Smiling Sun Gardens

03/22/2024

Happy !

Our mission is to sustain and improve the water resources of Springfield and Greene County through education and effective management of the region’s watersheds. 💧

03/22/2024

One of the most notable heralds of spring in the eastern United States is the profuse blooming of ornamental pear trees in front yards and along city streets. The Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), and particularly its many cultivars such as ‘Bradford’, ‘Cleveland Select’, and ‘Aristocrat......

03/03/2024

03/01/2024

Do you have a Callery (Bradford) pear on your property? Sign up for Missouri Invasive Plant Council's annual buy-back event March 15 - April 15! Remove this invasive tree from your property and receive a FREE, native tree to replace it! Learn more online at https://moinvasives.org/2024/01/12/callery-pear-buyback-2024/?fbclid=IwAR0MlAP-WO388Xu0iyL2fWgIsG0ICX7t27Q4Jj6-nAUqX_pNCjquGKC6CX0

02/02/2024

01/18/2024

If you have a turfgrass lawn on most of your property, your yard is not pristine. It is undergrown.

If you or your lawn service company apply herbicides, insecticides, or synthetic fertilizers, your yard is not immaculate. It is contaminated.

If you regularly mow down whatever strip of land you may have under your purview, you might think you’re keeping up with your human neighbors. But you’re killing your wild neighbors.

Industry portrayals of what constitutes "normalcy" have infected our culture for so many decades that they’ve become the unquestioned default. The perfunctory use of terms like “overgrown,” “messy,” “damage,” “pest,” “nuisance,” “weed,” and “aggressive” is so ubiquitous that I’ve spent the past dozen years dismantling this outdated vernacular in my presentations and conversations with reporters. Our tendency toward binary thinking has long divided the natural world into false dichotomies like “pest” vs. “beneficial,” a construct that immediately sets up any insect not deemed worthy in agricultural settings as suspect at best.

Those same black-and-white divisions make their way into the journalistic lexicon, where they’re often stated as fact, without reflection or exploration. When my sister Janet Crouch’s successful battle to save her vibrant wildlife garden from an overreaching HOA was featured in the New York Times, I was surprised to open my daily Times email digest to this biased synopsis of the piece: “A couple wanting to keep their yard overgrown ended up changing state law.”

That was clearly the word choice of the email writer, who had not seen the Crouches’ garden. Nowhere in the original, thoughtful article by Times reporter Cara Buckley did Janet or her husband, Jeff, say they were nurturing an “overgrown” yard. Buckley herself described the garden as a thriving, beloved sanctuary filled with butterflies and birds. As she noted in her narrative, only a single complaining neighbor had used the negative, vague term in his arguments for smothering the whole community in turfgrass.

As a former newspaper journalist myself, I thought the writer of the Times newsletter might appreciate a sincere note about the mischaracterization, so I emailed him the following message:

READ MORE of my latest post, "Is Your Yard Undergrown?": https://www.humanegardener.com/is-your-yard-undergrown-not-overgrown/

11/16/2023

Personally, I’ve ‘advanced’ from a 6b to a 7a.

The USDA has just released a new Plant Hardiness Zone Map, the first new version since 2012. The map is based on 30-year averages (1991 to 2020) for the lowest annual winter temperatures. The new data, along with the addition of more temperature stations and better mapping techniques, shifted about half the country into a warmer half-zone (such as Zone 6a to 6b). Find your current zone by entering your ZIP code on the map at this link: https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/