What is a Wildscape?
Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife
Wildlife needs habitat to survive, but developments have encroached on their turf. Homeowners can assist wildlife by creating oases of habitat around their homes called wildscapes.
A wildscape is simply a backyard landscape that takes into consideration the needs of wildlife. So it will provide food, shelter and water for various forms of wildlife, with a minimum of fifty percent native plants.
Marks Klym coordinates the Texas Wildscapes program. He says using native plants in a wildscape serves a two-fold purpose.
Native plants are the plants that the wildlife are accustomed to using in the wild. So, that’s going to be what they’re looking for when they’re moving through the area, as well as the fact that a lot of our native plants are becoming rarer and rarer in the wild. And we don’t want to encourage their loss by using the exotics.
Many commonly used landscape plants are exotic and invasive.
An invasive plant for a biologist is something that will escape your garden, survive for a minimum of one year, and when it gets out in the wild, it has a tendency to reproduce in a way that discourages everything else. It may have a chemical that it puts into the soil to discourage other plants, or it may simply be that it grows in such a tight formation that it chokes out everything else under it.
Find Wildscaping information at passporttotexas.org.
That’s our show… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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