Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 11

Making New Plants is Problematic

The assertion is that native plant cultivars -- those bred and crossed to produce new plants different from the straight species parents (not wild-found offshoots) -- are just as beneficial to wildlife and pollinators.

This is an assertion, and assumption, that highlights our hubris. We don't have the research yet, or the funds to produce it, that shows cultivars play the same ecological role in their environments as straight species. We need to test the nectar and pollen chemical makeup, as w...

We're in Nebraska Life Magazine

You might have noticed an awkwardly-posed, grey-haired fellow in the fall issue of Nebraska Life -- yeah, that's me, with my wife in support (and the garden the main attraction). Rumor has it lines are a few blocks long at local magazine stands as the issue sells out in a mad fury.

Research & Write Your Family History -- Online Class

Besides gardening, lots of you know I'm an essayist / poet and have an English PhD; two of my memoirs focus on discovering family history and turning that into a story. This fall I'm teaching a 10 week online class that explores how you can research your own family, what material to look for, how to create a narrative from that information, and the strategies and tools necessary to form it all into effective creative writing. All of the course material -- lectures, links, powerpoints, sample...

A Moment

I'm standing behind a hedge of indian grass watching a monarch lift from a Liatris that has sprouted among the tallgrass. The west wind pushes against my back, whips milkweed seeds into the air that race past me then up out of the garden. I still haven't moved a muscle when a white-lined sphinx moth comes, dabbles on a few blooms over the course of half a second, darts to within a few inches of my ear, hovers, drones in its spiked, low pitch like someone whispering in a crowded room, then is...

Front Yard Prairie Coming In, Seeding the Back

A few images of what's been going on at the homestead this month.

No filter on this morning scene. Black chokeberry is stunning. August is a very yellow month. Wild senna with bumble bee. They LOVE these flowers. I've started tossing seed in the back lawn, trying to do it in waves and drifts. A good year for milkweed bugs. Back under the arbor. Sometimes sideoats grama and rudbeckia is enough. The front is coming in, though those shrubs are a problem. Little bluestem is a workhorse! Not as many mona...

Clearing the Air -- Ethics, Native Plants, Climate Change

Several times over the last few months I've had someone, most gently and kindly, message me about my ideas and beliefs related to native plants and gardening. I am thankful for this. I have known for some time that landscape designers, specifically, have felt unsettled by me and seen me in a most negative light. I'm hoping that through this post -- and opening up to some perspectives I've tried to keep hidden for fear of reprisal -- I might generate a discussion that helps us think more deepl...

Pollan's Nativism Needs a Major Refresh

I recently reread Michael Pollan's 1994 essay "Against Nativism." In it he argues against a loud minority (a minority I float in and out of freely depending on the topic) who, according to him, believes the following:

A vocal army of designers and taste makers has decreed that the “new American garden” is henceforth a place that:
1. Outlaws any human artifice in its design;
2. Grants citizenship exclusively to native plants (any immigrant to be treated as “flora non grata,” with “invasive alien...

Oh, Prairie Flowers!

Two weeks ago I read from my Oklahoma memoir at the Iowa Prairie Conference, along with John Price, Mary Swander, and Elizabeth Dodd (what fun people and great writers!). I was able to tour plantings the Tallgrass Prairie Center is working on at the UNI campus, as well as their production plots and cool seed cleaning room. Then I visited my folks in Minnesota and their 2-3 acres of prairie restoration -- following is some of what I found in the land of 14,000 lakes (for more, follow me on Ins...

Happy Birthday to Me and the Garden -- 2015

It's my annual navel gazing day. The garden is 8 and I am, well, much older than it. I want to start with an excerpt from my unpublished memoir, Turkey Red, which I rediscovered this week, then share pics (in collage format to save space -- click on them to embiggen):

There’s an emptiness in the Plains. It’s not a literal emptiness because it is our absence which is most present. And yet our existence has redefined the absence: you can get lost in a corn field, lay down in the wheat and just...

Listening to an Oklahoma Windmill

This weekend my great aunt passed away, the youngest of a large family where only two sisters remain. I will be forever indebted to her for her memories as I researched a memoir on Oklahoma -- though with fewer experiences being the youngest, it was in a lot of ways her voice and thoughts that got me the closest to my grandmother and her early life. Exploring Oklahoma as an estranged adult -- someone who once hated the state and whose heart sank crossing the Kansas border -- I never asked my...