Judith Larner Lowry

The Landscaping Ideas of Jays: A Natural History of the Backyard Restoration Garden by Judith Larner Lowry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Elegantly organized by season, this lyrical yet practical guide to backyard restoration gardening celebrates the beauty, the challenges and the rewards of growing native plants at home. Judith Larner Lowry,winner or the prestigious John Burroughs award, here builds on themes from her best-selling Gardening With a Wild Heart, which introduced restoration gardening as a new way of thinking about land and people. Drawing on experiences from her own garden, Lowry offers guidance on how to plan a landscape with birds, plants, and insects in mind: how to shape it with trees and shrubs, paths and trails, ponds, and other features and how to cultivate, maintain,and harvest seeds and food from a diverse array of native annuals and perennials. Along the way, she exposes us to information and insights from indigenous traditions, ethnobotany, local history, ornithology, entomology, and restoration ecology."
~~back cover

Sounds pretty dull and dry, doesn't it? But it's not -- it's an enchanting book, and one that made me start thinking about the "web of life": how the loss of native plants dooms the animals and insects and birds that depend on those plants for food, shelter, reproduction, etc. It's made me itchy to try to restore my suburban yard, something I never thought I'd be at all anxious to do.