ONE LATE-AUGUST DAY, Nancy Lawson—or “The Humane Gardener,” as she is perhaps better known—was making a video about a spicebush swallowtail butterfly when something just beyond it in her Maryland yard caught her eye. A green heron was visiting a small pond Nancy had created not long ago—her first such encounter with the bird.  (That’s one of her backyard ponds, above.)

When I saw that video on Instagram it made me think of the late-March morning when I’d stood up from my desk and the familiar view into the backyard included something very unfamiliar bobbing around my own little water garden: a pair of wood ducks.

Every day in the garden is loaded with the potential for such surprises, and the resulting sense of awe. Nancy is here today to talk about some of the wonders large and ever-so-small we have each been privileged to witness, and some of the garden-management tactics we use that increase the chances of such encounters by welcoming more life to the garden.

Nancy Lawson is the author of “The Humane Gardener,” a naturalist and habitat consultant based in Maryland. Nancy promotes animal-friendly planting strategies, and in another of her books, called “Wildscape,” she challenged us to sharpen our awareness that we are not alone out there in the garden, but actually just one part of a much bigger picture.

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a change to win a copy of “Wildscape” (affiliate link).

Read along as you listen to the Oct. 5, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

wonder-filled garden moments, with nancy lawson

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Margaret Roach: Good to talk to you. Good to always think about the things that we both are out there thinking about all the time [laughter]. I was reflecting in advance of talking to you about how when I began gardening decades ago, it was sort of for the sheer love of the plants. And in the last, I don’t know, 20 years, it’s really been more for who else the plants might let me witness, kind of. So I mentioned your accidental green heron sighting in the introduction. Maybe we start at pondside. I dug my two water gardens decades ago; yours are newer. So maybe tell us a little bit about them and how they’ve begun to change the scenery there.

Nancy Lawson: Yeah, so our first bigger pond, it’s still quite small, that we dug was in 2020, during COVID, and I had always wanted more of an alternative space for them because we had just little tub ponds before that. And that I felt like was maybe a little bit too shallow for this past cold winter that we had. So I had also been wanting more places for the frogs to disperse because we have so many that were coming. We had 13 green frogs in this little round pond one year.

So this year we built one in the spring, and I had been looking online at other ponds for years and got more ideas for how to make some of the sides and some of the shallow areas. And so we dug in a sunnier spot in our habitat. And even before we were done, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, there were already diving beetles and water striders, and the green frogs came within a week or so from wherever else they had been.

And yeah, it’s just continued to amaze us all summer. Like you said, we had a green heron for the first time, and I don’t think I ever would’ve even seen that bird if I hadn’t happened to be already out there looking at a butterfly, and making a video about spicebush swallowtail habits and such. [Below, three male green frogs at Margaret’s doing who knows what at the pond edge.]

Margaret: Yeah. I have two ponds in-ground. They’re deep. They’re more traditional looking. They have stone coping around the outsides, a little more sort of formal-ish looking, I guess. And the bigger one is maybe 3 feet deep and it has a liner. I don’t know if yours have a liner or they’re just-

Nancy: Yes.

Margaret: And so it has a liner and then again, the stone edging and so forth. And it’s like I’ve had great blue heron come. It’s only maybe 12 feet by 8 or 9 feet wide. The surface is not big, and it’s a couple of thousand gallons, but I’ve looked out there [laughter] and there’s been a great blue heron standing there checking it out. And of course what he or she wanted was to see how many frogs he or she could eat, which always makes me crazy because I want to control everything, and I don’t want anybody to hurt the animals that I feel the most affinity for [laughter], which of course is insane and that’s not how it works. Which is one of the biggest lessons of all, isn’t it? That it’s a food web and we have to be O.K. with everybody doing what they’re supposed to be doing out there.

Nancy: And at the same time, I don’t think it’s insane. I think it’s natural if you’re really observing, you do start to become attached to these animals and notice that they’re not just a species, they’re actually individuals, and they do have these different personalities. But to your point, yeah, sometimes people get really upset like when I posted one of the green frog videos of the green frogs fighting and they worked it out, that’s what they do. Sometimes they do kill each other. I’ve never seen that, but most of the time they’re just competing for territory, right? And so most people find it interesting or amusing, or they learned something, but I did get a couple of comments from people who were angry that I posted it, feeling sorry for the frogs, but that’s kind of just one window into their whole story. They’re wrestlers.

