Nancy Lawson's Blog

Decades-old plant lists remind me that before social media and instant communication, there was real conversation and connection and community. There still is, but you have to cultivate it.

Journalists often ask for my origin story. I’ve learned to respond with quick, digestible answers, rooted in certain revelatory experiences about interdependencies of native plants and wildlife.

But the truth is less straightforward. Many of the decisions we make and the paths we take grow from the accumulat...

Most native bees nest in the ground, rarely if ever sting, and are tremendously important pollinators. Learn what you can do to help (and to stop inadvertently harming them).

To grow plants, we can tap into abundant resources for information about their preferred soils, rainfall and other conditions. But what does it take to grow a bee?

That question is top of mind for scientists studying a little-known but critical group of pollinators: the solitary native bees nesting beneath our feet.

“One o...

It doesn’t sound as soul-nurturing as braiding sweetgrass, but pulling stiltgrass has its rewards, including surprise encounters with frogs and turtles and the chance to create more habitat. Check out my list of 20 favorite natives for reclaiming ground.This mini-woodland started with volunteer tulip trees and sassafras, which sprouted among turf and stiltgrass. It’s now filled with an herbaceous layer of sedges, grasses, ferns and wildflowers, including many that sprouted on their own. (Featur...

You can have your garden and your deer too with this step-by-step guide to coexistence

When deer passed through my habitat this summer, they ate the tops off the brown-eyed Susans. They browsed low branches of walnuts and tips of swamp milkweed. They pruned black raspberries, sumacs, sassafras, shrubby St. John’s worts, common evening primroses, tall phlox, violets, fleabanes, Jerusalem artichokes, elderberries and white wood asters. They munched on pokeweed and jewelweed, wild lettuces and wil...

The ultimate local ecotype might be right outside your door, just waiting to resurface and reclaim the landIt’s likely no one planted these primroses in downtown Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. They might have been dormant in the seed bank for decades.

Common evening primrose is an outlier, always hanging around the edges of the garden party but banished from the inner circle. As its scientific name implies, Oenothera biennis has a two-year life cycle, lending it an air of unpredictability (“N...

An accidental encounter with a paper wasp underscored the importance of mindfulness. It also brought into focus a little-known truth: Humans live and walk among an extraordinary number and diversity of wasps every day without ever getting stung by these remarkable creatures.The vast majority of wasps, like this one in the Tachytes genus, are solitary and very unlikely to sting. Most make small, inconspicuous nests in the ground.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be stung on the tongue, ...

What happens to animals who venture beyond our gardens? It’s a dangerous world out there, but road ecologists are working to reconnect broken habitats. Ben Goldfarb’s captivating new book explains how.Above: A box turtle leaves the pond in my habitat. (Photo by Nancy Lawson) Featured image, top: One of many turtles rescued from the bulldozers. (Photo by Michelle Riley/The HSUS)“We inhabit a world as angular and broken as a corn maze, all edge and no heart.”—Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ec...

For too long the lawn care and pest control industries have normalized meaningless, divisive terms like “overgrown.” We need to take the language back. Once entirely turf, this area of our habitat is now filled with volunteer tulip trees and staghorn sumacs as well as sea oats, sedges, irises, ostrich ferns, sedums, Virginia bluebells, and many more native treasures. Far from being “overgrown,” it’s simply growing in as nature intended.

If you have a turfgrass lawn on most of your property...

They’re not the monsters they were once made out to be, and stepping on them isn’t effective. So why are people still unleashing their fury on spotted lanternflies, and what should we be doing instead?

I dreaded the day the first spotted lanternflies would show up in my habitat, but not for the reasons you might think. I dreaded it because I knew what would accompany the arrival of these insects in my region: a flood of frantic posts and messages sounding hyper-alarm bells: “Oh no! Is this a sp...

If your habitat sparkles, congratulations! You’re doing something right. If it doesn’t light up with insects twinkling their way through the night, read on to learn how to welcome firefly friends. The common Eastern firefly, also known as the Big Dipper, starts displaying at dusk. (Above photo: Nancy Lawson; featured image, top: Terry Priest/frfly.com)

Soon the Big Dipper fireflies will start writing their love letters across our back meadow, lighting up the tall grasses with their scrawling J-...