Benjamin Vogt's Blog, page 22

We Are Prairie

For a while we inhabit our bodies, fill them with signals of our being -- colors and scents, desires and actions, calls out into the abyss until a few find us and we become one. We are like the coneflower, a ray of inflorescence, stamens sticky with faith. We fade. We get sharp. We get stuck to whatever passes by. We're carried out into the autumn and like ghosts some part of us surfaces far away. Again and again, over and over, our shadows echo and call back to one another. Where will we blo...

As Prairie Vanishes, Our Morals Follow

I read too many articles that just really fire me up, get me angry -- piss me off (better off than on?). It always frustrates me when people say we need more corn fields to feed the world. First, the majority of corn goes to make ethanol. Second, corn is used to quickly stuff cattle in finishing lots, making the meat fattier and a leading contributor to human heart disease. Third, we already waste something like 50% of the food we have due to spoilage at home or in the grocery store or in tra...

An Orgy of Fall Photos

Soon enough this blog will enter its winter period -- which this year will mean garden and environmental manifestos as I work on a new book. But before those rants and deep ecology posts, let us gorge ourselves on one fantastic fall in the garden. Let me know what you think. The colors will run well into the end of the month -- it's a nice 2 month long show here in Nebraska!









































7 species if prairie flowers seeded in veg bed



Autumn sunsets are the best

The New Garden Landscape

This is my vision for the 21st century garden -- a space that embraces both the aesthetic /artistic expression of the creator / owner, and that pays attention to the local ecology by creating as much of a native wildlife habitat as possible. 



I do not see ecology and garden design as mutually exclusive or in any way opposed to one another. Yes, this means gardening may tax our brains a bit more, and nurseries and architects and landscapers will have to educate more. But you know what? I...

Following One Path

This fall I've become particularly enamored with one path, one portion in my small garden. I think it may be two asters that I self sowed themselves -- I just don't remember planting them. They are growing into blue sentinels across from each other on this one path, covered in insects, glowing in four dimensions. This is what I like about a garden that's now wilding -- I can be surprised year to year and take deep pleasure in the angles of light, the new reflections of life, the shifting form...

Morality and Ecosystems

I'm not the only "crazy" one linking morality and ethics to nature and landscapes (I've known this for some time, though). I just finished Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris, and while I spent most of the book pissed off both by some things she was saying and how she was saying them, by the time I got toward the end I realized we had similar goals. It doesn't hurt that she uses Aldo Leopold to get her point across more than once.



"In the late 1940s conservation icon Aldo Leopold called the r...

Milkweed Ethics

The last few days I've been dividiing and planting out milkweed seedlings that I winter sowed last year; they've grown into healthy young plants this whole summer. I was able to get about a half dozen common milkweed, and maybe a dozen swamp milkweed.





Asclepias incarnata has great fall color!

Every day I read an article about the 80% drop in numbers of last winter's monarch population in Mexico, and then a 90% drop in the North America summer population this year. You've got logging in Me...

October Flowers and Grasses Washed in Light

Someday I'll have the garden of my dreams, but for now I'll have to live with this. I can manage.






 











Cheating with Liatirs mucronata -- it's native to the southern Plains and so blooms later here.



10-12' ironweed







2" of rain last week. Very nice.

Seed Me

27 lunch bags and counting. I figure I'll make it to 40. The plan is to winter sow as many species as I can (in pots and beds), and then, perhaps, use most of the seed to start a nursery business on an acreage next year. Maybe. For now, the kitchen table is serving prairie.

You Can Garden How You Want, But....

.... the ethical imperative to garden differently is glaring. This from AMERICAN GREEN by Ted Steinberg:



1) Between 1994 and 2004, an estimated average of 75,884 Americans each year were injured using lawn mowers, or roughly the same number of people injured by firearms.



2) Using a gas-powered leaf blower for half an hour creates as many polluting hydrocarbon emissions as driving a car 7,700 miles at a speed of 30mph.



3) Approximately 7 million birds die each year because of lawn-care pest...