Native Urban Landscaping at Alberici Construction St. Louis, MO. Photo courtesy of Alberici Construction
Greetings friends and followers of the blog! Today’s post is a link to an article I wrote that has been recently published by Strong Towns, a national media foundation that promotes the financial strength of towns, safe bike and pedestrian routes, creativity and a whole host of other good things. After you get there to read my article, you might want to poke around their site. There is a lot of good info there. Enjoy!
Small House, Big Life 
Excellent article, and your author photo is so pretty!
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Thank you. I never wear that much make-up in real life, but the photographer’s studio did make-up as part of the package, and the photos did turn out nice.
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Great article, Fawn, and such a nice photo of you!! I don’t know that I had any idea what you look like and now a nice image of a smiling Quaker landscaper fills that empty spot.
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Thank you for both kind comments. I am trilled to have a larger platform to be sharing the news about native species.
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Loved the article. I tried leaving a Comment but can’t get past the Disqus screen!
We live in one of the New Towns of Scotland – ugly architecture but beautiful green spaces. I’ve noticed a move away from traditional landscaping (pretty colours, re-plant every season, buy in lots of small plants) – I suspect due to budget cuts!
However, I’m hoping our council start using a more focused approach to sustainable landscaping. We have huge swathes of “wildflower” or meadow strips now which is a start but I’m interested to see what else they are going to do.
Karen (Scotland)
PS I will try to copy this over to the article Comments. Always nice for publishers to see your article is making people think!
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Sorry for your trouble leaving a comment there. I will let the content director of the site know you had that trouble. Glad to hear that there is work in Scotland to use native plants, though I suspect they have not gone as far afield (Ha, see what I did there?) as we have in America. I am going to start going to my council meetings as it is clear that the folks deciding what to plant are unfamiliar with the concept.
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Karen-the comments section at Strong Towns appears to be working now, if you want to try again. Thanks so much, Fawn
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Really fabulous article! Terrific job! And you do look stunning in that photo.
Also, please do know that Europeans are waaaay ahead of USA in using native plants, and in sustainable landscaping in general. We’ve lived in the UK, France and Switzerland over the past ten years, where I have seen it everywhere, from laws promoting non-asphalt driveways (to eliminate storm water runoff) to massive meadows planting for Olympics. Prince Charles in UK is a huge advocate, for example.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5954885/Prince-Charles-warns-Britains-gardeners-weed-foreign-plants.html
One more thing–related–you might love the landscape designer Piet Oudolf (Dutch). If you don’t know him, he started a revolutionary movement awhile back–a really new way of planting and thinking about plants. You see his influence is everywhere now, first in Europe and now in USA:
http://www.fiveseasonsmovie.com/piet-oudolf-movie-trailer/
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Thank you for this info. I am eager to learn more about this topic!
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