 And just actually also I'm just also recording the presentation this evening. So just letting folks know that that's happening. And so without further ado, I'm going to I'm excited to turn things over to Kathy. Thank you, David. I'm going to share my screen. I'm excited that so many people are here. Let's see. I'm going to see if we can get this to go. I think this might work. How does that look? OK, good. All right, now let's see if I can get it to advance there. I'll just do it this way. All right, so I want to start with this quote, which really resonates with me. I think many of us come to this conclusion in the garden after we begin to get to know the plants a little bit and start to comprehend their mystery and resilience. We attempt to make nature appeal to our idea of beauty in the garden. And we try to do this by simplifying and ordering the natural exuberance and diversity and maybe even chaos that we see in nature. This makes the garden a place where art and nature intersect. And when done well, it's sometimes hard to see where one begins and the other ends. I think many of you will agree that gardening is a collaboration, maybe the most obvious collaboration we have with nature, where both of us are bringing all of our creative energy to the gardening endeavor. Nature's billions of years of evolution and our thousands of years of gardening history. So what does nature's creative use of winter inspire in us northerners? According to the people who flee to the south, probably not that much. I see it differently. I love the change of seasons and the shifting cycles of light and dark. I celebrate the changes and use the long winter nights as an excuse to break out the candles or admire the moon shadows. I celebrate the changes. I look forward to this transformation when the leaves fall and expose a completely different garden from the one that I was working in all summer. When I started thinking about the garden in winter, this was in the fall of 2018. I counted up the number of months between when the leaves fall and the leaves come back on again in spring. I thought that would be my definition of winter. Well, it turned out to be seven months, basically from the middle of October to the middle of May. We don't have leaves on the trees. Well, yeah, there are a few plants that hang onto their leaves well into the fall and manage to live through a couple of frosts before they give it up. And then there are the spring ephemeral and plants that begin to leaf out before the trees do in the spring. But basically more than half of our year in May is winter by this definition. So for us active gardeners, we just might need a break in the winter. I'm the first to admit, I do need a break. But there's no reason to forget about our gardens. This is the time when we can really guiltlessly be enjoying the garden. We don't feel like we need to get out there and be working. We can simply admire our gardens through the windows or go out there and experience our garden at this time of year. So why not make our gardens better? In writing the book, I thought a lot about the design choices that we make when we build a garden and how they serve us during the winter. And the funny thing is I realized that every choice is so much more meaningful for the winter garden when we don't have the leaves and the flowers to distract our attention. All that's left in the winter is the garden structure. So today I'm going to focus a little bit on design of the garden and some things we can do when we're caring for our gardens and some ways we can be sharing our gardens to get the most out of them during the winter. So there's no doubt about it, like winter is an austere time of year. Without all that lush foliage and vegetation, things are a lot more carried down and simple. But those shapes and those colors seem to be a lot more meaningful in the garden. Part of being happy with your garden in the winter is of course changing your expectations for what the garden should look like or what makes you excited about your garden. I spent a little bit of time in Japan as a young adult and got to know some of the most austere gardens in the world. Of course, some of the most beautiful gardens, too. So I kind of cultivated that aesthetic and find it works perfectly well in the winter. The Zen garden is maybe not everybody's aesthetic. And you can have a much more full and colorful garden by choosing appropriate plants and garden embellishments for the winter. So you can have a variety of kinds of garden or a variety of places in the garden where different features are are going to shine. So where to start? It might seem a little daunting. Like, do I need to redesign the whole garden? Well, I'd like to tell people the best place to start is by looking out your windows because most frankly, most of the time in the winter, we're enjoying our gardens from inside. And we're doing our gardening from the armchair, picking plants out of catalogs. So now is a good time to be looking out the windows that you are most likely to be looking out of during daylight hours. So that might be like your home office or exercise room or the place where you eat lunch. Look out those windows, take photographs and really document what's out there now and really analyze those views and how they can be better and think about what you can do now. This is your time to plan. This is the time when you really need to make a plan because once spring rolls