Margaret: Yes. And especially the males I find during breeding season, the males will go after each other and there’s these frog fights going on all the time. It’s pretty funny.

Nancy: [Laughter.] It is pretty funny.

Margaret: Yeah. A lot of personality. And I mean, people say to me, “Oh, what plant do you think…?” Because we’ve been all learning about pollinator gardens and obviously the power of native plants and so forth. But people say to me, “What plant is the most impactful?” and so forth.

And yes, dot, dot, dot, I know from Dr. Doug Tallamy and so forth, I know that oak would be—the oak trees. And I understand the idea of keystone plants and the actual scientific answer to some of these questions. But then the answer is for me, water has been the thing that I did, that I added, that’s made the most difference. Not a plant at all. Water’s where I’ve seen the most action from insects up to black bear [laughter]. Everybody comes to use the water and a lot of things –

Nancy: That’s amazing your black bear.

Margaret: Well, they think it’s a hot tub [laughter]. It’s like they’re crazy. But everybody is attracted to water. It’s a precious resource. It’s essential. So yeah, that’s been a really big thing, and you and I both intentionally added water to support more wildlife. But we also do other things intentionally. I know that we each welcome dead wood in the garden, which some people think is messy. “Oh, why don’t you get rid of that log or that half a tree trunk or whatever? Why do you have that messy thing here?” And I don’t have it in the middle where you have to climb over it to get to the house or something. I don’t mean that, but I do have a lot of decaying tree trunks [laughter] and so forth here and there, especially in the shadier woodland-y kind of areas. I feel like that’s important. So that’s another thing that I think is a big attractant.

Nancy: Yeah. And so sometimes we do these things for, for example, with the pond, I initially was like: There aren’t enough places for frogs. But then I see all the other life coming, like the hibiscus turret bee that we saw walking on water, collecting water for her nest. And you see the mud dauber wasps going and bending over into the pond, collecting water. [Above, Nancy’s video of mud daubers gathering mud to build their nests.]

And the same thing with those logs. So sometimes you’ll make a brush pile or leave the logs for the salamanders or for the turtles to over winter under the brush pile and things like that. But I actually finally saw this summer a mourning cloak at a time of the season I don’t usually—it was a little bit later—go onto a log and make herself into a perfect twig. And I mean, I posted it and people could not find this mourning cloak. I had to point it out because she was so camouflaged. And then I knew that they overwinter under there. I didn’t realize that in the summer they spend a lot of time there. I looked it up, read more about it, and they actually try to camouflage there in the warm season, too. And so if she didn’t have those logs, where would she go? She was absolutely perfectly blended into it.

Margaret: So this is a butterfly that people may see, in its territory, that people may see very early in the season, too, because of the way that it does overwinter, I guess, as an adult, yes? [Below right, from Nancy’s Instagram reel of the mourning cloak on a log; left, from her reel about the green heron she spied.]

Nancy: Yeah. And that was what was interesting to me because it’s like the first one if you see them that you usually see. And this was more like June. And so I thought, well, that’s interesting. The phenology was different for me. And so I was just grateful that, well, now I know more about this and I can explain to people with real imagery why this log is important to butterflies, too, because I think sometimes it’s abstract if you’re just talking about it.

Margaret: Yeah. And on a larger scale and much more obvious and loudmouthed [laughter], I have view from my office window where I spend a lot of time sitting, typing, etc., I look out and I have a downed, there was a tree that eventually declined and died and gradually I took it down. We first made it into a snag and then took it when the trunk was going to fall, kind of took it down in two large pieces, and lay it beside where it had been. And oh my goodness, Mister Pileated Woodpecker is just my best friend. And it’s like, “This is my tree, Margaret.” And it’s so much fun. [Laughter.] And if I were to go over with a hand lens or something and look closely when the bird is not there doing his thing, there’s a zillion things going on, every manner of the beetles and who knows what in there.

