Posted by Gardener Marc | Posted in Landscaping | Posted on 06-06-2011
If you are starting a garden or if you are searching ideas, howto do that, you should also think about the question, if you want birds in your garden, especially if you like organic gardening.
Here are some tips and tricks:
You may select from many plant varieties for your home garden. Every landscape planting needs at least a few conifers (evergreens) if it is to have maximum value for songbirds. Spruce, arborvitae (white cedar), junipers, yew, pines, and firs provide excellent nesting cover and winter shelter. Conifers also make excellent windbreaks for birdfeeders during winter.
The different serviceberries or juneberries make attractive small trees or shrubs. They bear abundant edible fruit in early summer and many berry-eating birds like them.
Most dogwoods adapt well to home garden, and many bird species eat their fruits. The gray dogwood is an excellent shrub for planting at home and bears an abundant crop of white fruits. The redosier dogwood, which likes moist soil, is a good background plant for your pool. It has bright red twigs in winter, and its white fruit catches the eye of birds.
Hawthorns and thornapples are ranked as the best small trees for landscaping with small houses outside the city. Some variety’s fruits drop in early fall, but those of the cockspur hawthorn and Washington hawthorn are retained all winter long. These trees provide excellent places for many songbirds and, because of their thorny stems, cats don’t like them.
The American elder or common elderberry is a large shrub which bears alot of fruits. The plant might be a bit wide for home landscaping, but is a good shrub for gardeners with a huge garden. It has large, flat, attractive clusters of white flowers in spring, followed by purple to black fruit in late summer. Yellow warblers and goldfinches usually love this shrubs. Although like to birds nest there, some trees and shrubs tend to become weedy. You should control Tartarian honeysuckle, multiflora rose, buckthorn and autumnolive closely. Mulberry is very attractive to robins but the ripe fruits, messy purplish bird droppings, and weedy nature generally make it a tree to avoid.
For food in late fall and winter, the American cranberrybush viburnum and the nannyberry viburnum are very useful. Both are excellent large shrubs for landscape plantings. The American cranberrybush has beautiful red fruits, that grosbeaks and cedar waxwings especially like, and nannyberry has quite large bluish fruits. Either shrub often attracts cardinals if there are any in your area. Cranberrybush viburnum berries usually remain untouched until late winter or early spring after they have frozen and thawed some times. Avoid European cranberrybush, birds do not like and eat their berrys.