Spring Flower Sale!
The Caro Garden Club in partnership with Szcygiel's Plant Farm is offering plants for its yearly fundraiser. The order deadline is April 22. To see what’s available and for order forms check our website at https://carogardenclub.wixsite.com/mysite or our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CaroGardenClubMi/.
Caro Gardens Cleanup Set for Wednesday, April 13
The Caro Garden Club, with the help of students from Caro High School, will be conducting its spring cleanup for the Nobel Boulder, Memorial and Botanical Gardens in Caro. Please join us; we can use all the help we can get. Cleanup time starts between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. and will continue till noon. Please bring gloves, rakes, and, if possible, paper leaf bags and tarps.
All Native Plants Are Not Equal in the Eyes of Insects and Pollinators
With so much publicity about gardening with native plants to sustain pollinators, insects and the wildlife that eat them, it’s may be surprising to learn that some 86 percent of our native plants aren’t contributing much to the food web.
That’s the conclusion of Douglas Tallamy, professor with the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. In an interview published in the March/April 2022 edition of Horticulture Magazine, Tallamy says: “Just 5 percent of our native plants produce 75 percent of the caterpillars that drive the food web. And 14 percent of the native plants are producing about 90 percent of the caterpillars.” And while he acknowledges that it’s hard for a gardener to plant things that everything wants to eat, it’s necessary in our world where pollinators are declining as are insects that feed birds and other wildlife.
Tallamy urges planting ”keystone plants” that support wildlife like oaks, birches, willows and cherries. You can get guidance for what you can plant in your area of the country at the National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder at https://www.nwf.org/nativeplantfinder/ Type in your zip code for recommendations and photographs of suitable plants.
You can also get recommendations at the Homegrown National Park Program website at https://homegrownnationalpark.org/
Read more about Tallamy and the importance of native plants that host insects in the Smithsonian Magazine’s article “Meet the Ecologist Who Wants You to Unleash the Wild on Your Backyard” at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-ecologist-who-wants-unleash-wild-backyard-180974372/
A monarch butterfly eating a milkweed leaf. Photo courtesy Ted White for the National Park Service article “Gardening for Wildlife with Native Plants.”