around and you head off to the nursery, you're going to be distracted by all those slats of pansies blooming and you're going to throw your plants out the window. So you make your plans now, document them so you can go back to those photographs in the summer and be able to implement the plans because the only time you can really do it is when the ground isn't frozen. The next thing to do is think about the views. In this case, this view is a special one that actually opens up in the winter when the leaves fall. The foreground would typically be covered with ground covers and the green and the background likewise, those trees would be closed in green. So this heart-shaped opening wouldn't really be noticeable in the summer. So we should think about what changes take place that are going to be real garden assets in the winter and think about ways to highlight those. Now, when the leaves fall, some other views might open up that aren't quite so pleasing and those might also be. Things that you want to really prioritize for action next summer. You know, I don't want to be looking out, admiring the garden and being distracted by the view that I wanted to close off last summer and didn't get around to. I won't be able to admire anything else. I'll just be constantly drawn to that negative thing being the gardener that I am. The next thing to think about is access in the garden. So how do you get from the vehicle to the house? How do your guests get from their vehicles to the house? Presumably, we'll be able to have guests again one of these days. So this walkway to the front door on this house is kind of unusual. It's not a straight line. It's made of irregular materials. And the width of this walkway is also irregular, which all of all of these things add up to a lot more excitement and interest along the way. And of course, the plantings are the key in this walkway as well. So think about you have to make this passage from point A to point B. How can you make it as interesting and exciting and beautiful as possible? Of course, you need to think about making it safe and easy to shovel to. And what are some of the other places that you go in your garden in the winter? Well, for me, it would be the compost pile, the bird feeder and the wood pile. I would say those are my top three. So how can you get to the places you need to go without getting your feet wet, slipping on the ice or being bored the whole time? So think about the line of the path. In this case, this is a straight line, but very interesting because the area beyond these pines is mostly occluded by the pines. So it makes it a little bit of a mystery of what you're going to find ahead. So trying to make the pathways you need to traverse in the winter a lot more exciting is going to make you want to be out there a lot more. And in the winter, water is usually a problem, especially where I am on the coast. A lot of times we get snow and then get rain and get snow again. So the ground is often wet, muddy or icy. All three could happen in the same day, in fact. So be thinking about how you can traverse those low areas, maybe using some stepping stones or a bridge or something to make that passage. Easy, keep your feet dry, keep yourself safe. In this case, this bridge is leading to some trails in the woods. So that's going to be a lot more accessible because the bridges there in the winter might not want to have to hop over this little stream. This is one of the gardens in New Hampshire that we photographed. This is called Bedrock Garden. It was created by a couple who one of them is a sculptor and the other one I think was a mathematician. Anyway, they created this really amazing garden. And the nice thing about this area right here is this is something we can all do. Well, maybe we're not all sculptors, but the idea here is that you can delineate a path in the woods using other items besides the path itself so that we can see where to go in the winter under snow cover and when we don't have to shovel. So we have a sculpture in the foreground. In the middle ground, there are some supports that are that beach trees are being trained on to make a green arch. And then in the distance, there is a sculpture to look at as on this same axis. So using landmarks along the way, finding things to look at, finding things to stop and examine, looking for little signs of beauty. A lot about the winter garden is really about cultivating appreciation for the small or the often unnoticed things. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. Another really important point for any garden really is layering. So in this case, we have the layering that those huge trunks are giant white pines. And the next layer there in the canopy, the layer below them is the spruces. And then below that are the rhododendrons, which are going to retain their leaves through the winter and the boxwood on the ground layer. So by having these layers, there is a lot of complexity going on there and a lot of habitat. Layers also work in the other dimensions. So in the perspective, so we have a foreground, middle ground and a background. That wall in the middle ground is dividing the foreground from the background. That sculpture in the background is drawing your eye through. So having layering in both planes adds just a lot of complexity, keeps this view really exciting. There's always going to be something to see and notice when you look out. Shape and form of the different