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| Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens | 
| Author: Douglas Tallamy
Publisher: Timber Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $17.47
You Save: $10.48 (37%)
New (26) from $17.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 14042
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0881928542
Dewey Decimal Number: 639.92091733
EAN: 9780881928549
ASIN: 0881928542
Publication Date: November 6, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 16-20 of 20 | | « PREV | | |
This is the right book at the right time January 2, 2008
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book makes a convincing case, and a call to action, for preserving biological diversity in the U.S. by shifting our home gardening practices to include native plants. The author provides useful and easy-to-understand explanations and statistics to back up his thesis, and gives specific examples of plants that can be established to optimize biological diversity in large and small home landscapes. I can't recommend this book enough as a "toolbox" for individuals to use for bringing their own backyards back to life. Be prepared to dog-ear a lot of pages!
Bringing Nature Home - A MUST READ for Bird Lovers December 16, 2007
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Bringing Nature Home is a veritable cookbook for making your yard more attractive and useful to native birds by growing the plants and food they need. If you love birds, read this book and learn how you can help restore our declining bird populations. The information is also extremely useful guidance for public land managers, landscapers, and ecologists trying to create or restore natural landscapes and native communities. In addition to an overview of the worrisome state of native wildlife in the U.S. due to habitat loss, invasive species, excessive night lighting, and an ever-expanding human population, the author provides specific natural history information available nowhere else. The book is a fun and fascinating read thanks to Doug Tallamy's vast knowledge and good sense of humor.
This book makes me stop and think December 9, 2007
67 out of 67 found this review helpful
I heard Douglas Tallamy speak at the Native Plants in the Landscape Conference at Millersville University (PA) last June, and I've been waiting for his book to be published by Timber Press.
I'm a gardener, and I don't want to grow only native plants. But this book makes me stop and think. Douglas Tallamy makes the best case for use of native plants I've read. I recommend it without reservation.
Simply put, the book's message is this. All life on earth, except for some recently discovered, relatively rare forms that take energy from volcanic vents in the ocean floor, depend on energy from the sun that plants convert into food through photosynthesis. Most of that solar energy is made available to higher life forms through insects that eat plants. With the exception of a few direct herbivores such as cows, all other higher forms of life either eat insects (most birds) or eat other animals that eat insects (hawks eating sparrows), and so on up the food chain. The productivity of an environment, literally the weight of biomass produced in a given area, is directly related to the insect population, and the variety of wildlife - number of species of birds and so on - is also directly related to the numbers and varieties of insects living there.
Research now clearly shows that native insect populations cannot be sustained by most alien plants. Our insects have co-evolved with native plants over millions of years, and most have highly specific preferences for certain plants as food. As Professor and Chair of the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, Tallamy has access to research that tells a disturbing story. With increasing urbanization and suburbanization, loss of large forest and natural areas to development, and transformation of a vast portion of the continent into ecologically sterile lawn, we can look forward to mass extinctions of insects, birds, and other forms of life that could surpass the mass extinctions caused by the great meteorite impacts long ago.
Without the literally innumerable varieties of insects that constitute the first step in transfer of solar energy into life, massive losses of species will occur in the not too distant future. Many such extinctions are actually under way.
Tallamy's statistics support his message. Native oaks, for example, support 517 lepidoptera species, willows, 456, birches, 413. In contrast, alien Clematis vitalba supports 40 species of herbivores in its homeland, but only 1 in North America. Another example, Phragmites australis supports 170 species in its homeland, but only 5 species on this continent. Unfortunately, insects can't evolve to adapt to alien species in time to save our threatened populations. Evolution takes place over millions of years. Although the Norway maple has been on the North American continent for going on 300 years, and has become the predominant shade tree here, it still has not become a productive part of our native ecosystem. Instead, it is rapidly displacing native species of maple.
Tallamy urges readers to do what they can to eliminate invasive alien species, to use native plants, to replace sterile lawns, which consist of two or three alien grass species that support little more than Japanese beetle grubs, with sustaining native plant refuges. He urges those who live in suburbia to plant native shade trees, possibly groves, to plant natives along lot lines to begin reestablishing productive areas where insects can successfully reproduce and live, and where their predators can find security and cover.
Tallamy writes with grace and humor. He makes it easy to follow his arguments, uses copious examples to relate his ideas to the natural world we all know, and uses down-to-earth anecdotes to illustrate his points clearly. The book, even with its many, for me, unpronounceable binomial Latin names for a multitude of insects, is an easy read. I finished it in two days, while busy with work and many other chores.
Like most people, I have an aversion to what I consider ugly, even frightening insects. I find it much easier to look at pictures of pretty butterflies than spiders and sawflies, but I learned a lot about the insect world while reading this book and looking at its pictures. And now I have enough knowledge to want to learn more, and to better understand how the natural world of my garden works.
I doubt I'll be able to eliminate plants of foreign origin from my garden, but I'll try to keep a much better balance of natives to aliens (mostly natives), and practice more sustainable gardening in the future. And I'll certainly work to try to convince others to reduce lawn size and incorporate native plants into their landscapes.
Bringing Nature Home November 24, 2007
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
Well written and timely. Describes how to make a difference in the health of the natural world in your local area that directly impacts the health of the planet. Bravo!
Love Birds? Invite Them Into Your Yard. November 20, 2007
29 out of 29 found this review helpful
Douglas Tallamy was captivated early by the natural world. In his engaging new book, Bringing Nature Home, Tallamy writes of spending his summer days exploring the "wild" places near his home in New Jersey. There, he also discovered the devastating effects of development when a bulldozer buried tiny toads he had watched develop from tadpoles in a polliwog pond. Our hearts go out to the nine-year-old child as he works valiantly, but futilely, to save the little creatures from being buried alive.
When he grew up, the boy who had tried to rescue toads studied the natural world, ultimately becoming Professor and Chair of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. In the process, he discovered the extent of loss resulting from wide scale development and agricultural activities. And that is the subject of his book. But Bringing Nature Home is not another gloom and doom tome on what we humans have wrought. Instead, this engaging and highly readable book tells us how we can all be involved in turning back environmental loss in a way that will bring that wild world right into our own back yards by simply trading non-native ornamental plantings for native ones.
Bringing Nature Home is very well documented (with a bibliography longer than your arm) and full of beautiful and fascinating photos. It includes many of Tallamy's own personal landscaping experiences as well as numerous suggestions on plant choices for the rest of us.
Like Ted Williams in Wild Moments and Scott Weidensaul in Return to Wild America, Tallamy remains optimistic about the future of America's wildlife. But unlike Williams and Weidensaul, both of whom wrote eloquently about why we should connect with and want to save our natural world, the good professor's book is a prescription on how we can all work to make that happen.
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Wildlife, nature and the Environment
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