A Monarch butterfly makes a stop at a local narrowleaf milkweed plant. [Photo courtesy Suzanne Clarke]
thing about many of the native plants that are good for our native insects is that they actually have beautiful blossoms. She has native sages, seaside daisies and redwood sorrel currently blooming in her garden. She says she also really enjoys the manzanita blossoms which provide important nectar for both monarch butterflies and native hummingbirds. “Some people think natives aren’t very pretty, but if you come to my garden, you wouldn’t believe how many people I have stop and look in my garden and say how beautiful it is,” she says. Clarke is a former president of the Petaluma Garden Club (PGC) and helped create the Butterfly Garden in Petaluma’s Wickersham Park. Clarke and a group of PGC volunteers called Flutterby’s now care for the garden. Clarke is working with the PGC to create more pollinator gardens and the PGC is also educating its members about the importance of creating native habitat. Clarke is also working with the Petaluma Sunrise Rotary, which provided the milkweed to Sonoma County residents at the PGC plant sale in late April and Petaluma’s Art & Garden Festival in July. Clarke praised the work of Dr. Doug Tallamy, an entomologist, ecologist and conservationist whose books, lectures and YouTube videos are valuable resources. She mentioned that Tallamy speaks about the importance of hedgerows because they create a place along the field for birds and insects to shelter in and have their offspring. Nesting songbirds need a whopping 5,000 caterpillars
• 37 students have read over a million words, and we have 3 THREE million word readers! • On average, 94% of all quizzes taken are passed! • This puts our students on track to read 47,000 books this year, which is a 10% increase from last year! So far for the 23-24 school year, our students have already read more than 26,000 books…that’s an average of 23 books per student!
March 2024
NorthBaybiz 53
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