Are you interested Butterfly Gardening...

This part one from a presentation that I did for New Port Richey's Ecofest in October 2013

Butterfly Gardening

First and most importantly, establishing a butterfly garden what you are doing, or should be doing is establishing an Ecosystem Garden.

What is this?  Ecosystem Gardening is about giving a little back to wildlife

It’s a way of gardening sustainably, conserving natural resources, and creating welcoming habitats for wildlife in our gardens so that we will attract more birds, butterflies, pollinators, bats, and other wildlife. We can learn to reconcile our land use to support the needs of wildlife.

Our role as is first to take a gardeners version of the Hippocratic Oath: FIRST, DO NO HARM.

Michael Rosenzweig, in Win-Win Ecology, calls this process reconciliation ecology, which he defines as “the science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play.”

According to Rosenzweig, we can learn to adapt our use of the land around us so that other species can share this land with us. This requires a mental shift in our approach to land use: every lawn need not look like a golf course; every park need not look like a savannah or every schoolyard a desert.

To practice reconciliation we will need to learn what elements of habitat are necessary for other species and then incorporate these elements into the design of our wildlife gardens.

And so it goes on as more and more people come together with a common goal in mind. But for now, we start with our own wildlife gardens