Portsmouth Caterpillar Club

Summit of Borestone Mountain Audubon Sanctuary, Maine.   I love native plants.   If you don't know that already, just get a really nice frying pan and bang it against your head a few times and see if that helps get the message though.  Oh my, did I just write that?  Sorry.  It is just really tough to watch the natural world get erased by the force of human disregard for nature:  big box stores and the finest retailers alike sell foreign plants to decorate lawns that are no better in ecological terms than your average parking lot; armies of landscape contractors use machines blow away leaves in the fall that would otherwise feed the soil and harbor eggs and larvae and bury the hew survivors with bark mulch made from the chipped and dyed remains of our forests. Biddeford Pool, Maine.  Nature is being systematically destroyed and your local garden center claiming to sell native plants is an accomplice.  Nursery plants are cloned from single individuals grown in some other

I post the plants I start from seeds every year and, if I am lucky, only 1 or 2 people take me up on my offer for free plants.  I think people do not feel comfortable taking something offered for free.  I am not really sure.  But from my perspective, I offer plants for free because I want to help slow the decline of nature and the more the yards around our neighborhoods can feed caterpillars, the more butterflies there will be for me.  I am really being selfish, right?  Well not really, but it would be a great reward not only to see my seedlings grow and feed butterflies, but also to know that somewhere out in our suburban jungle, they might be doing the same.  So don't hesitate to contact me if any of these plants may interest you.  I have some good ones this year and hopefully a few that I have started from wild seeds. From the Wild Seed Project, which uses seeds collected in Maine: Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum) .  This is a striking native plant that is valued