I was very lucky to have a few years to work with Cindy Gilberg. By the time I became interested in native plants she was already well established as an authority on native plant landscaping in the St Louis area. When I was in school converting my parents backyard lawn to a native landscape we bought the plants from Cindy's nursery. As part as our working together at Shaw Nature Reserve we would go on trips together to conferences or to collect plants. The above photo of Cindy was taken by Terri Brandt on one of our trips. She was a good companion and I never got the impression that hanging out with me was a burden to her. I loved to hear Cindy's presentations. They always provided new information and helped me become a better landscaper. She was also very funny. Cindy inspired me to start a native plant monthly newsletter when I worked at Shaw. In the 5 years I published it I ended with more then 2000 subscribers. That has been one of the more rewarding things I have done in my career. I really felt like I was making a difference in the landscaping word to make it more native plant friendly. Many of Cindy's articles were featured and she also edited my writing to help me improve. Towards the end of her life Cindy continued to write for the newsletter and the days she came to the office were something to look forward too. I feel like I understand her determination better now as I have my own battle with cancer. The inspiration to write is hard to find when you are completely exhausted. She must have had so much more to say.

Sometimes your life crosses paths with someone over and over again. If they are a person you admire it is a great chance to learn new things and grow each time. Jan Philips has been an influence on my life for as long as I can remember. I first met Jan as a friend of my dad's. She and my dad were both outdoor educators so we went on cool trips like caving and rock climbing. From these trips I learned to love and feel confident in natural areas. Soon after that she became the principal of my grade school. I was a good student so I remember her as being the cool sub who would take us on spontaneous trips to the park to draw plants and made us pancakes out of dandelions and real maple syrup. I learned to really look closely at plants to draw them and identify them as edibles. During college and my early career she was an author that I knew. She wrote Wild Edibles of Missouri, which has been the authority on the subject for the last 40 years. I treasure my autographed copy and like to share what I have learned from the book with my friends. Now she is the major philanthropist supporting one of the landscapes I work on. It is a really neat sustainable landscape with rainscaping, a classroom, called the Jan Phillips Learning Center, and nature preserve. Working on this landscape has provided new challenges for me and many rewards as I watch it develop. Our paths have crossed in many ways and I have been challenged and improved each time.

I was lucky to spend 13 years working with Terri at Shaw Nature Reserve. The best learning experience is to be immersed in a workplace filled with knowledgeable coworkers and curious volunteers. Just sitting in the office I picked up so much knowledge from questions being asked and answered. Terri is a treasure trove of knowledge about native plants. She knows when to collect the seeds, how to grow the plants, the best way to arrange the plants in the garden, and how to care for a healthy sustainable garden. All the gardens in the Whitmire Wildflower Garden have been touched by Terri and it shows. Terri also supported me as a blossoming adult. She was always there to encourage and support me. She included me in her circle of friends even though I was just the inexperienced kid. She knew when I was stressed about an upcoming event and would bring me chocolates. Even now that I have moved on to my own business and she has retired we keep in touch, go on trips to the Black River together, and visit each other's gardens. I am so lucky to have Terri in my life and have learned much from her.

Does there come a point in everyone's career where a bunch of their mentors retire at once? I have felt that way recently. My coworkers at Shaw Nature Reserve, Terri Brandt and James Trager and also the director, John Beher. My friend Tim Wood who helped me land my first independent landscaping job. Sam Faith, who has mentored me in my volunteer interests in outdoor education. It is hard not to feel uprooted as the people I'm used to conversing with regularly find new interests. It is nice to have a support network of native plant nerds to bounce questions off. I guess this means it is my turn to become the mentor to someone just getting started in native plant landscaping. How does one become a mentor? If you are a mentor do you even know it? Having mentors was so valuable to me in my career so far, keeping me on track, encouraging me to push myself to do more, giving me the courage to move beyond my comfort zone. I want to give that same opportunity to someone else. Maybe only for the selfish reason of seeing the native plant movement continue beyond when I am no longer able to help.

