Still stuck inside by cold, snowy weather? Itching to start planning Spring projects? Here’s one website you should visit if you’re interested in environmental landscaping.

Audubon Pennsylvania and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay have teamed up to put together a unique “Landscaping for a Healthy Planet” website full of practical advice on how to landscape, garden and create healthy habitats for wildlife.

Environmental Landscaping – Getting Started lets you take inventory of your surroundings, helps you develop a plan for landscaping, choosing plants and offers tips on maintaining your landscape.

A picture, or in this case a video, is worth a thousand words and the webcast section of the site has more than a dozen online videos covering topics like an introduction of environmental landscaping, water conservation, landscaping commercial locations, creating forest buffers, landscaping with native plants, deer management, integrated pest management, managing wetlands, urban landscaping, invasive plants and energy conservation.

A Conservation Practices section offers tips on intelligent landscaping to reduce water and air pollution and health risks for visitors and neighbors.

A handy Worksheet section provides checklists on watchable wildlife, home landscape auditing, a pest management inspection record, habitat inventory and maintenance schedule.

A Specialty Gardens webpage provides guidance on how to set up handicapped accessible gardens, developing wildlife meadows, container gardens and roof gardens.

A Resources webpage is chock full of links to a variety of other backyard wildlife, native plant and gardening webpages along with a list of nurseries where you can purchase native plant materials.

Gardeners can also find official PA Preferred nursery and landscape plant and materials providers through the PA Landscape & Nursery Association website.

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay has also put together another resource on using native plants for landscaping called Bayscapes that provides even more information on environmental landscaping techniques.

Bayscapes includes sample landscaping plans gardeners can adapt to their own properties.

After your project is finished, you can register it as a Pennsylvania Environmental Landscape through an online form. Registered project sponsors will receive a certificate of registration and selected projects will appear on the website as examples for others to follow.

Special Event: Bayscape Workshop and Tour, Washington, D.C. May 20.

2/24/2006