Hilltop Natives

09/04/2026

I’m open today and tomorrow (Friday and Saturday). Friday usual hours, 11-6.

Saturday I’ll be closing early, around 3:30 pm. Family event. 😀

09/03/2026

And don’t forget to use “buckets of doom”!!
Nontoxic mosquito prevention.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZIb9GQDjAS/?igsi=MWlqd3N3cThiYmM1ZQ==

It’s that time of year again - the risk of West Nile Virus is now Moderate in Norwood. Mosquito pools in the county have turned up positive and it’s possible that mosquitoes in the area carry the virus.

What to do:

- Wear mosquito repellent when outdoors, especially between dusk and dawn
- Dump out any standing water on your property twice a week. Mosquitoes can breed in as little as a soda cap full of water!
- Wear long sleeves and long pants between dusk and dawn
- Check window screens for holes and repair as needed

For more information, check out https://www.mass.gov/info-details/mosquito-borne-disease-prevention

09/03/2026

The weather is starting to change. You can feel it in the air, especially earlier in the day. And although I know it is not officially fall yet, it’s definitely my favorite time of the year to plant. As we head towards cooler weather, the soil begins to cool, and the air is cooling, too. I’m hoping for a rainy fall. All this helps your new plants and seedlings to settle in and stretch their roots. They will be ready for a New England winter, and come spring, seedlings will already be in their second year of growth!

NEW this week:

* NE Blazing star (Liatris novae-angliae)
Small button-like flowers bloom along a tall stem. This is a great plant for late season pollinators, including butterflies, bees, moths, hummingbirds, songbirds. Seed heads feed birds like finches. Loves dry, sandy soil. Drought tolerant. Rare, and the only liatris native to MA. Deer resistant.

* Swamp milkweed (asclepias incarnata)
Important food source for monarchs. Clumping growth habit makes this a well-behaved milkweed. Attracts bees, butterflies, moths to its nectar rich blooms. Seedheads feed birds. Great in a rain garden. Can handle average soil if well watered for the first year. Fragrance is reminiscent of vanilla. Deer resistant. (Limited quantities)

Open Thursday, Friday, Saturday 11-6. Stop on by!

Inventory is in the comments.

09/03/2026

Chickadees!

That 30% brain expansion is only the beginning of the story. The real marvel is what's happening inside those new neurons — and why the whole system exists in the first place.

The black-capped chickadee weighs about as much as four paperclips. It lives through winters where temperatures plunge well below zero, where snow buries every branch and hollow for months at a stretch. There is no grocery store. There is no backup plan. There is only what the bird hid in October, and whether the bird can remember where it is in February.

So the chickadee does something no other animal does quite so dramatically. As the days shorten in late summer, a flood of new brain cells pours into the part of the brain that handles memory and location — the same region humans rely on when navigating an unfamiliar city. The chickadee's version swells nearly a third larger than it was in July. Not metaphorically larger. Physically, measurably, anatomically larger. The skull doesn't grow. The brain simply reorganizes what's already inside it, compressing older cells to make room for this seasonal surge.

And those new neurons get to work immediately. A chickadee doesn't cache randomly. It selects specific spots — a particular crook in a specific branch, the underside of a single curling piece of bark on one tree among thousands — and it files the coordinates with a precision that makes human spatial memory look clumsy. Researchers estimate a single bird can remember up to 500,000 individual hiding spots across a territory that spans dozens of acres, all simultaneously, all retrievable months later under feet of snow.

The retrieval isn't guesswork. Studies show chickadees fly directly to cache sites with minimal searching, even when researchers artificially rearrange landmarks to throw them off. The memory is not approximate. It is exact.

Then spring arrives. The snow melts. The caches are eaten or spoiled or gone. And the brain, with no further use for that enormous filing system, quietly sheds what it no longer needs. The extra neurons dissolve. The memory center contracts back to its summer size. The bird doesn't grieve the lost capacity. It simply waits for the days to shorten again.

A brain that builds itself for winter and dismantles itself for spring isn't a curiosity. It's proof that intelligence isn't fixed — it's seasonal.

The mind, it turns out, knows when to let go. [51KED]

09/02/2026

I sent a plant home with a customer today, with a firefly from my yard. You’re welcome.

All the bugs wanna hang out here at the Dedham Farmers Market. I also saw a beautiful yellow butterfly that flew off before I could snap a pic.

09/02/2026

The rewilding of America

Thirty-two thousand homes gone — and the land locked shut forever. That's not demolition for the sake of clearing space. That's the beginning of something much older than concrete moving back into a place it never really left.

The program works like this. A home floods repeatedly. The federal government buys it, tears it down, and places a permanent deed restriction on the parcel. No future owner can rebuild. No developer can flip it. The land enters a kind of legal silence, and then nature fills that silence with extraordinary speed.

Within a single growing season, grasses push through the disturbed soil where a foundation once sat. Woody shrubs follow. Give it two or three years and the outline of a former subdivision begins to blur. Songbirds appear. Frogs find standing water. Insects colonize the stems of plants that didn't exist there twelve months earlier. The river, freed from the hard edge of a mowed lawn or a paved driveway, begins to wander back toward its old channels — the ones it used for thousands of years before roads and rooftops interrupted the flow.

And here's where the biology gets genuinely astonishing. A floodplain isn't just habitat. It's a pressure valve for an entire watershed. When storms push water over riverbanks, a functioning floodplain spreads that water out, slows it down, and lets it soak into the soil rather than race downstream in a destructive wall. Every parcel returned to open space is one more sponge added to a system that desperately needs them. Communities downstream feel this. Flood peaks drop. Infrastructure survives storms it couldn't survive before. The math is quiet but it's real.

Wetland plants do something even more specific. Their root systems stabilize banks that erosion had been chewing away for decades. Their stems slow moving water during flood events, causing sediment to drop out and rebuild the very soil layers that agriculture and construction had stripped. The land doesn't just recover — it rebuilds itself from the bottom up, layer by layer, season by season.

Since 1989, more than 3,100 completed projects have spent $1.73 billion reclaiming this ground. Another 637 active projects are currently underway, backed by over a billion more in committed funds across 42 states and territories. That's not a small experiment. That's a quiet rewilding of the American river corridor, one demolished foundation at a time.

The most powerful thing a map can show is what's no longer there. [5EDI8]

09/02/2026

Monarch journeys

08/28/2026

I’m in the nursery today (Friday) until 6 pm.

Saturday you will find me at Norwood Day. I’ll have plants, books and tools. Stop on by!