plants is important in the winter garden. Here again, we have a lot of rhododendrons in other broadleaf. Our greens and we have some that are deciduous too. So combination of the rhododendrons, the hemlock and the little pine. They're all all of these have been highly pruned. So this is a very managed landscape. But notice how they're all kind of mixed up. So adding a lot of texture and color variations and keeps this view engaging. So we alluded to this in the last slide, but texture is really important for the winter garden. And in this case, the heathers are providing a lot of color as well. A lot of color contrast. These are actually blooming in the winter. Many of the heaps and heathers turn bronzy colors in the winter and can create a nice tapestry effect like in this photo. So we have a lot of different greens here. Juniper, rhododendron, the heaps and heathers. And in the foreground, there are even some lavenders. So this kind of adding a lot of plants that are going to have a presence in the winter is good. Even plants that lose their leaves still have a presence. So in the winter, we're mostly talking about shrubs and trees, woody plants that are going to provide the most structure for the winter garden. All right, I wanted to switch a little bit to sharing for the garden. So some things that you can do in your garden maintenance or maybe not do in your garden maintenance that are going to give you a little bit more of a fulfilling garden throughout the winter. It might be a little late for some of these this year, but you might keep these on your list, your to-do list for next year. So the first thing is to not cut everything back. All your herbaceous plants, grasses, things like that. Not only do these provide a lot of habitat. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But there are so many beautiful effects that these plants have in the winter when the light is low, the sun is low and the color is very golden. These black eyed susans in the foreground almost provide a little bit of a veil in front of the grasses in the middle ground, and likewise, they provide somewhat of a veil in front of the evergreens behind them. So, like I said, it might be a little late to do this this year, but my recommendation would be to not cut anything back the first year and figure out what things really look good all winter and which ones don't last very long at all. That's going to be a little bit different for everybody because plants grow differently in different under different conditions. So if you have a very sunny garden, some stocks may be very sturdy. In a shady garden, you might get very leggy plants that don't hold up that well. So I can't just say, you know, uniformly one plant is going to be better than another plant. And this regard really depends on the local conditions. In my case, I'm a little bit of a lazy gardener and I left some daylilies without deadheading this year. And I kept looking out the window at those, thinking, oh, I need it dead at those daylilies. But I tell you what, now I'm very happy that those are there because the stocks are really just beautiful. And when they catch the snow, they really look fabulous. In writing the book and visiting so many gardens, I found that the grasses were such an asset to the winter garden. In this case, this is a big swath of little blue stem, which doesn't actually look blue in this photo. It actually has a reddish tinge to it. But the grasses look great practically any time of the day and all winter long. They're catching the light. They're catching the wind. They're moving. There might even be some sound and they provide all this wonderful texture. And this photo is also from the Bedrock Gardens in Lee, New Hampshire. So another thing you have probably heard is to leave the leaves. Well, that's good. However, it's also good to chop up the leaves instead of leaving them in place as solid leaf. So the homeowner in this case runs the lawn mower over the leaves that are being collected on the lawn. And then puts those chopped up leaves into the garden as mulch. And that way, those leaves are much better positioned to be broken down by the microorganisms. Basically, you're creating all these openings in the leaf that bacteria, fungi, macro or microinvertebrates can get in and start chewing away and breaking down the leaves. And that's important because that's all providing organic matter for the soil. So somewhere along the way, we somehow got convinced that nutrients come in a bag. Well, no. By having a healthy soil and a healthy soil microbiome, you don't need the bag nutrients. Basically, all the nutrients your plant needs are already in the soil. It's about making them available for the plant. And that means having healthy soil. So doing things like providing organic matter are going to go a long way toward creating a healthy garden year round. Whoops. I don't know if I can bear another mulching that we often see around here is the fur battle mulch and this photograph. We took in, I believe it was 2019, 2020, that winter. Remember when the winterberry was just like everywhere phenomenal? It was a bumper year. Anyway, this person mulched the garden with fur vows and then added winterberry as decoration to the mulch. So contrary to what a lot of people think, the mulch is important. Not it is an insulator, but it's important to insulate the ground not from freezing, but it's important to insulate it from thawing. So where I