04/22/2026
Happy Earth Day!
The red maple that I planted on earth day last year survived the summer drought and the frigid winter!
This year I tore out a bed of highly invasive vinca/periwinkle and sweet woodruff (and god-awful “landscape fabric” which did exactly zero to prevent weeds, but instead smothered and compressed the soil, negatively impacting soil quality) and planted some NATIVE PLANTS that love the shade and acidic soil under this (non-native) Norway spruce. Their roots will do the work for me to break up the soil and bring it back to good health.
I was able to add a few groupings of different species. The shrub in the middle is our native hydrangea arborescens. There’s also foam flower (tiarella), coral bells (heuchera), wintergreen (gaultheria procumbens), and some volunteer Virginia creeper (parthenocissus quinquefolia)- which happily grows all over our property, and I will be transplanting to the front hillside as a sprawling ground cover. It’s sparse now, but it will fill in, especially the foam flowers and Virginia creeper.
If planting natives is a new concept to you, I highly encourage you to look up PA local entomologist Doug Tallamy, and his research findings regarding the drastic and accelerating decline of insect populations in North America (and, consequently, the similar demise of our birds… making its way up the food chain).
Somebody was shocked that I was planting in my garden, and asked “aren’t you worried about frost, planting before Mother’s Day?”. Nope. These are all natives. They have evolved over thousands of years to thrive in these conditions. No need to wait. If we have a really hard freeze, I might cover them just to be safe.
And all that ground cover that I pulled… I know some folks would give it away for others to plant in their garden (to the detriment of our ecosystem), but I’m trashing all of it so as not to further the spread of invasive plants
If you read this far, thank you!
If anyone can guess the name of the only other entomologist I’ve ever known about or referenced, I’ll pot up some native sedum ternatum (stonecrop) as a prize!