One of my favorite ways to wind down after a hard day is to have a margarita out on our deck and watch the sun set. Shortly after sunset is a time that we call bat 30. The bats come out at dusk and we can watch their silhouettes as they do loopdeloops across our yard. Their flight pattern is a predictable wide circle around the garden with little darts off in any direction to snatch up an unsuspecting insect. Usually we see about 4 bats at a time but it is hard to tell. Sometimes they swoop so close that we can hear the air as they rush by. I'm guessing when they swoop low over me I was just saved from a mosquito bite. Common backyard bats are the big brown bat which often lives in peoples attics or garages and the red bat which lives in trees under bark. I was lucky enough to be part of a bat survey where we monitored the calls of the bats as they flew around the yard at night. I recorded calls from not only the big brown and the red bat but also the endangered Indiana bat. I was really excited to find out that my garden is providing habitat for an endangered species. Probably my Indiana bats were part of the colony that over winters in cliff cave but in the summer forages in a wider area, including my garden. To help attract bats to our yard we added two bat houses that we mounted on either side of our chimney. So far no bats have moved into the houses but I guess that just means that there is plenty of excellent bat habitat in the area and they don't need our house. We leave the houses up because we want the bats to have a place to live if their tree falls down or someone fixes the hole in their attic. Bat house designs are available from Bat Conservation International or ready to go houses can be bought at many wildflower markets. Personally, I think bats are pretty cute. I have never had one get in my hair although I have had a few fly very close. I have heard them referred to as sky puppies which is fitting with their funny little faces and fury bodies. They are so acrobatic in the sky and so much fun to watch. I also enjoy the fact that I know they are eating mosquitoes and other bugs in my yard. They are my favorite garden mammal and they are welcome in my backyard any time.

It is always so exciting to see the first green leaves pop out of the spring soil. A little walk around my garden and I saw spring beauty, trout lily, rue anemone, Dutchmen's britches, blood root, and tooth wort showing some leaves. Identifying flowers without blooms is always more challenging and leaves are not even shown in many wildflower ID guides. Each spring is like a quiz to see which plants I remember and how quickly their names and and an image of their bloom pops into my head. Spring beauty has very thin leaves and the nodding buds on a stalk in between. Trout lily is one of the easier ones since the leaves are thick and wide and covered with brown splotches just like a trout. Rue anemone leaves are tiny and there is usually a whole bunch of them in a colony together. Dutchmen's britches has feathery leaves. Blood root leaves are one of my favorite because they come out in a tight swirl that slowly unfurls into a large many lobbed leaf. Tooth wort has flower stalks like spring beauty and leaves like a very slender red maple. Another favorite of mine is the wild ginger because they remind me of little ears peaking out of the ground so I whisper to them that it is spring.

As I read Doug Tallamy's new book "Nature's Best Hope" I think about how great it would be if this book was in the hands of our local law and policy makers. I want to send a copy to the weed ordinance enforcers, the crew that clears the power lines, my county park superintendent, and my neighbors. I know there are some people who won't bother to read it but most people do care and only need the right information provided to them to become educated citizens that make decisions that protect nature. Like Tallamy's last book "Bringing Nature Home" this new book also encourages us that our best chance at saving nature as we know it is to start in our own yard. We often are discouraged when we here reports about declining populations of monarchs, bees, and that all insects are vanishing at an alarming rate. A study released a few months ago claims that 25% of north american birds, that is 3 billion, have disappeared in the last 50 years. We need to think global and act local because each of us has influence over a piece of this earth. If all private landowners were to take care of their own property by removing invasives and planting native plants we could make large parcels of ground friendly to biodiversity. Even if we all planted just one native tree in our quarter acre properties it would make a huge difference to habitat availability for migrating birds. In "Nature's Best Hope" Tallamy outlines a ten step process for each of us to do our part in the creation of what he calls Homegrown National Park. This book will give you hope and an action plan as well as several good talking point for the next time you see your neighbor. So I encourage everyone to buy a copy of this new book, read it yourself and then pass it on to someone who needs to read it, someone outside of your native plant circle. Give it to your preacher, your council member, and the president of your neighborhood association. Now I'm looking at my bookshelf and I have so many books I love. I should loan them all out so they can have as big of an influence on someone else as they have had on me. Let the books be read! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43212849-nature-s-best-hope

When I was a kid I had a poster called Roadside Wildflowers of Kansas. I would stare at it as I lay in bed and memorize the flowers. I wanted to have a name for the plants I saw out in nature. I knew I loved the plants even before I knew their name but once I had the name I could share with others. As a kid I wanted to share everything I experienced and asked even more questions to understand every little mystery. I know that many of my friends have had similar experiences of finding a love and curiosity about nature when they were very young. Take some time to think back to your first nature experiences and what you found wonderful and mysterious and peaked your curiosity. What made you first fall in love with the outdoors? As a community we need to make sure that children are still having nature experiences. We need kids to learn to love plants early in life. We protect what we love. Take a kid outside and help them find wonder in nature.

I have no idea how to quilt but I went to a quilting presentation recently because it was called Sew Native which sounded interesting. It was a great presentation about how many quilt patterns are inspired by nature and how easy it is to invent a new quilt pattern just by looking around outside. She had a beautiful quilt block that was based on a whichhazel flower with four crinkly yellow petals. It made me want to make a note this winter to go out in the snow and take a careful look at those tiny flowers. Many flower and other plant parts are very geometric and are easy to copy on graph paper for other types of projects. Her presentation did not inspire me to start quilting but to be more mindful of including nature in my craft projects. Our gardens are full of inspiration for art if we just go out and look. Maybe I can make some cool art based on a seed box flower.

