Flower Gardening Nursery Landscaping Guide
Flower Gardening Ideas To Invite Wildlife
By Suzzie T Franklin
Flower gardening truly is an art. With each seasonal garden,
you will come up with more ideas on how to enhance your backyard
ecosystem. Many people enjoy reading about gardening tips on how
to attract wildlife to their gardens.
As a child, you may recall chasing yellow, orange and white butterflies,
but perhaps you seldom see them anymore. Most of us remember our
first glimpse of a tiny, delicate hummingbird or the first time
a dragonfly touched our skin while we were floating on a raft
at the lake.
Choosing Flowers Loved By Wildlife
Certain plants are dynamos for luring these wonderful creatures
to our back doorsteps. While you are free to incorporate whatever
flowers you’d like into your garden, adding a few carefully chosen
wildlife favorites will give you much more to gaze upon.
If you’re interested in creating a garden that will attract song
birds, then you can add a few special shrubs, annuals, perennials,
native and cultivated plants to draw them to your yard.
Include A Bird Bath
By growing plants from each group, you can provide fruits and
seeds for all seasons to keep your feathered friends singing all
year long. Be sure to add a bird bath and throw seeds out in the
winter to keep your bird clan happy.
Also, consider that in addition to your flowers, birds like trees
for nesting, protection and shelter from the elements. Sometimes
the trees even provide food like sap, seeds and berries.
Choosing Trees For Your Yard
You can consider deciduous trees like dogwood, red mulberry,
American mountain ash, sassafras, hazelnut, chestnut and black
walnut, as well as evergreen trees like American holly, red cedar,
blue spruce, Douglas fir, white cedar, ponderosa pine and California
juniper.
Flower gardening is an important source of food for sparrows,
finches and other songbirds. You can try perennials like penstemon,
tickseed, bee balm, goldenrod, cosmos, purple coneflower and four
o’ clocks, or you may try annuals like sunflowers, asters, bachelor’s
button, spider flower, snapdragons and cockscomb.
Birds Can Hide From Predators Among Your Shrubs And Vines
Garden guides also recommend planting shrubs and vines where
birds can hide from predators and seek out food. Some tasty plants
(like cherries and raspberries) are preferable to our flying friends,
but they’re picked clean in a hurry.
On the other hand, birds can be seen feasting all year long on
elderberries, blackberries, huckleberries, chokecherries, bayberries,
Oregon grapes, beauty-berries, silver-berries, blueberries, crab
apples, cranberries and currants all year long.
Attracting Hummingbirds And Butterflies To Your Flowers
Naturally, flower gardening to attract both hummingbirds and
butterflies is ideal. Gardening tips suggest incorporating bee
balm, California fuschia, salvia, columbines, daisies, sunflowers,
marigolds, zinnias, peas, clover, mint, milkweed, parsley, violets
and pansiesthe to increase your odds of keeping these creatures
nearby.
Nature stores also sell very effective red and yellow hummingbird
feeders that these little winged beauties just love. Since hummingbirds
can be pretty territorial, you might want to set up more than
one in different locations around the yard if you notice the birds
are coming to your home.
About the Author:
Suzzie T Franklin has written a number of articles on gardening
and landscaping including
The Japanese Garden,
Bonsai Trees,
Bonsai Plants,
Outdoor Bonsai Trees,
Indoor Bonsai Trees,
White Flowers,
Fruit Trees,
Tole Painting,
Lady Slipper Flower,
Plastic Flower Pot,
Zen Garden,
Wire Topiary Frames,
Window Bird Feeders,
Planting Guide,
Flower Seeds,
Gardening Vegetable,
Garden Furniture.
Keep a lookout for more of her articles on this website.
Little Known Gardening Facts....
What type of tools will I need to grow a garden?
There are some basic tools you will need
no matter what type of garden you intend to grow. Most gardening
tips advise having a spade, a shovel, a small rake and of course
a watering hose or can.
Large scale gardens will require you to
have a tiller to till the soil over. Small flower gardens will
not require this and you can break up the soil with the hand spade
or the shovel. The small rake will come in handy to get rid of
weeds and leaves that may be in your garden.
The water is essential to the plants growing.
You may need to add fertilizer and additional soil nutrients to
help your garden grow. The best advice is to get your soil tested
first to determine the pH balance and the soil composition. Then
you can look at what each flower or plant needs to grow best and
add components accordingly.
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