Inviting Wildlife With Better Flower Gardening Tips
Organic gardens involve the use of all-natural compost, garden tools and pest deterrents. With flower gardening tips, you may want to consider creating an ecosystem where wildlife and other animals can thrive.
Perhaps you enjoy the wonderment of walking through the garden, while gardening with your garden tools and seeing ladybugs, praying mantises, dragonflies, hummingbirds and butterflies enjoying your natural creation as much as you do. Here are some gardening tips to create an enduring, wildlife-friendly garden.
Lady Bug, Dragonfly, Humming Bird, Butterfly and Praying Mantis
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. By growing healthy 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.
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.
Snapdragon, bachelor button, sunflower, spider flower and bee balm
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.
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. Garden supplies stores online sometimes sell butterflies from farms that you can let loose in your backyard once it’s all set up to jumpstart the process.
Learn about Flower arranging – FREE lesson and newsletter
