April 16 Last fall we had the front of our house landscaped with plants all native to our region.  There are several reasons I chose to stick with native plants - basically they enhance the environment by providing food/shelter to animals, particularly pollinators, using less water, not requiring fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides.  Indiana Wildlife Federation and Indiana Native Plants and Wildflower Society are great sources for using native plants in landscaping for people in Indiana. Our yard is dominated by many large, old oak trees, so the landscaper we worked with wanted to keep with that theme and create type of woodland edge-habitat with the design.  You will learn in any Ecology 101 course that edge-habitats are where the action takes place.  Because they occur at the boundary between two habitats and provide a variety of heights in vegetation they support a high level of biodiversity.  This is something that is easy to replicate in a yard w

This post is not about gardening, I needed a space to work through my feelings towards the end of a political era.  An era that has helped shape me, and our country, in many ways.  Yet, the garden is a useful metaphor here. In the musical Hamilton, as Alexander Hamilton is about to be shot by Aaron Burr in a duel he is frantically reflecting on his life.  He states: "Legacy.  What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see." I've been thinking a lot about this line this week after watching President Obama's farewell speech.  What will President Obama's legacy become?  And, maybe equally important, what will my legacy become?  What seeds do we plant that we will never see grow?  It is even worth the struggle and pain to plant those seeds knowing that we won't see them grow to bear fruit? whitehouse.gov It is no secret that this has been a rough election cycle and outcome for many people.  While I know that I will be