am, especially on the coast, we get these oscillations in the weather where one day it's freezing and the next day it's thawing. A lot of times the wrong message is getting sent to a plant. You want your plants to stay dormant through the whole winter. So applying the mulch after the ground is frozen is going to be better for the plants. And it also has a side benefit of deterring the rodents from making a little hotel under the fur vows. Actually, it's more like a B&B because they find plenty to eat under there, too. Like the stems of your woody plants, like that heather or maybe a juniper or something like that. So a good strategy if you need to mulch because you've just moved some plants in the late summer or fall, you need to prevent them from heaving out, wait for the ground to freeze, then add your mulch and make it look beautiful like this. OK, another since we're on the topic of rodents, let's look at the upper right hand photos. So you should be thinking about what's happening under the snow. And voles are probably the biggest culprits in this. They can tunnel around under the snow and often eat the bark of vulnerable, newly planted, expensive trees. So in this case, the owner has placed a hardware wire circle enclosure around the tree, and this will really prevent rodents from eating through the bark to that cambium layer, which eventually if it's severe enough, it can actually kill the plant. So the other wildlife that we all love and we love to hate are the gardeners, the deer. So fencing is a good alternative. So I saw so many nice fences in touring gardens, looking for gardens to photograph this one in the upper right. It's just a beautiful fence that surrounds the entire garden and that homeowner can sleep well at night, knowing that her garden is protected on the lower left. That's a very simple fence made with some very thin pieces of bamboo. And so thin, it almost you can practically see through it. But it's enough to deter the deer. I even when I first started my vegetable garden, I even just put in some posts and put some fishing line around those posts at a couple of different heights. And that was enough to deter the deer for quite some time. So you have to find out what works for you. There are no plants. I'm not going to tell you the plants that the deer will eat because, frankly, there aren't any and the deer, every deer herd has a taste for a different kind of plant. So what might work for one person will not work for another. So on the lower right, this is actually a walled garden, which is a beautiful idea. The garden itself, it has a wall that completely encircles it. And you can look out onto the garden from the inside and it really creates like a whole another room. And this one is filled with rhododendrons of the largely rhododendrons and the smaller PJ deep rhododendrons in the front, which turned a bronzy color in the winter. And that's a pachyandra around that tree. So a lot of color still in this garden in the winter. The nice thing about enclosing a garden is that both protects it from the deer and it kind of separates it off from the rest of nature, making it a much more kind of special place, not that it's any less natural or any more of a garden, but visually it does something where we can really appreciate this garden without the rest of nature. It simplifies things, I guess, is what I'm saying so that we can really appreciate this part of the garden. So one of the few things I would recommend that you actually do outdoors in the winter is pruning. And the reason I say this is because it's so much easier to really see what's going on in the winter with the structure of the plant. In this case, this is a crab apple. And this was a late March snowstorm. And the funny thing this year is that crab apples are still on the tree, so they're still waiting for that pack of cedar wax wings to show up and defour them. Anyway, the pruning, like I said, it's a lot easier to see what you're doing in the winter and having and then you can also make sure that it has a nice winter shape in the summer. When you're pruning, sometimes there are so many leaves in the way, you're pruning it to look good in the summer. And then you find when the leaves fall, that the structure is out of balance or not the way that you would like it. Or you pruned off a branch, perfectly healthy branch and left a branch with a disease or that was actually broken or something like that. So I always like to prune in the winter when I can really see what I'm doing. A lot of times that does promote a lot of growth in the spring, but then it's an easy job of just pruning off those sprouts, the water sprouts in the case of fruit trees. So in this case, a lot of pruning has happened on these shrubs makes a nice arrangement where we have sort of a ground layer and a canopy layer or a mid layer and then a layer above that. But another thing I wanted to point out in this photograph was the whole idea of the foundation planting and how that doesn't always serve us so well. So we have in the right hand side of the photo, we see that that evergreen is growing up in front of that window. Wouldn't it be nicer if you could see the garden through that window? So either move that counter for out of there or cut it back so you can see over the top of it. And if you just move your plantings out away from the house, they'll be much easier to admire from inside. And the other thing I wanted to mention about this photo