« Wicker Patio Furniture | Home | LIGHT UP YOUR NIGHTS »
DON`T FORGET TO FEED THE BIRDS THIS WINTER
By John | January 10, 2008
Birds are the voice of the garden, and their colors and motion brighten any season. But since bleak winters present an avian survival test, now is the time to think about doing the birds, and your yard, a favour.
A garden with many different species of plants and an assortment of habitats from flower beds and shrubs to coniferous and deciduous trees helps compensate for the food, cover, and nesting places that have been lost in the wild through overdevelopment and the ubiquitous monoculture of the lawn. By mixing plant heights among these habitats, you’ll encourage a wide variety of bird species to find their particular niches, like tenants in an open air apartment house not that there won’t be some interesting squabbles among screeching blue jays, territorial mockingbirds, and bossy starlings and sparrows. For your region, there are many wonderful bird-favored ornamental plants to bring life and color to the garden. To begin at the largest scale, put in a few needled evergreens: Lots of birds relish the seeds found in the cones of pine, fir, spruce, and hemlock. One or two stately shade trees are also a boon to the bird-watcher. The aristocratic oaks scarlet, pin, white and northern red all bear savory acorns, and their benign, deep root systems make underplanting easy. Another native, the sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua, has brilliant plum red autumn foliage and spiky rounded fruits harboring seeds with beak appeal.
Gardens of any size can accommodate smaller berry or fruit bearing trees. Unfortunately, crab apple and native flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, are subject to serious diseases, but for palatability and aesthetics they rank at the top. If you’re afraid to take any chances, substitute the Korean dogwood, Cornus kousa. Or there’s the Washington hawthorn, Crataegus phaenopyrum, a lovely tree with late-spring white flowers, leaves that turn orange red in fall, and red berries that last into winter.
Besides punctuating the landscape with vertical accents of silver, gray green, and blue, junipers provide sturdy nest sites and opalescent blue berries irresistible to many birds. Juniperus virginiana ‘Glauca’ and J. scopulorum ‘Blue Heaven’ and ‘Moffetii’ yield especially good crops. Birds also relish the berries of American holly, Ilex opaca, the traditional holiday symbol. My favorite holly is the shrubby deciduous winterberry, I. verticillata ‘Winter Red,’ a fine textured cultivar. As with I. opaca, you need both a male and a female plant in the neighborhood to get fruit. Winterberries thrive in light shade and moist soil, so they would be ideal growing under an oak or a sweetgum.
Native chokeberry, Aronia arbutifolia, a tall deciduous shrub with scarlet autumn leaves, has bright red berries that many birds eat when other sources of food are depleted. The velvety maroon, cone-shaped fruit of the staghorn sumac, Rhus typhina, is also a cold-weather lifesaver. Rose hips are a staple, too, and the prickly canes that carry them are effective defenses for nests. Single and semidouble flowered cultivars (the double ones don’t yield hips) of Rosa rugosa, such as Blanc Double de Coubert’ and `Alba’, all make superb hedges, while the taller, more gracefully arching hip bearers R. glauca and R. moyesii are good individual specimens.
Handsome smaller shrubs for winter fruit include American and European cranberry bush, Viburnum trilobum and V. opulus; Cotoneaster horizontalis; Berberis koreana; hardy forms of firethorn (I suggest Pyracantha coccinea ‘Chadwickii’ or ‘Lalandei’); white fruited snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus; and purple fruited beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma.
Leave the seed heads on your ornamental grasses and late summer and autumn flowers. Birds enjoy feasting on asters, sunflowers, cosmos, verbena, zinnias, and coreopsis. And for the gardener, watching a finch perch on chocolate rudbeckia buttons in the snow or glimpsing a cardinal among holly berries that match his plumage is one of winter’s great delights.
Topics: Misc |
