The Birds and the Bees (and other pollinators too)

In late July, Catherine Zimmerman came to Friends to film as Friends students young and old planted the new Little Friends Swale (one of the most recent additions to the Native Plants Teaching Gardens) as part of The Meadow Project, a documentary film about the role that native plants and meadows play in supporting pollinators like bees and butterflies.





As she says, if you like butterflies, you need to give them something to eat! And if you like birds, you need to give them seeds and bugs and berries; native plants are the best way to encourage wildlife in our backyards.

 Zimmerman came to film a new planting at the swale because it's full of (among other things) winterberry, milkweed, and mountain mint--these are plants vital to a complete ecology at multiple trophic levels. Here's a post with some details about why we need swales like this and what the garden used to look like. And there's this Flickr set of the most recent planting.

And here are students in Mr. Ratner's US English elective, "Literature and the Land," where students read plenty of Dickinson, Thoreau and McPhee, but also get outside to choose one plant to study, sketch, and journal about all semester.

US students, Mountain Mint, and Cassia Marylandia

Also, see those white placards with the red flags? Those will tell you what you're looking at throughout the garden. If you just want to see the list of the 68(!) native plants species represented in the Little Friends Swale, well, here you go.



-Joshua Ratner