Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards

America's landscape style of neat yards and gardens has devastated suburban ecology. With their mowers, shears, and misguided choice of plants, gardeners are wiping out animal species by destroying their habitats and food supplies. Entire communities of plants and insects - the once well-stocked pantry of our native countryside - have been wiped bare. After a decade of intensive gardening, Sara Stein and her husband felt they had created their personal Eden. And then they realized the full extent of what their efforts had wrought - they had banished the animals from their paradise. Thus began the author's "re-education of a gardener". Gardeners see moles as a nuisance, snakes as scary, aphids as the enemy. Ecology sees all species as connected. We cannot decide who gets to stay aboard the ark: if we spray the caterpillars, we lose the butterflies. This book interweaves Stein's efforts to build a garden that welcomes all creatures (humans, too) with her explorations into the ecology of a garden. As with her critically acclaimed My Weeds, Sara Stein takes the reader along on an adventure that will make every gardener look at the land with a new and thoughtful eye.