April is Native Plant Month
Robin Schachat
And our club is ready to celebrate!!!!! As many of you already know, our own President, Cynthia Druckenbrod, is on the GCA’s panel supporting a National Native Plant Month initiative. Among other activities our club is looking forward to, when celebrating native plants and their great value to sustaining our ecosystem, is an opportunity to collaborate with other local organizations to educate the public as to why native plants are necessary.
Many of our members are active locally in a variety of ways. Ann Cicarella, for example, has dedicated her “Cleveland Pollinator and Native Plant Symposium” for years to teaching the public about the importance of native plants to the health of pollinators in NE Ohio. This year she collaborated with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to produce an exceptional series of virtual sessions to this end, with terrific speakers. You can locate these to view at the WRLC website if you missed them live. They are well worth your time – you will learn a lot.
Now Jane Ellison and I are working with the Greater Cleveland Audubon Society to create a service through which members of the public can request guidance to make their personal properties havens for native birds. To do that, both native plants and native pollinators must be part of the plan! We attach to this article an excerpt from the Greater Cleveland Audubon Society’s March Newsletter, where their participation is announced to their membership.
In April you will hear much more about the roles you can play in celebrating, learning about, and teaching others about the importance of native plants in our world. If you can’t wait until April, Jane and I would love to engage you in the project now!
Greater Cleveland Audubon Society Newsletter
March, 2023
Are you thinking about spring gardening? If you’re like me, you might have ambitious plans for new garden beds, better vegetables and more flowers. Have you thought carefully about the positive impact your planting choices can have for birds? To raise a nest of chickadees, for example, the parents need to find 10,000 caterpillars nearby. What plants and trees will provide habitat for so many insects?
As birders and conservationists, Audubon Society members are concerned about plant diversity, habitat, the availability of insects as food sources for birds, and many other environmental issues but often despair of our ability to affect change through public policy. In the last few years, many people have become aware that we as individuals can have a significant impact on habitat simply by changing what we grow in our own yards!
Dr. Douglas Tallamy contributed to this understanding in 2020 with the publication of his book, Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard where he laid out his evidence that small changes in many yards and businesses could patch together large swaths of suitable and thriving habitat. By paring back lawns and changing what we plant to emphasize primarily native plants, we can play an important role in establishing what he labeled “home grown national parks”. Pair that with removing invasives and eliminating pesticides, and we can create environments where insects and birds can thrive.
Those who are concerned about butterfly survival have already heard this message. Patches of milkweed have sprung up in both private yards and public parks around Ohio as individuals, school groups, cities and parks have installed monarch way stations to feed monarchs on their long journey to Mexico and back.
Great Cleveland Audubon Society will soon join other Audubon societies and launch a program to assist members who would like to learn more and make changes in their own yards to benefit birds and pollinators. Here are a few resources for you to read until our program launches:
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard https://www.amazon.com/Natures-Best-Hope-Approach-Conservation-ebook/dp/B07NMH5GH5
Xerces Society website for pollinator conservation and native plant lists: www.xerces.org
National Wildlife Federation for native plants by region: https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder/Plants
Homegrown National Parks to learn more about connecting small pieces of land and regenerate biodiversity: https://homegrownnationalpark.org/
Kathryn Craig for the Education Committee