is that you can see how these plants have been pruned to very regular forms. It doesn't need to be that way. Pruning, there's a lot of different ways that you can prune a plant. Pruning for more open, more natural structure is actually the way I prefer to do it. And again, most easily done in the winter when you can really see the structure of the plant. All right, I'd like to talk a little bit about sharing the garden. So welcoming your human friends as well as your wildlife friends into the garden. Some things that you can do. So of course, everybody is an Audubon member, right? So we're all feeding the birds. I just love this sort of bird feeder pelusa here where every conceivable kind of bird feeder is out there with a reconceivable kind of bird food attracting a huge variety of birds to this yard. You can see the platform feeder for the ground-feeding birds. And there are, I'm sorry, ground-feeding birds, as well as the pine siskins feeding off of the ground directly. We have that Harry Woodpecker who is going for, I think, the sunflower seed rather than the suede. But this is quite the buffet for the birds. And another really important thing here is just the shrubs that are nearby to the feeder, giving the birds a kind of staging area to how weight their turn at the feeder and also giving them plenty of cover, especially when there are leaves, but that's also important. So we all know about keeping the feeders clean and filling them regularly in the winter as birds come to depend on them. So in this case, the crab apples, again, are still in this tree as it's beginning to leaf out. So these crab apples made it through the entire winter, which is kind of amazing before these bogeyman wax wings came to devour them. So this is another strategy just to use plants that retain their berries or fruits into the winter that are available for the birds. So some other plants are the winterberry holly that we already talked about and it's cousin, the bayberry. And there is the black and the red choked berry. And there's the high bush cranberry, which is the kind of fiber of all of those plants keeps their fruits all winter long. One winter, I saw a palliated woodpecker eating the fruits out of a staghorn sumac, which was quite amusing to witness, but providing those natural foods by planting native plants is really a great way to provide food for our feathered friends. And then we have our other friends that we might want to be providing some food. And we can use mask trees like oaks or beach. Other trees provide lots of food like pine and spruce and fur throughout the winter for all of our other friends out there who need to make a living. And we're often discouraged from feeding at our bird feeders. Another thing you can do is to embrace our smaller friends, the insects. So this homeowner created this amazing bug hotel. And so by drilling a lot of holes in different shapes, block shapes of wood at different diameters, provides different habitat for a lot of our native bees. The mason bees and others will be laying their eggs in little compartments in the wood, also in hollow stems. So of course, by leaving your perennial standing, the hollow stems will be available to the insects to use as habitat. And if you feel like they're you'd rather cut them back because they're not going to stand up for the winter, you can rather than throwing them on the compost pile and making them inaccessible, you can just bundle them up and put them under a shrub or some obscure place where they're not going to be in the way the insects will find them. So in this case, the owner told me that she was so excited that the bees had found a place to lay their eggs. But then the next time she looked out there, she saw a chickadee eating the eggs directly out of the bug hotel. So a lot of times that our native habitat is going to be better for the wildlife. However, the chickadee's beak is only so long and I'm sure it could not reach all of the eggs in the bug hotel. So you even notice at the bottom of this hotel, there's some bricks and cinder block helping it stay upright in the winter, but also providing a damp habitat for things like toads and frogs in the summer. Another fun thing to do with your brush is to create a kind of sculpture in the garden. So one of the things I like to tell people to do is, again, we don't have to find all our gardening materials in a bag. So for mulch and for things like that, a lot of times we are having things hauled off and then we have to bring those very sink things back in in a different form. So in this case, by keeping the brush on site, but making it very unsightly, very sightly rather than unsightly, we can provide habitat both for mammals and for the detritivors and decomposers who are going to be returning all the nutrients from this brush back to the soil where it will be accessible to the trees by it will be made accessible to the trees by the fungi that are living underground. So again, don't have don't have to be hauling things off and then bringing them back in in a different form. We can just find ways to use what nature has to offer. We can be providing a healthy habitat for not only for the microorganisms that make up the soil microbiome, but we can be providing a much more nutrient rich habitat for our trees, our plants, our granules. And then there's the humans who we'd like to talk to we'd like to welcome into the garden. So I like to think about where do I like to