Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our own Back Yards, by Sara Stein. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993

‘Noah’s Garden’ was one of the early books advocating using native plants and gardening for the wildlife. Stein relates, in wandering fashion, the long process she and her husband undertook of returning a large site to something sustainable and critter friendly- both macro and micro. She shows the problem with having a lawn instead of a meadow, and with planting exotic (non-native plants) to the exclusion of natives. Not having a landscape that provides food and shelter to native insects, birds, and mammals means that pest species numbers just explode with nothing to keep them in check. And that point is where people end up reaching for the spray gun.

It’s a very interesting book for the most part, although it bogs down near the end and I started skimming for a while. There are sources that go into more detail about meadows, pest species, and gardening for wildlife available now, but it’s a nice starting point. Four stars.