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Habitat for Harmony How to garden the way nature intended.

By Constance Casey
Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2008, at 4:08 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Habitat gardens, though they can be pretty, are not what you usually see in Architectural Digest or even Fine Gardening as models to emulate. In addition, it is the rare nursery owner who is knowledgeable about native plants, though that is changing.

If you're willing to join me in this experiment with natural and native rather than super-tidy or super-showy, here's how to do it. Choose small trees and shrubs that provide berries to eat and a dense network of branches to conceal a nest. Add nectar-rich flowers for butterflies, honeybees, hummingbirds, and beneficial insects. A little shallow water would be appreciated; it can be no more than a concave stone that you'll splash with a bucketful of water every once in a while to prevent mosquito larvae.

Why should the plants be primarily native? For one thing, you're trying to create a distillation of the original landscape that is (or was, before the bulldozers) around your plot. That landscape will consist of the plants that co-evolved over thousands of years with native birds and insects. You need not join the native-gardening crusade; keep your pink roses and peonies and tomatoes, preferably closer to the house. This postage stamp of habitat can be at the back of your yard or along part of an edge.

From this list of 10, choose one small tree, a few shrubs, and a couple of flowering plants for your wildlife experiment.

The immediate benefit of such a planting is that you'll have your own little wildlife preserve to watch. Once planted and watered attentively for the first year, these plants take little watering, no grooming (just cut off dead stuff if necessary), zero pesticides, and, given not-terrible soil to start with, no fertilizer.

Perhaps seeing hummingbirds will be so thrilling that you'll put some red sage in with your milkweed, then you'll go buy Alabama Crimson honeysuckle or trumpet vine to grow up a pole near the front door. You may be perceived by your neighbors as eccentric; then again, you may be seen as a leader in the next wave.

If the 40 million or so gardeners in the United States each were to plant at least one of these mattress-size plots, there would be not quite a quilt, but at least a pattern of welcoming green dots across the country. (The plan will work for city gardens, and even a container planting can attract wildlife.)

So, Justice Roberts, I'm available for a consult on your front yard. Picture the native wisteria Amethyst Falls over your doorway and a grove of three river birches, native to Indiana, where you grew up, shielding the house from the sidewalk. We'll talk native plants and a little First Amendment on the side.

Send your habitat gardening tips to , and discuss this article in Slate's readers' forum, "The Fray."

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Constance Casey, a former newspaper editor, was a New York City Department of Parks gardener for five years. E-mail gardening questions to .
Photograph of habitat garden by Francis Groeters/Catskill Native Nursery.
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