About Us

Photo by Adam Sparks.

We are friends, biologists, lovers of birds, plants, and wild spaces.  We first met in 2005 in graduate school at the University of California - Riverside, where we bonded over a love of birding.  We continued to cross paths over the next two decades, through Scotland (Sonya in Glasgow, Sarah in Aberdeen), and now in Auburn, Alabama.    

Sarah grew up in subtropical south Florida and got her degree in Wildlife Ecology & Conservation from the University of Florida.  She then hopped around the country working as a field biologist (mostly birds, but some plant work) in Missouri, Florida, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, and  Nevada.  While in graduate school, she did field work at 10,000 feet in alpine habitats in Montana, but she also spent a great deal of time exploring California’s coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and desert ecosystems.  It was in southern California that she first started growing native plants adapted to the local climate and soils.  After 4 years in Scotland, she moved to Auburn, Alabama, where she instantly got to work learning about and propagating southeastern native plants.   

Sonya is a New England native. She studied biology as an undergraduate at Prescott College and then as a graduate student at University of California - Riverside. Between all that schooling, she was an itinerant biologist, conducting field research on birds in North and South America as well as Africa. She also spent several years in Scotland studying trout and salmon in the highlands.  Returning to the United States, she then donned the professor hat for a few years before moving on to Alabama and its beautiful native plants!   

We both love having gardens, but believe those gardens should also be a functioning part of the ecosystem.  Unfortunately, non-native plants do very little for biodiversity, as the vast majority of our insects are specialists (97%) and require the plants with which they co-evolved.  Similarly, while birds may eat the fruits of some non-native species, virtually all songbirds feed their nestlings caterpillars . . . which require native plants.  Did you know a single chickadee nest with 4 nestlings will consume 6000-9000 caterpillars before fledging?  Because we love the birds (and the insects), we believe in cultivating yards and landscapes that will continue to support our wildlife populations.  As such, we also choose not to use any insecticides on our plants.  You may have read in the news recently that most milkweed plants found in commercial nurseries contain insecticides at levels that are harmful to the monarch caterpillars that eat them.  We’ll be honest: it’s hard to grow a perfect-looking milkweed without killing all the things that want to eat it.  So our milkweeds- and other plants- may not always look perfect, but you can be sure that they are supporting our wildlife food webs!  

And what does our name mean? "Nemophily" means a love of forests and woodland scenery.  If you love being amongst the trees, you're a nemophile like us. 

Sonya & Sarah