And obviously so many things we can’t see, more on the microbial level. I mean, there’s so much nutrient-cycling going on and this is what helps us build soil also. We take these things away, and where’s the soil going to come from if we don’t only not leave… We say leave the leaves, but what about the biomass that these trunks of trees represent that have grown up out of a place for 50 years or 40 years or 70 years or 100 years? Do you know what I mean? It’s tons of biomass that can return to the soil.

So I want it. And yeah, I sometimes have to move them, obviously not by myself. I have to get help to move them, but the arborists who come to help me stabilize, again, a dead or dying tree, they understand that I want to do something strategic. I don’t want them to take it away and grind it up.

Nancy: Right. I think it gives away, too, once you start thinking about that, to celebrate when something falls or a tree is dying, it’s of course a lament if this is a favorite tree for you and for wildlife, but there’s so much more that can happen after that, and so make the best of it.

We had some pretty strong winds this summer, and actually a very young Virginia pine I had planted that’s right near where we dug the new pond, didn’t break but fell. And so it’s still alive, but what it’s doing is providing shade in the rocky areas where it was getting too hot. And I thought this pond would have a little bit more shade than it does, but all the trees around it are still pretty small. And so it actually ended up helping with that microclimate situation. And it almost looks like, to me, it looks like when I was little and we would go visit relatives in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, like driftwood on the shore [laughter], like this microcosm of rocks and wood and logs and this half-fallen pine.

Margaret: So some other sort of creature observations, and I noticed also—not that I stalk you on Instagram or anything [laughter]—but you had an ant moment not long ago. And still the most common ant questions I always get are about how can I get rid of ants, which I don’t think about getting rid of them. But you had a caterpillar was being plucked of its hairs by an ant. [Laughter.] You had a little video of it. That was a crazy sighting, right?

Nancy: Yes. And at first I thought, is this something that this ant does? Are they trying to get something for their nest? And I watched it more later because I was pulling stiltgrass around a silver maple and I just happened to see this caterpillar, and then I filmed it and then I only saw a small bit of what the ant was doing. So I watched it later, and seeing the whole segment made me think this caterpillar going down the bark because he was sort of leaving the tree was really just startling those ants, I think, because he was kind of bumping into them. And so the ants were trying to bite at him, and instead they’re getting this mouthful of hair [laughter], which is the caterpillar’s defense, right?

Margaret: With the setae, those hairs can be almost bristle-like in some cases and can have toxins.

Nancy: Some toxin. Yeah. Because then I saw, too, when I looked closer, that the ant was dropping the hairs pretty quickly.

Margaret: Ah. I had an ant moment in—I don’t know, I want to think it was around May [correction: it was August]. I was walking down my front path and I saw this whole big activity on the ground, of ants. But when I looked, they weren’t all one size, and some of them had wings. And I was like, “What is going on here?” And some of them were really big with wings, and some of them were medium-sized with wings, and then hundreds of them were smaller with no wings. And I was like, “What is this? What is this?”

So I took a little video of it, like what you said, and went and tried to look it up. My first thing was flying ants or termites; apparently that’s what people always think it is. But not termites, but ants, many regular ants have this sort of moment in their reproductive cycle, I guess, this “nuptial flight,” they call it, where you get these oversized winged females, they develop wings, and some winged males were not quite as big, and that’s going to make the next generation, but there’s all this action. I guess it was just like—I don’t understand it completely, but it was like, “Wow, I happened on this moment, right?” [Above, nuptial flight of citronella ants from Wikipedia by Beatriz Moisset.]

Nancy: You happened on a moment. That’s exactly, we’ve seen that once here, and it’s because we happened to be doing something in the front yard where we had put a log, we placed it as a stump from a neighbor’s cut tree, and it was citronella ants, and it was gorgeous because the sun was coming at just the right time. And yeah, I read about it later, and I was like, “Gosh, if we had missed this by half an hour, we never would’ve seen this.”

Margaret: Apparently it’s very quick. Again, it’s called a nuptial flight, and all the individuals with the wings, the reproductive individuals are called alates, I think. It’s like this whole moment, but it happens really fast, so that was kind of cool.

Nancy: It makes you think of where the fairy myths come from, because it’s beautiful, and they look almost silvery in the light and everything.

