Gardens born to be wild!

Paula
Sep 12, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Jun 23, 2023

We all want to stop feeling so helpless in the face of climate change, right? Well, we all have the ability to create space for biodiversity in our gardens, window boxes and vegetable containers. If you are lucky enough to have a yard, you are in a powerful position to do something beneficial. Gardens attract wildlife, birds, and beneficial insects like pollinators.

Perfectly manicured green lawns don’t do much for the local wildlife — all that green grass is what scientists call a “biodiversity desert.” Lawns are America’s biggest irrigated crop and so converting some of them into natural habitats could do wonders for Earth’s biodiversity. Replacing even a section of your lawn with perennial flowers, bushes, wildflowers and grasses or groundcovers will help support these important players in the ecosystem.

In addition to supporting greater bio-diversity, gardens are also much kinder to the environment than maintaining a lawn. No longer will you need to use electricity or spew fumes into the air when you mow your lawn. Maintaining a garden also uses far less water than keeping a lawn green. On average, lawns use ten billion gallons of fresh water daily in the United States and 90 million pounds of pesticides a year.

As climate change, water scarcity and ongoing drought continue in southern California, as well as many other parts of the world, many people’s thoughts have turned to replacing our lawns with native plants, and now going native has become something of a movement. After all, native plants provide food and habitat for native, beneficial species, they sequester carbon, and they are naturally and uniquely adapted to the regions in which they belong. And by planting specific species such as milkweed, you can contribute to the wellbeing of a species suffering from habitat loss–in this case, the monarch butterfly.

Planting native plants strategically so that something is always in bloom from early spring to late fall is another foolproof way to make sure your yard is a hotbed of pollinator activity. While spring and early summer provide a banquet of options for pollinators, late summer through fall can be a time of food scarcity, and blooming natives are a lifeline for our insect friends.

Another great way to assist pollinators is to limit mowing what lawn you do have. In the northern hemisphere, No Mow May is a community science initiative popularized in recent years in the US and UK that encourages property owners to limit their lawn mowing practices during the month of May. In May, many bees are coming out of hibernation and need flowers to feed themselves and their babies. The main purpose of No Mow May is to encourage people to let spring flowers in their lawns bloom before mowing.

What we do with our yards matters because they’ve become such a dominant part of our world. Residential yards make up more than 16 percent of all land in the contiguous United States, and are rapidly expanding. That’s why groups like Montreal’s Nouveaux Voisins are helping homeowners turn their yards into wildlife sanctuaries buzzing with birds, bees, and all manner of native plants. They created a series of garden experiments to replace grass yards and conventional ornamental gardens for a diverse landscape that supports local plants, insects, birds, and other wildlife. Representing a variety of gardening preferences, sometimes more orderly and sometimes wilder, these experimental gardens showcase a diversity of gardening aesthetics that embrace ecological processes, speak to different garden styles, and grow best in different contexts.