Native Plants

Jennifer Ryan doesn't keep records, but something unusual has been happening in her Roxborough community garden the last couple of years. "The mulberries are dropping earlier," she says. "We notice because it's a giant mess. " It's too soon to tell whether Ryan's mulberry mess is related to changing climate patterns. Best to watch it for another century or so. Zoe Panchen did the next best thing: She looked back. Panchen, a June graduate of the Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture at the University of Delaware, spent the last two years researching 150 years of plant and climate records in the Philadelphia area for her master's degree thesis.

John F. Collins, 75, a landscape architect, urban planner, nurseryman, and educator, died of complications of Parkinson's disease Friday, Aug. 5, at home. Among Mr. Collins' projects were Schuylkill River Park; the renovation of the Market East corridor with wider sidewalks, bus shelters, trees, and flower boxes; the greenways of Society Hill; and pocket parks throughout Center City. He first drew plans for Schuylkill River Park in 1965. Forty years later, the 1.2-mile riverfront path was finally opened to pedestrians and bicyclists.

The Wiggles from PBS Kids Sprout network brings its Big Birthday Tour to the Tower Theatre on Saturday, celebrating its 20th anniversary as a musical group, with proceeds benefiting a charity to help young children succeed in school through reading. Kids can party with the Wiggles during the 11:30 a.m. or 3 p.m. show. Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Capt. Feathersword, Wags the Dog, Dorothy the Dinosaur, and Henry the Octopus will sing some of their popular songs, including "Fruit Salad" and "Toot Toot Chugga Chugga Big Red Car. " The Wiggly Dancers will party in the aisles with the audience.

Rhododendron, azalea, holly, yew, euonymus, juniper: For the last century or so, these plants have occupied the narrow flower beds up against the bases of American houses. They're called foundation plantings, a landscape concept that was originally intended to hide the high, sometimes unattractive, lower extremities of Victorian homes. But architecture and lifestyles have changed, and jamming the same old retreads up against the house no longer serves a practical purpose. And such a limited - and limiting - design certainly doesn't add to the aesthetic.

Here's a novel idea for making the world a greener place: Have everyone get up close and personal with 50 local species. Could it be that simple? A matter of making friends with a few frogs and flowers, butterflies and birds? Kenn Kaufman has been pondering this since 2007, when the nationally known birder, naturalist, and author said in an interview that doing so would "profoundly change each person's sense of values, each person's sense of responsibility to the ecosystems that support all of our fellow creatures.

The folks at Jenkins Arboretum in Devon have been so "green" for so long, you wonder: Is it in the water? They use donated garden tools that they dutifully clean and sharpen. They print on both sides of their copy paper, something we've been meaning to do. They bundle errands to save gasoline, also on our to-do list, and in winter, without complaint, they layer up to curb heating costs. "We've always been frugal," says executive director Harold E. Sweetman, who speaks of this 46-acre woodland sanctuary in personal terms.

STARTING IN 1682, when William Penn stepped upon our shores, he set the stage for horticulture in this region. For nearly 200 years thereafter, until 1876, horticulture here was able to hit its peak. When the desired plants were hard to come by, trading, collecting and propagation was the tradition. In the current horticultural era, local arboretums, botanical gardens and gardeners are seeking to refine and redefine their approaches to their gardens. For some, the trend is toward all native plants.

Marjorie Unger Bayersdorfer, 75, a social worker and award-winning gardener who championed the use of native plants to beautify and preserve the environment, died of ovarian cancer last Sunday at the Hill at Whitemarsh, a retirement community in Lafayette Hill. Before daughter-in-law Cyane Gresham, a gardening expert, and a conference at Millersville University opened Mrs. Bayersdorfer's eyes to native plants, her gardening was a beloved pasttime that merely created a lovely landscape.

Eileen Boyle takes a bird's-eye view of the fall garden. She sees it as a bountiful buffet of fruits, nuts and seeds. She won't eat them herself. She'll use them, along with dried apricots and apples, popcorn and Cheerios, to make a holiday wreath that's a treat for birds and a delight for people who like to watch them. "You'll have birds till February. It's so cool," says Boyle, education coordinator at the nonprofit Mount Cuba Center near Wilmington, which studies and celebrates regional native plants and wildflowers.

Sinclair Adam used to cringe when his pals called him "the pharaoh of foamflower. " Now, he embraces his inner sovereign with only a slight grimace, hoping it helps get the word out about tiarella, the starry little wildflower he adores. "Tiarellas rock," says Adam, a pipe-smoking plant breeder and horticulturist who runs Dunvegan Nursery with his wife, Kirsten, from an 18th-century farmhouse in Coatesville. More properly known as Tiarella cordifolia, which refers to their heart-shaped leaves and small tiaralike flower sprays, shade-loving "foamies" have been an Adam preoccupation for two decades.