Perhaps you’ve made up your mind to create a garden that can be enjoyed by not only you, but by nature’s insects, birds and creatures too. Yet, do you have many gardening questions that need to be answered? Flower gardening for wildlife involves several different components. Most creatures like to live near a water feature, where they can get hydrated on those warm summer days. Birds are especially drawn to fountains full of circulating water. They also like to dwell near a food source. This means different things for different animals, of course, so you’ll need to do your research. Creatures also like places of shelter, such as rocks, bird houses or ground cover, for example.

If you’re considering designing a garden that will be a magnet for song birds, then you can include several special shrubs, annuals, perennials, native and cultivated plants to attract them to your garden. By cultivating plants from each group, you can offer seeds and fruit for all seasons to keep your feathered friends chirping year round. Make sure to provide a bird bath and throw seeds around in the wintertime to keep your bird clan satisfied.

In addition, consider the fact that, as well as your blooms, birds like trees for safety, nesting and refuge from the weather conditions. Often the trees even supply food including seeds, berries and sap. You can choose leafy trees including hazelnut, American mountain ash, chestnut, dogwood, red mulberry, black walnut and sassafras, in addition to evergreen trees such as American holly, red cedar, blue spruce, Douglas fir, white cedar, ponderosa pine and California juniper.

Flower gardening is an important source of food for sparrows, finches and other songbirds. You can try perennials like penstemon, tickseed, bee balm, goldenrod, cosmos, purple coneflower and four o’ clocks, or you may try annuals like sunflowers, asters, bachelor’s button, spider flower, snapdragons and cockscomb.

Garden guides also recommend planting shrubs and vines where birds can hide from predators and seek out food. Some tasty plants (like cherries and raspberries) are preferable to our flying friends, but they’re picked clean in a hurry. On the other hand, birds can be seen feasting all year long on elderberries, blackberries, huckleberries, chokecherries, bayberries, Oregon grapes, beauty-berries, silver-berries, blueberries, crab apples, cranberries and currants all year long.

If you’re flower gardening to attract butterflies, then you will need a place for the insects to gather water, to seek solace from the sun and predators, as well as sources to breed and feed. With the exception of monarchs and other migrators, butterflies generally don’t like to migrate too far from what they need, so if your yard has it all, you’re likely to keep these beautiful insects around. Garden supplies stores online sometimes sell butterflies from farms that you can let loose in your backyard once it’s all set up to jumpstart the process.

Everyone wants their property to look its best and one of the ways to do that is to enhance your landscaping. For some great suggestions on flower gardening and other ways to get the backyard of your dreams, check out the Landscaping Ideas site.

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It’s Not Our Yard Fence But It Did Make Us Think Hedge

We were thinking about building a fence across the front of  our yard, close to the sidewalk to help keep the neighbourhood kids out of our yard when they are running and playing their games. Then I saw a few gorgeous hedges while on my walks through town. Now we want a nice hedge instead, just not completely sure what to go with, I really like the rose bush shrubs I see as hedges. You don’t need an expensive professional landscaping company for every landscaping job, there are many jobs you can perfectly do yourself. Any homeowner with a few helpful tips can get started with hedges and get them looking just the way they want them. With the right tools, and some great tips on hedging you will be able to do just about any job. Read about it, buy good tools, pick a nice day and enjoy yourself. And remember hedges are not hard at all. Privacy or just because they look nice? There are a few popular types of hedges that are typically used and one is the formal hedges which require about two shearings a year. This can vary of course from one situation to the next but this is the average requirement. The evergreen hedges are one of the most popular types because they require very little maintenance and look beautiful. The hedging that a person will have to complete will absolutely depend on the type of garden hedges that they are working with. But most hedges do not need more shearing a year at all. Try it, it’s not hard at all. Garden hedging is a great activity for homeowners to take on. Just as with hair, it is better to cut too little and then gradually go along when you are  hedging and trimming the hedges rather than cutting off way too much at once and having no way to go back. Hedging is a great job for homeowners to take on. It is a fun activity, you see direct results and there is no need to pay for a landscaping company to come in and do the work. It is really not hard to learn, and not physically hard to do also. Just make sure you use the right tools and go for it! The author of this article, Hank Gordon, writes at his website Gardeners Info Point. com about WorX Cordless Trimmer and for example what to look for at the garden supply center .

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Do you know what this plant is? Well we don’t but we would like to. Take a minute to post a comment and let us know.

We live in New Brunswick Canada and it seems to thrive very well on our property fence.

Even though some flowers look beautiful they can also be painful, like stopping to smell the roses, well those roses have thorns that can hurt. This bush is much the same, you get close enough to take a good sniff and they will grab you and drag you in, perhaps not to be found until late fall.

We aren’t sure what this is called, we just know it looks great when it has leaves, make a great privacy fence but the maintaining it can be lethal.

We are slowing removing it from our property fence but I think we will keep a little section on each side of our property. It just looks too beautiful to completely remove.

I think we can control it if we have access to all sides. As it is now it lines the entire three sides of our property and is too hard to handle. I will see how it goes with a small section we have already cleared and if it’s managable we will keep the smaller sections of this shrub and use less thorny plants and shrubs for the rest of the fence.

Plus this type of shrub makes it hard on the neighbours as well.

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