Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own BackyardsPublished to rave reviews in 1993, Noah's Garden shows us how our landscape style of neat yards and gardens has devastated suburban ecology, wiping out entire communities of plants and animals by stripping bare their habitats and destroying their food supplies. When Stein realized what her intensive efforts at making a traditional garden had done, she set out to "ungarden." Her book interweaves an account of her efforts with an explanation of the ecology of gardens. Noah's Garden has become the bible of the new environmental gardening movement, and the author is one of its most popular spokespersons. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 20 | |
| 34 | |
| 52 | |
| 76 | |
The Aphid on the Rose | 98 |
Where the Gone Goose Went | 120 |
In Respect of Grass | 136 |
To Plant a Prairie | 154 |
In Memoriam | 173 |
Smiles of Vanished Woods | 191 |
Revisitations | 211 |
Home Comes the Bluebird | 236 |
Appendix | 257 |
Index | 285 |
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Common terms and phrases
acre American American sycamore animals aphids aster beetles berries birch birds blades bloom blue blueberries bluebird buckthorn bush butterflies cabbage canadensis caterpillars cherry chokecherry color crop deer dogwood earthworms ecological ecosystem edge eggs European feed ferns fertility fireflies flowers forest frog fruit goldenrod grass grassland green ground grow growth gypsy moth habitat hedgerow herbivores horticultural insects ladybug land landscape lawn leaf leaves little bluestem live maple meadow milkweed moles monarch butterflies mountain laurel mowed native natural nectar NOAH'S GARDEN nursery one's patch path pests plants pollinators pond population prairie predators purple purple martins Rhododendron rock roots roses season sedge seeds serviceberry shade shore shrubs snakes soil species spray spring suburbia summer summersweet swallowtail swamp switchgrass thickets toads trees vegetation viburnum vine weed Weidemeyer's admiral western tiger swallowtail wetland wild wildflowers winter woodland woods yard yellow
Popular passages
Page 115 - The New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University welcomes the privilege of participating in international development — an important role for modern agriculture.
Page 19 - We cannot in fairness rail against those who destroy the rain forest or threaten the spotted owl when we have made our own yards uninhabitable. Yet how quickly we could grow this land, spangle it with blazing stars, stripe it with red winterberries and white summersweet, let it wave again with grass!
Page 16 - We — you and I and everyone who has a yard of any size — own a big chunk of this country. Suburban development has wrought habitat destruction on a grand scale. As these tracts expand, they increasingly squeeze the remaining natural ecosystems, fragment them, sever corridors by which plants and animals might refill the voids we have created. To reverse this process — to reconnect as many plant and animal species as we can to rebuild intelligent suburban ecosystems — requires a new kind of...
Page 124 - Ion exchange is a reversible chemical reaction wherein an ion (an atom or molecule that has lost or gained an electron and thus acquired an electrical charge) from solution is exchanged for a similarly charged ion attached to an immobile solid particle.
Page 36 - And although our summer landscape glows with deep-hued lilies and milkweeds, and glitters with black-eyed Susans, yet in actual brilliancy it must yield the palm to an English field of scarlet poppies. But when September lines the road-sides of New England with the purple of the aster, and flings its mantle of golden-rod over her hills, and fills her hollows with the pink drifts of the Joe-Pye-weed or with the intense red-purple of the iron-weed, and guards her brooks with tall ranks of yellow sunflowers...
Page 128 - Figure 4.22 would fit in an area smaller than the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Page 43 - ... synthetic pesticides for natural pest control, inorganic fertilizer for natural soil maintenance, chlorination for natural water purification, dams for flood and drought control, or air-conditioning of overheated environments. Generally, the substitutes require a large energy subsidy, thereby adding to humanity's general impact on the environment, and are not completely satisfactory even in the short run.
Page 35 - Except for the arrival of the clovers and for the constant reinforcement in the ranks of daisies and buttercups, the appearance of the fields has not altered greatly during the last two weeks. Blue flags still lift their stately heads along the water-courses, and the blossoms of the blue-eyed grass are now so large and abundant that they seem to float like a flood of color on the tops of the long grasses. I do not remember ever to have seen these flowers so vigorous and conspicuous as they are this...
Page 13 - ... with people who saw another person donate to Salvation Army solicitors. If the model is too generous, however, it may scare off potential donors who might be embarrassed about their own small contributions. Number of bystanders. As we saw in the earlier discussion of this point, the more bystanders there are, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. The setting. Being a Good Samaritan may be discouraged for many reasons. Physicians and nurses may refrain from spontaneously helping...
Page 138 - La\cu turf, rolled u grass regularly — preventing it from reaching up and flowering — forces it to sprout still more blades, more rhizomes, more roots, to become an ever more impenetrable mat until it is what its owner has worked so hard or paid so much to have: the perfect lawn, the perfect sealant through which nothing else can grow — and the perfect antithesis of an ecological system.