Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 14
March 24, 2015
A Blessing of Snow Geese in the Garden
A weekend ago I met with some design clients and secured a job. As we stood in their backyard a line of snow geese slid across the sky. After lunch when I got home I headed out front to tinker on a small bed I'm re-working -- line after line after line of snow geese moved northwest for 10-15 minutes. Two groups were bunched up tight in the distance, as if they were balloons just let go from a lake a mile or two away. As they got high enough into the thermals they began to form lines and point...
March 17, 2015
The Ultimate Pollinator & Native Plant Gardening Guide
I'm celebrating 2 years of Milk the Weed with the nerdiest, awesome-ist list of links on butterfly and pollinator gardening I can come up with. It's certainly not a complete list, but I hope it's helpful to you as both a practical and philosophical guide. Time to make a profound change in our landscapes; time to connect in a deeper way to our home ground and ourselves through the web of life that sustains us.* Prairie up!
Milkweed Profiles
12 U.S. milkweeds in depth from the National Wil...
Milkweed Profiles
12 U.S. milkweeds in depth from the National Wil...
March 11, 2015
Native Plant Gardens -- Why Are They Sometimes Hard to Embrace?
A native plant landscape is not an attempt to "return to some past, pure nature." That's impossible, especially with climate change (and philosophically it's wrought with ideological problems -- this environmental lit PhD knows). But the wildlife that need native plants and their ecological communities have not gone away -- they certainly can't evolve within decades or even a century to our imported plant gardens. We're doing our best to make the wildlife go away through unprecedented mass ex...
March 3, 2015
Winter, I Hardly Knew Ye
I'm sad to know the last of the garden's snow will melt away this weekend. I cherish the seasons. I especially cherish winter. There is nothing more profound or connective than sitting outside while the snow falls all around -- it is the most perfect and deep silence that strikes the loudest chord in me. I cherish the cold, the thin air that carries voices and howls beyond their natural reach. I honor the slick ice that glazes berries and seeds. I am humbled by the life that sleeps in every n...
February 26, 2015
Heartbeats and Prairie Wind Are the Same Impulse
Today in two of my English classes we're finishing Linda Hogan's stellar book Dwellings, where she says there are occasions where we can hear the language of the earth -- through water, grasses, etc (but only if we are patient enough to do so). I asked my students if hearing a breeze through corn or prairie grass, or listening to waves on a beach, made them feel peaceful, relaxed, connected. Almost all raised their hands. We watched a video on fractals seeing how every biologic and terrestria...
February 19, 2015
Bald Eagle o'Rama
Oh, if only I'd had charged ANY of my DSLR batteries this image would be better. Still, we counted about 45 eagles on Branched Oak Lake the other day; others reported nearly 100 in recent weeks as they fish along the ice's edge.
A record 146 nests were recorded in Nebraska in 2014, with 111 active. Eagles were federally and state endangered as recently as 2008. In less than 25 years baldies have gone from virtually gone to fairly numerous! See what we can do? Go forth and help life thri...
A record 146 nests were recorded in Nebraska in 2014, with 111 active. Eagles were federally and state endangered as recently as 2008. In less than 25 years baldies have gone from virtually gone to fairly numerous! See what we can do? Go forth and help life thri...
February 16, 2015
We Need 40-80 Acres Now! Help!
Do you know of anything around Lincoln or Omaha? Nursery trends are supporting native plant landscape design and plant purchases, and educating the buyer at the point of sale through more sophisticated and innovative layouts, workshops, and display gardens are tops. These are all in our business plan and model. Add on top of that hosting weddings and artist residencies and maybe farming seed as we engage the community on behalf of prairie and its wildlife, and our dreams seem most promising....
February 11, 2015
Rethinking Pretty Every Day
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February 6, 2015
Garden Thoughts on a Snow Melting Day
"The Benedictine monk Thomas Merton said, “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.” Merton’s profoundly moral and enactive perspective points to a vision of all of life as interdependent, entangled, and embedded. This vision orients one toward action that is fundamentally unselfish and selfless. This is “principled compassion”; compassion with a clear moral...
February 1, 2015
It Finally Snowed Impressively!
I am so happy. Being stuck inside a warm home, the wind howling, the trees and stems and spent flowers topped in snow, cardinals dashing from cedar to seed -- it is overwhelmingly gorgeous and energizing. When I get my full measure of each season I feel more complete, more whole, more part of my home. Today I feel a measure of this:
"All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese ca...
"All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese ca...
