Mountain Garden Club talk was a whole lot of fun
Last year, only a few months after I started this blog, the Mountain Garden Club asked me to speak about our native plant garden at their May 2024 meeting. We’d only lived up here a few years, and I didn’t know much about how local gardeners thought about things. I did know that native plants were very hard to find in the Valley. Fortunately I had a year to learn about our new community, and my talk went over really well.
Here are a few of my slides.
I talked about the work of Professor Douglas Tallamy, and how the connection he makes between habitat loss and the loss of native plants and insects radically changed my view of gardening back in 2012…
and how and why habitat loss leads to the loss of insects…
and about how much our local birds need insects…
and how native plants and native insects need each other.
Climate change is making things worse…
but there are ways individuals can make a difference – Homegrownnationalpark.org
As gardeners there are lots of ways that we can help.
Many members spoke to me afterwards and had really nice comments. I was thrilled.
Great news! More native plants are available for MWV gardeners. We are going to have a native plant section at the Mountain Garden Club’s plant sale next weekend, and a kid’s table to color and talk about native plants. I was also happy to see tables full of native plants at the local garden center in Conway this week – a huge increase over last year.