From parking strips to parklands, communities are full of mowed spaces that could be put to better use. Here’s how to reclaim them for native plants and wildlife.
Standing in the street and admiring each other’s gardens one day, Sherrie Pelsma and her neighbor made a delightful discovery: They’d become hosts to a buzzing block party.
“We could actually see the air traffic of bees and butterflies crossing the street between our two habitats,” recalls Pelsma. “I said, ‘Wow, how cool would it be if everybody had a little strip?’ ”
Forty-four of those little strips—often called “hellstrips” due to their exposed location between hot asphalt and concrete—now bloom by the sidewalks of Pelsma’s community in Portland, Oregon. Once patches of lifeless turfgrass, the 12,000 square feet of mini-habitats are life preservers for native bees, many of whom can fly only a few blocks before running out of fuel.
“It’s not going to help wolves or bears,” says Pelsma, founder of Pollinator Parkways. “But we’re talking about really tiny creatures, so tiny spaces have a really big impact for them.”
Birds, squirrels and other urban wildlife also find sustenance in these urban oases. Every outdoor space, whether a transformed city plot or a suburban pocket prairie, matters to animals. Here’s how to creatively reclaim land for wildlife well beyond your own backyard.
Rally the community. As a professional community organizer for a local nonprofit, Pelsma knows lasting change starts from the ground up. When she called a meeting on Nextdoor.com, a dozen neighbors responded. “They came up with the idea of parking strips specifically because they’re smaller than your yard, so it’s a little less intimidating,” she says. “And people really wanted to beautify the neighborhood.”
Broadening her base, Pelsma reached out to a local nonprofit that recruits volunteers for restoration projects. Students and Boy Scouts braved November rains to remove sod and prepare beds. Homeowners played an important role, planning the gardens with Pelsma, overseeing volunteers and planting alongside them. The process ensures participants are invested and can serve as ambassadors for the program. “The point is also for them to be more informed,” says Pelsma, “so that they become stewards.”
Seek creative funding. A $500 gift card from the city covered initial plantings, but demand soon exceeded supply. When Pelsma learned that many grant-makers award only nonprofits, not individuals, she found a workaround: City Repair, an organization dedicated to artistic and ecological endeavors, became a fiscal sponsor, allowing Pelsma to use its nonprofit status to apply for a $3,000 regional grant. “And then I was able to buy plants in bulk,” she says. “It was just this total game changer.”
Public and private funding helps legitimize wildlife gardening, says Pam Sonneville, who has gradually replaced turfgrass in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Gaithersburg, Maryland, with native plants. When she encounters skeptics, Sonneville points to the grants the community has received as proof of the plants’ value. She invites visiting experts—from landscape designers to wildlife advocates—and shares their positive feedback. She even led the charge to have the whole community certified as a National Wildlife Federation Community Wildlife Habitat.
Wildlife large and small thrive in the Woodland Hills community, where efforts to revegetate the landscape with native plants led to certification by the National Wildlife Federation. (Photos, above: Kate Courville; below: Pam Sonneville)
Address human needs. As the grounds chair of her homeowners association, Sonneville emphasizes practical benefits. In one wet area where landscapers unsuccessfully planted grass seed, white wood asters now hold the ground and feed small native bees. “Before it was nothing but mud in the spring, and the water was coming down in front of people’s houses,” Sonneville says. “Now it’s probably 90 percent better.”
Wildlife-friendly plants also save time in Wilmette, Illinois, where retired attorney and native plant expert Charlotte Adelman planted a prairie in a hard-to-mow detention basin in the town’s Centennial Park. “The mowers get stuck in the muck—it’s a wetland,” says Adelman, the author of several books, including her most recent one, Midwestern Native Shrubs and Trees: Gardening Alternatives to Nonnative Species: An Illustrated Guide. “So [the park district supervisor] looked at it as a very practical alternative.”
The Centennial Prairie Garden in a town park of Wilmette, Illinois, is a haven for native plants and the animals who depend on them. (Photos: Will Heinz and Nancy Lawson)
Show and tell. Now a haven for Wilmette’s wild residents, the Centennial Prairie Garden has inspired a garden club to promote pocket prairies throughout the community. Adelman looks for such opportunities wherever she sees bare ground and open minds; after she suggested a wildflower garden at the firehouse, the chief himself enthusiastically drilled holes for the plants.
Many of the plantings Sonneville has nurtured—a wildflower strip outside the pool, milkweed lining the tennis court, a mini-meadow of boneset and ironweed behind some townhouses—demonstrate how natural plantings evolve. As flowers beget more flowers, leaves replace expensive mulch, and grass becomes a thing of the past, she reports financial savings and progress to the HOA board and in community newsletters.
But she and other advocates know there’s more at stake than the bottom line; Pelsma, an avid photographer, has witnessed bee declines up close. “There just aren’t as many, and there’s not as much variety,” she says. “I feel the loss really profoundly in my heart.”
Because she turned that loss into positive action, though, the buzz is growing louder in her community as each new parking strip fills a gap in the pollinator corridor. It all started with two neighbors, their gardens and a few butterflies and bees who showed them the way.
Related story: Pocket Humane Gardens: No yard, no problem!