WHAT IS the XERCES SOCIETY? by Gail Salazaar

As a member of the SGUUF “Habitat Group”, one organization that I’d like to tell you about is the Xerces Society. It is pronounced Zero-see,s and this organization inspires us!
Learn more at: https://www.xerces.org/

The international Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation advocates for the conservation of invertebrates and their habitats .As a reminder , invertebrates are any animal without a backbone. They comprise 95 percent of animal species .

There are two key things that we have learned from the Xerces Society ,that deepens our understanding of how to keep a sustainable landscape . One is that the standard of tidying up your garden as soon as the first frost turns everything brown is not good for the wildlife that we want to support . Instead , we should imitate nature . We now resist the temptation to cut back all the brown material and we leave our dried plants standing through the winter , This provides shelter and hiding places for bees and insects , and seeds for birds .

In your own garden , you don’t need to leave all the leaves – the point isn’t to smother your lawn -but just keep some at the back of a border or along the base of a hedge . Leaves also improve the soil .

Leaving the leaves in our flower beds also helps the survival of the native plants . An example of the pass few years of winter’s record breaking freezes . Happily , our native plants have survived .