Environmental News

Non-native plants are one of many factors driving global declines in insect populations – but you can help

Although autumn is generally the best time to add native plants to your landscape, spring is the next best time.

If you walk briskly, you could traverse the winding path that runs through the Manhattan Beach Botanical Garden in a very short time. Yet the fact that the garden is small makes each plant that much more precious to behold. 

Unlike most botanical gardens, where one day is never enough to appreciate everything there is to see, it’s different here. You can take long looks at each specimen on display and not feel you might be missing out on something if you linger more than a few moments over any particular plant.

And how to fix it.

Follow this path to the hotline page now, and get all of the information you need to find dazzling displays, be they big and bloomful or small and stunning, during the spring of 2021. And that hotline voice you hear? It’s Emmy Award-winning actor Joe Spano, “the Voice of the Wild Flower Hotline.”

Officials are urging people to take down their feeders, where birds are congregating and spreading a bacterial infection.

In recent years, the number of monarch butterflies has been declining steeply. But you can invite them back into your garden by planting the right kind of native plants and using the correct gardening techniques. 

Tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood, the two-plus acre Point Loma Native Plant Garden is a neighborhood prize and a hidden gem.

For thousands of years, a beautiful and hardy species of bunchgrass grew in small meadows in the mountains and foothills of California, including in the Tehachapi Mountains.