I'm sorry to tell you that your butterfly bush is not a native plant. This news is sometimes shocking but still true. However, the jury is still out on whether it is an invasive or just a harmless ornamental. I haven't noticed butterfly bush invading woodlots and natural areas the way that bush honeysuckle does. In my garden it does reseed itself around the yard. A weedy shrub that only germinates in cultivated areas is not a threat to the environment, only to our gardens. Last summer on my way to dinner I drove through Crondelet park and just happened to see a shrub clinging to the side of an abandoned building. At first I thought it must be a honeysuckle growing up there in such an inhospitable habitat but on closer inspection it had purple flowers. So I got out of my car and took some photos of the butterfly bush in it's strange habitat. The side of a building in not a cultivated space but this shrub was obviously thriving and ready to reproduce. Have you noticed any butterfly bush that have escaped cultivation? Should we be worried about it invading natural areas? Should we be using it in our landscapes?

We like to put plants into categories. Categorizing a plant under one of the above categories can help us decide if we want to add that species to our yard or not. Understanding how a category is defined can help give meaning to the label. Additionally, knowing that the label is subjective to the experience of the gardener can add flexibility to your choice of plants. A native plant is a species that is local to this area. Native can be subject to how large of an area one considers to be local and what period of time we are looking at. Usually the area considered is the state of Missouri and the time period is when European settlers first came to the area because that is the first detailed record available of the flora. However, in the St Louis area it makes more sense to consider east central Missouri and west central Illinois to be the local area. Exotic plants are non native plants. Many exotic plants can not withstand our climate and die during the winter. An exotic plant is also a plant out of place, one without natural predators. Exotic plants that are able to handle the extreme climate of Missouri often earn the title exotic invasive because they take over our natural areas without any control to stop their reproduction. The invasive plant is the type to avoid. Being categorized as invasive is a big warning label that you do not want this plant in your yard. Even if you have an invasive plant in your garden that is well behaved it still can be harming natural areas if a bird picks up a seed and deposits it in a new place. Invasive plants are the biggest environmental threat to our existing nature reserves. Stop the spread of invasive species by eliminating them from our home gardens and educating friends and neighbors to do the same. Aggressive plants can be garden worthy if they receive enough care. Aggressive plants are often found in nature colonizing recently disturbed sites. They are the healers of natural areas and give way to more established plants over time. In our gardens aggressive plants can be problematic because a garden area is constantly being disturbed with our obsessive tinkering. Methods for gardening with aggressive plants include dead heading, root barriers, isolation, keeping low in the watershed, and pairing with equally aggressive plants. Limit opportunities for seed dispersal and root travel. Be careful to keep your composting area clear of viable plant parts. Categories like aggressive can be very subjective to the experience of the gardener.

Did you know that local St Louis streams have been measured to have salt concentrations higher then sea water? This is a major problem for our local ecosystems because the freshwater critters in the creak can not withstand high salt levels. If the critters all die there is no food for the fish and birds that eat them. The stream becomes out of balance and can cause algae blooms. Another bad side effect is more mosquitoes because there will be fewer predators of mosquito aquatic larvae. Dragonfly and damselfly larvae that live in our local streams are sensitive to stream pollutants. These high salt levels usually occur in winter when roadways are salted in preparation for an upcoming ice storm. As the snow and ice melt, all that salt goes into the storm sewers and flows into the creek. One of the worst sources of stream contamination is from road salt piles that are left outside uncovered. If you see an uncovered salt pile report it to  the sewer district and they will get a team out to get the problem resolved. Ongoing research in St Louis County involves citizen scientists across St Louis that measure water quality throughout the winter. I joined the monitoring group a few years ago and adopted my local stream and go out once a week to monitor which sometimes involves breaking the ice to get a sample. One benefit I get from this weekly trip to the creek is a chance to take in the beauty of the ice formations at the edge of the water and occasional visits from ducks and other wildlife. It is easy to forget to stop and enjoy the serenity of the outdoors in winter when I'm trying to keep my fingers from freezing. There are several things you can do to help keep salt out of our creeks. Use only as much salt as you need on your driveway and sidewalks and try switching to using sand or cat litter instead. When you visit a large parking lot at your school, church, or gym speak to the staff about the impact of salt on the local stream. Talk to your community about using brine instead of salt on streets because it is less harmful and is also usually cheaper. Too much salt can also kill lawns, rust cars, and damage roads.