It’s tough to top the beauty of wild columbine’s.  They’re my hands-down favorite flowering plant in the Turner House native landscape.

This post will be a little off subject, but still has many direct and indirect influences on what kind of wildlife species might use our backyards. North Carolina State University has just completed its instructional website on native plant landscaping. Turner House, a disjunct building from the rest of campus, is the department building for fisheries and wildlife sciences. It is also where I have my office.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Chris Moorman planned a native plant landscape design and with the help of many students, transformed the urban backyard into a native plant garden, complete with a small yard pond and irrigation system. As a follow-up, brochures have been made about the landscape project and the benefits of using native plants to landscape.

The new website “Going Native” has some great pages on how to design a landscape plan for your yard, a warning page highlighting invasive exotic landscape plants, a page highlighting great native plants to substitute and reasons why native plants are the up-and-coming thing for landscaping.