My 10 Most Popular Articles
With updates from the readers who submitted the questions
Dear Yardener,
Woohoo! In June, Dear Avant Gardener's articles received 7,000 clicks from Google Search. I’m excited about this milestone because it means more people are learning about ecological approaches to their landscaping challenges, partly offsetting the often environmentally harmful recommendations that predominate on the internet, e.g., touting pesticides, chemical fertilizers, exotic, and even invasive plants.
Optimizing our titles and URLs for Google search is part of Zoe and my strategy to achieve Dear Avant Gardener’s mission: To bring joy, bolster biodiversity, and mitigate climate change through the art and science of ecological landscaping. Zoe’s work on our site’s backend is paying off. The number of clicks our articles have received has been growing by hundreds a month.
The best topics come from readers like you
We owe special thanks to Dawn in Colorado, Carolyn in Brooklyn, “Not Making it In the Shade” in Rhode Island, and the other subscribers whose questions generated our top 10 most popular articles. The key to having content that interests people is receiving real, relevant questions from readers like you. In fact, many of the articles that get the most clicks are on topics with which I don’t have any personal experience. These questions send me deep into Google Scholar looking for the latest research, yielding often fascinating new information for those of us gardening for biodiversity.
Curious about our most popular articles? Maybe one addresses a problem you’re also facing. See “How” for links to Dear Avant Gardener’s top 10 most clicked articles from Google Search. You’ll also find updates from some readers whose questions I answered. All the updates express a spirit of openness and experimentation you subscribers share — and which will eventually yield a joyful, life-giving yarden.
Warmly,
— The Avant Gardener
Why, How, Wow!
Why?
Did you know the Xerces Society is named after an extinct North American butterfly endemic to the sand dunes that became San Francisco? I was not — despite being a supporter and huge fan of the organization. Thirty years ago, founder and butterfly researcher Robert Michael Pyle heard a British entomologist recommend making a declining species the symbol for British butterfly conservation.
Pyle, an American, thought of the Xerces blue. “We should make that our symbol for butterfly conservation in the U.S.,” Pyle said. The fact that the butterfly’s name began with an “X,” evoking “extinction,” didn’t hurt.
He went on to found the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, turning the Xerces blue into a symbol for not just threatened butterflies, but all sorts of imperiled insects.
— The Washington Post
Now, a coalition of organizations is reintroducing a related species — the silvery blue — as part of the Presidio's ecological restoration. Like many insects, the Xerces blue and silvery blue butterflies are specialists, unable to survive without specific species or genera of native plants; both lay their eggs on deerweed (Acmispon glaber).
With one million species facing extinction globally, substituting a closely-related species for an extinct one is one of many methods scientists are testing to reverse ecosystem collapse — and scientists disagree about which means are best to achieve this end. The Xerces Society, for example, does not support the effort to replace its namesake with a cousin.
While the group that bears the butterfly’s name did not oppose the project, “we do not see it as a priority when there is so little funding for insect conservation,” said Scott Black, its executive director. “We should invest limited funding in the protection of and habitat restoration for the butterfly species that are currently facing extinction rather than introducing a common species into new areas,” Black added.
Specimens of the extinct Xerces blue butterfly, some dating back more than a century, are housed in the California Academy of Sciences’ collections. (source: Washington Post; photo: Gayle Laird)
How: Dear Avant Gardener’s top 10 most-clicked articles from Google Search
1. How to Remove Weeds Correctly: Startling insight on why you’ve been removing weeds wrong your whole life
Invasive plant eradication best practice is to rescue more pristine areas first before tackling the worst infestation.
Source: Sunny Side Design
3. Shade Good, Rats Bad: How to plant a beautiful urban yard that deters rats
Dear Avant Gardener, I wish I had better news for you re my yard. I've just reread that article and realize that I haven't done anything that you suggested. I see that you recommended a fall seeding of self-heal and planting ramps and chives, so I think that's where I'll start this fall. Along with ripping out the ivy, of course. – Not Making It in the Shade, Providence, RI
Irish hedgerows (Source: Green Restoration Ireland)
5. How Does Landscaping Affect Your Home's Value? Plus, a peek into Zillow listings that mention native landscaping
Dear Avant Gardener, After reading this article originally, I was convinced that native landscaping would be a fun project for me, alleviate some of my existential stress about the climate by giving me something I could actually do about it, and would be helpful should I decide to sell my house. I did feel a bit overwhelmed about where to begin, which is why I signed up for your course Transform Your Yard. I LOVED it and highly recommend it. I started thinking about my yard in ways I never had before and was so grateful for how very practical and informational the course turned out to be. I walked away with a beautiful planting/landscaping plan tailored to my needs, climate, budget, and personal sense of design and creativity. What a special experience. — Lauren, Bay Area, CA
6. Managing Japanese Beetles with Native Plants: What do Japanese beetles eat? What do they avoid? And should you care?
Dear Avant Gardener, A few things have happened that may have contributed to a relative lack of Japanese beetles [JB] in our yard this summer: Bill has been planting clover the past few years to replace our lawn, which is where the JB grubs are laid. The clover has been taking hold, though he re-seeds it every spring. This in turn has begun to reduce the grub population. We’ve had more rain this spring and summer than I can remember which has had a positive (booming!) effect on the clover so I’m hoping we’ll continue to see less and less JBs. Lastly, our next door neighbors have stopped hanging traps which I believe had brought more in. JBs seem to go where the party is.🙂 — No Longer Bested by Beetles, St. Paul, MN
