Keeping the garden native

Go local: Gardens filled with native plants will promote a healthy landscape. Common milkweed, for instance, is an important pollinator that benefits butterflies such as fritillary and tiger swallowtails.

ECOLOGY is on many gardeners’ minds these days. Gardeners who value the science of relationships between living things and their environments increasingly want to know more about those connections – how toxic chemicals worsen a yard’s overall health and why bees, birds and butterflies are crucial to our daily lives, for example.

“We have a responsibility to support the land that we depend on for our own survival, and that responsibility includes thoughtful choices about how we landscape our own tiny spot of Earth,” says Carol Heiser, habitat education coordinator with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. She encourages public, private and corporate landowners to provide habitat for songbirds, mammals, amphibians and other native wildlife.