go in the winter in the garden and make those places as attractive as possible? So finding a place to sit where it's sunny or where there's something to watch, like maybe the bird feeder or a place that's a little bit enclosed where you can have some privacy and meditation or a place where people can gather. So think about how you might like to use the winter garden and then devise a plan to make that more accessible and more easy to use. And then just you can just get out there or something like this. All it takes is a snowfall. So this person created a labyrinth in the snow. It's nice because it's just a temporary thing. You can just try it out. Some people find a labyrinth the very meditative. It's in this case, you just follow one path. It takes you all the way to the inside and that brings you back out again without ever having to change direction or turn around. You don't have to retrace your path. So trying something out like this is it's a fun thing to do for the family. It's a very interesting thing to look at from the windows of the house. And maybe you would like to make a walking labyrinth of regular practice and think about ways that you can have a labyrinth in the summer, too. In this case, the homeowner has moaned a spiral into the lawn. So the areas that are not to be walked on can be left. In this case, they have cut some of the things back, but they don't need to be cut back. So we can leave a lot more vegetation standing through the winter. Again, providing that habitat. And also creating a kind of texture and having more there to catch the light, to catch the snow and to move in the wind. So making nature more visible by having that standing vegetation. In this case, now we can see that only half this lawn area is really lawn and the rest can be a lot more diverse, have a lot more wildflowers, a lot more pollen sources and nectar sources for the insects, which of course are going to be food for the birds and the other creatures. And then you just have to get out there more in the winter and find ways to enjoy the garden. So building snowmen, of course, is probably the oldest way you can think of. I don't think anybody's too old to do that. And then lastly is the fire pit. This is not my fire pit. This is a lot more scenic than my fire pit. But I decided to build a fire pit. It was the winter of 2019, 2020. Why I decided to build one in the winter. I don't know. But in any case, I persevered on the days when the ground wasn't frozen and put in the fire pit and then COVID struck. And I couldn't believe my good luck to have had done that right at that time, because that fire pit has just been like a lifesaver. It's a place where friends can gather outdoors, maintain some spacing between us and enjoy the fire. So we've developed this ritual where every Friday night we get together at a fire pit or somebody else's outdoor space. But we met every single Friday throughout last winter outdoors. I was pretty proud of us for persevering through the whole winter. And to conclude, I'd just like to thank Lisa Luck, who photographed for the book so intrepid. I learned so much from her during the process. The most important thing was you don't need to go skiing to be wearing ski pants. So with that, I'd just like to say a couple more things. So the the book is available again at the main Audubon Nature Stores. And the last thing I wanted to say was that this Saturday we're going to be doing a little gardening at the Fields Pond Nature Center. And you can sign up for that on the main Audubon website. And on March 5th, I'm going to be doing another program at the Native Garden in Blue Hell. So I hope some of you will come to the program. And I urge you to. Ask any questions that you like. So let me figure out how to stop sharing my screen now. I think why you're why you're doing that, I'll write a question that someone had. A back when you were talking about winter being a great time for pruning. The question was, is it safe to prune anything and everything in the winter, including lilacs for Cynthia and hydrangea? Yes, it is. However, as we've all been taught that those early bloomers are creating their buds during the summer, after they bloom. So it is safe to prune them now. It's just that you're going to be pruning off some of the flowers. So it really depends on how much you value those flowers and how much you want to see those in the summer. So if you're more concerned with the shape of the plant, go for it. If you're going to be disappointed, you don't get as many lilacs than you better wait. But it's the plant does not care. It'll be fine. We do. If anyone has any other questions, you're welcome to use the Q&A or the chat, both boxes work. You have a lot of comments, Kathy, for the lovely talk and photos. So there's there's lots of those coming in, lots of things. So maybe we can see if there's any other any other questions in it. Folks want to type type in. OK, somebody wanted to add more color. And so I find that the grasses provide a lot of color. Of course, there are a lot to choose from. And I'm just trying to figure out now which native grasses are going to hold up the best in the winter. So that's one possibility. There are also a lot of evergreens to choose from. There's been so much plant breeding in the last like 20 years, you can get a juniper that's gold, a juniper that's blue, a juniper that's green. So junipers, microbiota, false cypress all now come in a lot of different