Japanese beetle range as of 2019; source: University of Minnesota Extension
7. Never Plant These 2 Easy Trees: Enhance vast yard with native trees in meadow instead.
Dear Avant Gardener, I wanted to update you on what we have done to our yard since I sent my original question two years ago. We finally pulled it together to buy and plant six trees in our backyard surrounding our vegetable garden — three river birch, two red maple, and one redbud that has pink flowers in spring and purple leaves. We can see all the trees from our screened-in back porch which makes us very happy. So far, we have not done anything to turn parts of our lawn over to meadows as you suggested. As I said in my original question, I don't want to retain any more beds that need to be maintained and weeded. How do I create a meadow-like area that is maintenance free? From what I have seen a lot of meadows and wildflower beds turn into weeds. — Too much lawn in Cape May, NJ
Yay! Another great question. Stay tuned for a future newsletter....
Source: Garden Revolution by Larry Weaner
Native mid-sized dwarf evergreen shrubs Elf mountain laurel, left, and Whipcord western red cedar
9. How Can I Lure Hummingbirds Every Day with Shade Loving Flowers? Reader wants her husband to experience awe looking out his home office window.
Dear Avant Gardener, Thank you so much for your sage and thorough advice about optimizing our planting to attract hummingbirds in our shady front yard. Though it is a slight pivot, I wanted to provide you with a little hummingbird-related landscaping update that will hopefully give you and your readers a taste of the joy it has been bringing to us! After years of apartment living with nothing more than a patio, the move to our current 3+ acre property, while exciting, has been a bit paralyzing. We have a lot of plans and ideas, but in order to manage overwhelm, we decided to phase our landscaping projects, prioritizing our most high-use spaces and working down from there. As such, we decided to direct our initial focus to the pool area in the back, which gets a lot more use — and a lot more sun — than the front. This spring we ripped out a ton of invasive English ivy, and now we’ve started filling in with natives that are recommended by the Xerces’ Society. We found an incredible native plant nursery nearby in Santa Cruz that has had most of the species we were looking for. In the “part sun” areas, we’ve planted: common yarrows; coyote mint; sticky monkey flower; various salvias including Mexican sage, black sage, blue sage, pitcher sage, and white sage (Salvia apiana); Island alum root; coastal buckwheat; California fuchsia; common rush; Idaho fescue; and California fescue. We also have a small shaded area where we've planted wood strawberry and yerba buena, which we hope will form a groundcover beneath a bench by our frog pond. The hummingbirds are going wild for our penstemon varieties and we also have seen many species of butterflies, moths, and other pollinators. Now we’re starting to think about the rest of our yard, especially the sandy patchy field under our live oak trees, which is intimidating but exciting! — Humming for Real Now! Santa Cruz, CA
Anna’s hummingbird at fuchsiaflower gooseberry
10. Honoring Traditional Japanese Gardens with Native Plants: Drought-tolerant Santa Fe natives complete this masterpiece inspired by venerable Japanese designs.
Dear Avant Gardener, It has been almost two years since I wrote in asking your advice on how to create a Japanese inspired garden in the Southwest using natives and very little water. I took your advice and planted dwarf pinyon, turpentine bush, and New Mexico privet, as well as Mexican feather grass. Sadly, the dwarf pinyons and turpentine bushes didn’t survive last summer’s heat wave, but I am happy to report that the New Mexico privets and the feather grasses are slowly taking root. The most important change however, occurred after I removed many of the invasive Russian olive trees, allowing numerous shoots of our native pinyon and junipers to sprout up without my having to water them. Now, I have been slowly pushing the rocks around again to get the “architecture” of the space to work with the natural environment! — Art Historian Outside in Santa Fe, NM
Wow!
Weeding is the only gardening I’m doing this month. As Pete quipped, “Now that you’ve finished planting, it’s time to kill stuff. Your favorite thing.” That would be mean if it weren’t so true.
A few days a week, I allot half an hour or so — I can’t take more in this sultry weather — and tackle any aggressive invasives in one area. In my Rhode Island yard, these include mugwort, garlic mustard, oriental bittersweet, creeping bellflower, English ivy, Japanese spiraea, Rose of Sharon sprouts, and Norway maple seedlings. I’m not bothering to remove any annual weeds, which I found disappear on their own once the native groundcovers fill out.
Recently, I started using the bellflowers and spiraea I cut to the ground in my cut-flower arrangements. These flowers remind me that invasives aren’t inherently evil; they are often pretty plants brought here by humans, just doing what they evolved to do, unfortunately to the detriment of our ecosystem.
Invasive Japanese spiraea and creeping bellflower, along with native daisy fleabane and purple poppy mallow (photo: Heather Evans)
Related Resources
Deer destroying your plants? We are loving a natural, mint-scented deterrent recommended by our Transform Your Yard students John and Karen: Deer Out.
Interested in the Xerces Society plant lists that proved so successful for reader "Humming for Real"? Find your regional list at Xerces Society Pollinator-Friendly Native Plant Lists.
Want to know more about the introduction of the silvery blue at the Presidio? Use this gift link to the Washington Post article.
