Mountain Native Landscape Design

08/29/2026

08/27/2026

Steep slopes can make gardening more complicated, but they can also create opportunities for thoughtful native plant design.

Join Asheville Botanical Garden for Gardening on Steep Slopes with Drew Lathin. This indoor class will explore the challenges of landscaping on slopes, including soil moisture, soil composition, sunlight, plant selection, establishment, and long-term vegetation management.

Drew will share practical ways to think through slope conditions and improve your odds of success when landscaping with native plants.

Sunday, September 6
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
ABG Visitor Center
Indoor class

$25 for non-members
ABG members receive 25% off with code CLASSES25

Learn more and register at ashevillebotanicalgarden.org/classes/

07/25/2026

Every parking lot should have a filled with for habitat and better control of instead of a raised bed with useless turf. Here is one I installed at the in Michigan a number of years ago. See the curb cut middle far right? Water from the parking lot goes into the three foot deep depression and is infiltrated into the ground rather than into a storm sewer which then goes to the river carrying parking lot pollutants.

07/23/2026

There is a funny backstory to this picture. When I was in Ann Arbor, I killed the turf grass in this lawn extension and seeded it with short . Evidently a neighbor who had nothing better to do contacted the city ordinance department to complain. Ann Arbor ordinance requires turf grass to be no longer than 8" tall. The client and I met with the ordinance control officer on site. And here is where it gets amusing. Like a good lawyer which I am not, you don't ask questions that you don't know the answer to. I asked him to confirm that the ordinance requires *turf grass* to be shorter than 8". He confirmed this. I then said that this is not *turf grass*. He thought about this for about 5 seconds and then said, "Have a nice day," and left.

07/20/2026

This was my house in Ann Arbor in 2010 with the city's first taking water off the street not associated with a street repaving. The city drilled the hole in the curb and I chipped the pavement so water would more easily flow into the rain garden. Whenever it rained that year city staff would descend on my rain garden to see how it was working. In the upper right you can see another rain garden taking water off the roof with the blooming.

07/19/2026

After 42 years, now the . Help it get off the ground.

07/14/2026

Conservationists are calling it the biggest assault on public lands protections in modern U.S. history.

Three million acres of sacred land just got signed away, and the tribes who've protected it for generations weren't even asked. On Monday, Trump gutted Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two of Utah's most breathtaking national monuments, shrinking them by about 3 million acres, roughly 90% of their original size.

Bears Ears dropped to about 121,000 acres. Grand Staircase-Escalante fell to about 182,000. Conservationists are calling it the biggest assault on public lands protections in modern U.S. history.

Here's what that land holds: ancient cliff dwellings, rock art, dinosaur fossils, canyons carved over millions of years. And beneath it, coal and uranium that industry has eyed for decades.

Trump stood in the Oval Office, flanked by Utah's all-Republican delegation, and framed it as giving the land back to the people.

Which people?

Not the Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Zuni, Hopi, or Navajo, whose members say they were never informed of or asked about the decision. They learned about it the same way you did.

The federal government has a trust and treaty duty to consult tribal nations. Leaders say that duty was simply ignored.

Obama created Bears Ears in 2016 to be managed in cooperation with those tribes, weaving generations of knowledge into how the land is cared for. That partnership just got shredded.

And the kicker? The Antiquities Act, the 1906 law Trump leaned on, was signed by Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. It lets presidents create monuments. It does not clearly authorize them to abolish or gut monuments their predecessors made.

Earthjustice calls the move flatly illegal and is preparing to sue, again.

We've seen this movie. Trump shrank these same monuments in 2017. Biden restored them in 2021. Now they're smaller than ever, and the land hangs in limbo while politicians play tug-of-war with something that predates all of them.

Land doesn't grow back. Some sites still sit inside protective designations, but Trump's Interior Department is already reviewing whether to weaken those too. Once the rigs and haul trucks arrive, what's lost is lost.

This was never about the people. It was about handing a public inheritance to private extraction and betting we wouldn't be paying attention.

We're paying attention.

07/14/2026

One more bit of the forest being saved.

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article316500359.html?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6a5612136276760001835de3&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawTDC6tleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFaUFdZTmhmY0htU01KWGwwc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHrXzo6N06Kdn3503lRY44WPs2y3Egx2pmM1BA2t2VqCU4o00iNMIVxe39WYY_aem_GSiQW8ILBWxUqC-7jJ4vug