colors. The microbiota is still basically green, but it has a brownsie colors in the winter. So you might consider that a lot of things have colorful stems. The I think that the dogwoods are the best for that. Again, a lot of plant breeding amongst the. John, the well. The red dogwood, I can't remember the Latin name because it's not the native one. But our native dogwoods, the silky dogwood and the red twig dogwood both have very red stems and that can be very attractive. And that lasts all winter long. The one thing with those are you do need to prune them regularly because it's only the newer stems that are going to be the brightest color. They do dull down, turn more mahogany and then turn sort of a gray if you never prune it. So you do. There is some maintenance involved there. The gray dogwood, contrary to the name, has a very yellow stem, which is also really beautiful. A lot of the willows are colorful too with both red, yellow and even chartreuse color stems. So that's another thing you can add. A lot of tree bark is really amazing. Like the paper birch, the yellow birch, the black birch, the river birch, all of them look really great in the winter. You might look for, there are a lot of non-native trees too that have fabulous bark. And I think part of it, again, is about cultivating your eye for the details and appreciating some of the smaller things rather than the dinner plate values and stuff that we get in summer. Kathy, someone had a question that I also had, the photo you had of the evergreen mulching, it looked like it was a fur. The question was, do you need to remove those in the springtime? Oh, yes, absolutely. Oh, sorry, I should have mentioned that. So you really depends on what's under there, but you probably ought to be removing that April or May, depending on how, if you're gonna have a lot more heavy frosts, if it's just a light frost, it's fine to remove it. Then things can start to acclimate to the normal temperature range. So I would say April. Yeah, no, the leaf mulch, you just leave that on. That's fine, things will come right up through it, but those fur boughs do have to be taken off, yeah. There's a bunch of questions coming in now. Let's see, someone asks that their neighbor has all perennial, looks like cuts all perennial to the ground because her mother always did. I leave mine as is for the winter. Her garden always looks great in the summer. So I'm confused about which strategy is best. Well, in that case, the insects that you're harboring in your garden are feeding her birds too. So it doesn't, leaving them standing isn't necessarily better for the plant. I mean, it is actually better for the plant in some cases. So whenever you cut a plant down and it still has green foliage on it, you are certainly taking nutrients away from that plant. If you let that plant senesce naturally and return the nutrients that are in the leaves back and store them in the roots for the winter, that is always gonna be best. So a lot of times those stems don't have any color left. That's because the chlorophyll, a lot of nutrients are already taken away. So things like the lignin is left and those things take the soil, the microorganisms in the soil to break down. So, a lot of times we cut that stuff back, take it away and then we add the nutrients in the form of a bag of pro-grow or something in the spring. So yeah, you can have a beautiful garden even if you do take those things away but you have to add them back at some point. Laura has a witch hazel shrub and she wondered if you had any favorite plants to put next to it. Wow, actually witch hazel is one of my all-time favorites. I like, it depends if you wanted to be full. I like the deer Bella which is called the bush honeysuckle, not to be confused with the Japanese or the Asian honeysuckles, but the bush honeysuckle, it's a native, kind of a low shrub, brown cover, it does drop its leaves in the winter but it has kind of arching stems that will kind of echo the arching stems of the witch hazel. And the other nice thing about the deer Bella is it does have, it flowers all summer long. It's a pretty small yellow flower but it continually flowers. So it's continually providing some nectar and pollen all summer long. And a lot of times the new growth is a little bit bronzy colored so it adds a little more color interest in the garden in the summer. So that would be one of my favorites and it's fine and kind of part shade. Other ground covers, things like bearberry, that's another one of my favorites. That one does keep its leaves all winter, is very low to the ground and does have very glossy leaves and kind of red stem. So it looks very attractive. It does have red berries. They don't really hang on in the winter but they are very good food source for wildlife. And that's another nice native that doesn't need any kind of special soil and is even happier, I think, if it's in a rather poor soil situation, can live in part shade or full sun. Kathy asks if you have a favorite Heather. Oh, now I don't. I don't actually have any in my garden because I don't have enough sun. They do like the sun. And they can be a little bit tricky. Some people like to mulch them in the winter with just pine needles around them. And, but you do have to watch out for the rodents in that case because you do make a nice little house for them and they can girdle the stems. Sorry, yeah, just about any Heather, just pick the one that has the nicest