Margaret: Have you ever had snow fleas, springtails? Have you ever had springtails on the snow?

Nancy: No, I had some kind of winter beauty; oh, I can’t remember, was it winter moths? But I have not seen the snow fleas.

Margaret: Yeah. So that’s another weird thing. I’m walking along and along the bottom of this whole long wall, there’s this big, thick, wide stripe of dark color, and I think, why is this snow blackish or gray? And I bend down and it’s moving, it’s all alive [laughter], it’s pulsing, and it’s zillions of these tiny little creatures.

It turns out they’re not actually insects, technically speaking. They do have six legs, but they’re wingless. And anyway, they’re arthropods, but they’re not insects. And they’re these springtails that are commonly called snow fleas.

And then the next year I had them, just this year, I had them also along the edges of where I cut with the snow shovel, where I shovel the front path, and there’s a little miniature wall of snow on either side, left and right walking down, and then they appeared there this year. Wow. So it’s like, I guess I have them now.

Nancy: That’s amazing.

Margaret: They have this amazing chemistry that they don’t freeze. They can be active in sub-freezing weather. So you never know what you’re going to see even in the offseason. Have you had any other cool things happen lately? [Laughter.]

Nancy: Yeah. Well, I mean, so by the pond, there’s some things that I haven’t even posted just because either I didn’t get a picture, there’s so much going on, but I did see a green frog leap up to get a spotted lanternfly, and I was just there for a quick break. I wasn’t taking pictures. The frog right in front of me was just very still, and we were just chilling together, and it happened just in a flash. And so that was, I think, again, another thing, unless you happen to be there at the right time.

And so I keep thinking I often have a fear of missing out in my own yard [laughter], and I was thinking that you could probably really relate to that where I’m doing one thing somewhere or I have to be inside or something like that. And that’s my biggest FOMO, is that there’s always something amazing like that going on if you have habitat, right?

Margaret: Yes, yes, yes. And this is a good time to look even just closely at leaves. There’s so many leaf mines, those squiggly trails in leaves, and galls, the odd structure things. And I love this book by Charley Eiseman called “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” I think. And it’s like a field guide, but to all the oddball things, especially those. And it’s just like you could just, even on those little tiny fascinating things, find out what’s going on, look at all those squiggles in the leaves [laughter].

Nancy: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think I learned about that book probably from when you interviewed him years ago.

Margaret: Yeah, it’s a long time. Yeah, I’ve known him for a long time. He’s great. But any other kind of fun things going on over there?

Nancy: Yeah. I mean, I see some patterns of behavior now that make me wish we had kind of an iNaturalist for behaviors, to see if we could compare. And I’ve noticed that the frogs will make a circuit from one pond to the other, because we have a really small shell pond that’s a few feet away from the new pond that we did last year. And I had to watch for a while, and I saw that they were leaping out of one, going to the other one, chasing each other, coming back the other direction in front of me. Oh yeah, amazing. And of course, it makes me want to build another and another [laughter].

Margaret: Uh-oh.

Nancy: Yeah. So just behavioral things.

Margaret: Yeah. The smaller frogs go in one pond that’s more protected, and the larger ones go out in the bigger, more open area.

Nancy: Oh, interesting.

Margaret: So it’s like they seem to self-select according to how comfortable and how strong, how ready for the open world they feel. I mean, I’m projecting onto it, but you know what I mean? That’s what I’ve always noticed over the years, that more of the younger ones will be in the more protected, smaller, out-of-the-way pond, and the ones that go brave it out in the open are the larger individuals. So yeah, lots to think about.

And yeah, we could just go on and on and on forever about all the crazy things that we’re seeing outside [laughter]. It’s pretty fun. And like I said, I thought it was all about the plants, but it turns out it’s about all kinds of other things I didn’t even know existed, right?

Nancy: Right. All the interactions.

Margaret: Yeah. So I’m glad to talk to you, and I hope we’ll talk again soon. Thank you.

Nancy: Thank you, Margaret.

enter to win a copy of ‘wildscape’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature,” by Nancy Lawson for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

What was your latest awe-inspiring garden moment?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. Good luck to all.

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prefer the podcast version of the show?

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Oct. 5, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).