Know before you mow!

Last year a well-intentioned neighbor mowed huge swaths on both sides of our beautiful Santos Drive. Gone was a huge supply of the only food that monarch caterpillars eat: milkweed. Gone was the clover that another extremely important pollinator, the honey bee, favors. Gone was the beauty of all the wild roadside flowers, such as the highly endangered mountain laurel. Someone had inappropriately tried to turn wild nature into a 1950s-style suburban lawn. The day before the mowing, Santos Drive’s curving road would have made a beautiful landscape painting. It would have provided food for so many native species. But, like the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island, our well-intentioned neighbor clearly didn’t understand the effects of not knowing what he was mowing. Please, everybody, leave patches of native species in your gardens and roadsides, especially in the sun. What to you might seem to be only “weeds” may be very important to our ecology. Thomas and Elizabeth Murphy Milford