color for you or that's gonna bloom at the time when you wanted to bloom. There's just so many of them to choose from. We have someone in zone five who's looking to plant a hedge along a stream and was told to do a mix of three native shrubs. Any suggestions? I would need to know if it's in the shade or in the sun, but I can maybe give you in the, well, you won't like this, but our common alder is a great one to plant by the stream side because it is one of the first things to bloom in the spring and really provides important pollen for our native bees that need to get their hives up and running early in the spring. That's one that like loves to be next to a stream. Another one is the, it's the other fly honeysuckle. It's called, it's our native honeysuckle. You might find a hard time, you might have a hard time finding some of that though. It's a little bit hard to find in the nursery. Some other things could be elderberry either the black or the red elder, both of them would do well next to a stream, provide a lot of food. They have hollow stems or a pithy stem where a lot of insects can find a home in there too. So a good habitat. And try to think of other good stream side willows, willows would be super happy. There's a lot of willows to choose from. You know, they might take a little bit of management, be sure to research that because some of the willows turn into trees and they don't stay shrubs. There's a question that had to do with when you were showing the slide of the bird feeder. And if you avoid putting feeders near veggie gardens or orchards and or berry patches. So not to encourage the birds to eat those crops. And I'll just add my two cents to that at Fieldspawn. We have between two of our bird feeding stations, there's a couple of high-wish blueberries. And I find that the birds will go to them, but usually I, you know, there's berries there for the casual passerby. It's not like the birds are eating them all but they'll eat some of them. So that's my two cents that Sharon share alike. Yeah, that's my strategy too. And if you're not getting enough, just plant more. And the high-wish blueberry, that's another great stream-side plant actually. Great, let's see if we can, maybe one more question we can fit in here. Let me look through. Oh, someone asked about what would be an effective privacy hedge growing under white pines in a shady area? I guess I would just go with either Bayberry, which kind of lives everywhere and also provides wonderful berries for a lot of different birds, warblers especially. And then the other thing would be hazelnuts. We have two native hazelnut species that provide wonderful food for you and the squirrels. And so those could both work in kind of a shady area. They are both deciduous so they're gonna be losing their leaves in the fall. I don't know if you need to have that privacy hedge last all winter long. If you do, the best thing might be to use some other evergreens. Unfortunately, cedars could work except that the deer really love to eat cedars or at least the deer around me really love to eat cedars and they often need a winter protection. Yeah, that's a little bit of a tough one. It really depends on how high the canopy is and how much light you're gonna have for that privacy hedge and how you around you want that screen. A lot of times if you sort of build that screen out in front with deciduous leaf things that they're twiggy enough that it'll create a kind of screen whether the leaves are on or not. So that's one thing I like to do is just not think about a line but think about more of a wider border and add a lot of different things in there and that there'll be enough to distract your attention you won't be able to see through it unless you're really looking and that usually works pretty well. Great, I think this has been great. Just kind of in closing, just wanted to mention again you had talked about the program on Saturday at Fields Pond, that's this Saturday. I know you did a quick visit and walk around and maybe you could just talk a little bit about what your plan is for that because it'll be a small group and it's just about like for I think an hour and a half and what do you have a plan and what the group might do? Well, I thought we could look around and identify some plants and decide which of those plants are good for our own gardens and we can go inside and look out the windows and kind of go through that exercise about sort of analyzing the landscape while looking through a window and kind of brainstorm some ideas on what we could do to improve the views out various windows. And then I thought if people were ambitious and we had time we could actually do some pruning of some of the shrubs around the building to sort of improve their winter structure and then we can build a little brush pile or sculpture with the prunies that we make. So that's kind of what I was thinking. We'll see. That sounds great. So if anyone has interest, like Cathy said you can register online at Maine Audubon's website and I'll just say again to thank you. It's been a pleasure having you. Yes, so just by the attendance tonight it's a topic that touches a lot of people close to home especially during the pandemic. Gardening is taking on an added urgency for some of us and it's been a great therapy as well. So thank you for your perspectives and I'll wish everybody a good night and hopefully we'll see some of you on Saturday. Okay, thank you everybody.