Western towees love the shelter of a white spruce. Birds make a beeline for that tree when storms are in the area. (Yes, unfortunately, it is a large tree, and not something you plant in a backyard.) Smaller birds are always foraging in the branches. Birds search in any pines with seed cones or nuts. Lodgepole pine is a favorite. Birds also eat wild hazelnuts. In season (when there is fruit), birds can be found in red-twig dogwood shrubs, dogwood trees (for cedar waxwings and scrubjays), chokecherry, wild cherry, and blueberry shrubs. I would think crabapples would be essential fall-winter food in your area. Birds move very quickly from food source to food source. This is especially true during migration periods. You'll see them for a couple days as they use up the available seeds, nuts, and fruit, and then they move on. I'd say plant a variety of trees and shrubs with the objective of providing shelter and/or a food source. And one of the most critical items that people seldom think of ...clean water.

I live in the northland. First they need to check any rules to see what changes they can make some will not allow anything other than in pots. From the discription of one tree in a field I think they live in Kansas City North of the river which has multiple types of land. Theirs is probably all fill. North Kansas City is a small town in itself. North Kansas City is next to the Missouri river in a flat area which which may be soggy when we have too much rain. My DH just told me there is a retirement residence in a part where they tore down all the senior apartments and build taller buildings. I would suggest thymes, zinnas. Kansas City has numerous gardening societies. One of the umberella groups is the Garden Center Association. It is a group of various garden groups that used to use a building in a park called Loose Park just south of the plaza area. This groups has a meeting the third Saturday of the month normally at the MO Conservation Department building just south of 4700 Troost. Coffee and goodies at nine am and various types of lectures at 9:30. Center has wonderful gardens behind the building for different types of woodlands, ponds, grasslands, etc. Amazing how much is packed in such a small area. If you can post the general area of the northland I can give better suggestions and locations of nurseries and plant that can provide decent plants at a reasonable cost.

most of those aren't native plants. The native ones that I recognise are: Ajuga reptans; Casuarina nana; Grevillea 'Molonglo'; Myoporum parvifolium; Rulingia hermanniifolia; Scaevola aemula; Scaevola albida; Scleranthus biflorus; I've never had much luck with scleranthus, neither in Canberra nor Melbourne. It seems to died from under watering and over watering too easily. Investigate your council tip and see if they have big piles of old chipped garden waste. As long as it is dark brown and doesn't have any obvious weeds growing in it,it should be find to use as a soil conditioner. You can probably pay someone to deliver a truckload of the stuff for a tuppence and spread that out. Avoid fresh mulches like woodchip or pine bark, as they are loaded with tannins which stunt growth, and pull the nitrogen out of the soil. Another possible mulch is road metal, which is cheap, readily available and looks quite interesting (to me, anyway). You can usually get blue metal (a kind of basalt) or granite. Canberra should also still sell 'granitic sand', a form of decomposed granite which makes a dense layer (though often contains a fair amount of clay). Start saving those newspapers!

As far as I know, there aren't many evergreen shrubs that are also host plants for butterflies. I've heard of people planting red bay (Persea borbonia) or swamp bay (P. palustris) which are evergreen and keeping them pruned to bush size, but they're only regularly used by palamedes swallowtails, which don't occur in north Alabama. Once in a blue moon I find a spicebush swallowtail caterpillar on mine, but it wouldn't be worth it for you. Spicebush swallowtails lay eggs just as freely on sassafras as they do spicebush, so you could plant some 'out back' for them. Sassafras doesn't need a shady swamp like spicebush. If I were you, I'd use one of the native viburnums for foundation planting, like V. acerifolium/maple leaf viburnum or V. dentatum/arrow wood. Maple leaf viburnum has some of the most beautiful leaves, plus azalea sphinx moths occasionally use viburnums as host plants. Bird just LOVE the berries! The best thing about the native viburnums is that they're so easy to grow, they can survive foundation soil, which is usually full of subsoil turned over by the builders and hard to repair. If your foundation area is real wet, you could plant the possumhaw viburnum, which is evergreen. The best wildlife plant out there is wild black cherry/Prunus serotina, but it makes a big tree. If you have a big enough yard, it would be well worth it to have several. It's host to both tiger swallowtails and red-spotted purples, plus many of the big moths, like cecropia moths, use it as a host plant, bees use the flowers, and birds love the fruit. In regard to butterflies, you probably should watch to see what butterflies occur in your area, look up their host plant/s, and plant them if you'd like to see more of them. Buttonbush is a real draw as a nectar plant for butterflies and MANY other insects, but, unless you have a consistently wet spot for it, it might not make it. I have about a dozen blueberry bushes which have gotten big, and they keep me and the birds eating blueberries from about the first week in June until August - I have different varieties that mature at different times. And they're SO easy to grow, no insecticides needed, just acid soil! There are many plants that make good nectar plants. I have a bottlebrush buckeye that butterflies just LOVE, but it only blooms once a year. You could plant some pentas, which butterflies like to nectar on and tersa sphinx moths like to use as a host plant. Of course, there's milkweed, the monarch host plant that all butterflies like to nectar on, zinnias, butterfly bush, and lantana, which can't be beat! A good butterfly book that includes host plants, and a good bird book would be a great buy! Sherry