That time 90 people toured our garden
This summer we hosted tours for members of the native-plant organization Wild Ones. What it's like to open your garden to strangers, and why natives are just right for the suburban homesteader.
By Lisa Brunette
When we transformed our garden from your typical suburban grasscape into a platinum award-winning natural habitat in less than three years, people took notice. Some of those people were volunteers with our St. Louis chapter of Wild Ones, and they invited us to give a tour of our garden to their members.
As Wild Ones members ourselves, we’ve been on many a tour of other people’s gardens. These tours have both inspired and humbled us. Inspired us to keep going with our intent to replace a 1/4-acre expanse of lawn, invasive plants, and exotic ornamentals with a mix of native plants and edibles. Humbled us because many of the people whose gardens we’ve toured have been at this for a looong time, and their models are not only award-winning, but in one case, actually immortalized in print: The water feature in the garden of Margy and Dan Terpstra is highlighted in the book Nature’s Best Hope by Doug Tallamy, the reigning super star of native plant gardening.
So it was tempting to beg off, to claim our garden wasn’t ready for public viewing. But that was a hard argument to make with a platinum award—the highest in the Audubon Society’s Bring Conservation Home program—to suggest otherwise. Less than 2 percent of gardeners make it that far. Our garden has also been named a Wild Ones native plant habitat and a Monarch Waystation. What can we say? We’re gamers, so we had to collect all achievements!
We guessed this meant we were ripe for a tour. But even if we hadn’t leveled up, would it matter? Some of the gardens we’ve taken the most inspiration from didn’t come with any award endorsements. After all, the birds and bees don’t care how many plaques you’ve displayed on your fence.
Anthony’s father keeps a stunning garden in Walla Walla, Washington, that has been subject of many a tour, not to mention a cover story in Sunset Magazine. So welcoming strangers into your garden was not without its precedent in our family.
We gave two official tours, one on Saturday morning and another on a weekday evening. Due to a glitch in the event listing, we ended up giving a third tour to a couple who missed a date correction and arrived on the next Saturday after driving from several hours away. They got a private one! In total, 90 people visited our garden.
Honestly, we were both a bit nervous to open our garden to the world, but Wild Ones members are a curious, kind, supportive lot. In fact, as I mentioned to the tour crowds, many of our native plants came either from free or discounted seeds and seedlings picked up at Wild Ones events or through a special bulk order you can participate in as a member, ordering trees and shrubs directly from the Missouri Department of Conservation nursery at only $1 US per seedling. So while it’s our garden, the plants literally came from the local plant community.
The Wild Ones mission is to encourage gardening with native plants, and we definitely took that up as a goal. Gardeners plant natives for a variety of reasons, but here are the two most obvious and important:
They’re better suited to your home climate and growing conditions, requiring less work, care, and support in the form of water and fertilizer.
Because native flora and fauna evolved together, native plants do a much better job of feeding and providing habitat for pollinators and other creatures we need to survive.
We suspect that most people do it “for the birds,” meaning, to attract wildlife to your garden for your own pleasure but also to help fight against the documented decline of pollinator populations. So, many native plant gardeners also consider themselves “environmentalists.” But we think it might be even more crucial to think about our own survival. While nature as a whole adapts and changes, human beings will suffer grave consequences with the extinction of pollinators.
For us, gardening with natives is a no-brainer. We’re not native-only zealots, and a good deal of our gardening effort is put toward plants we can eat. But natives attract, feed, and provide nests for the birds and insects that pollinate our fruits and vegetables. For example, did you know that only native bumblebees can pollinate tomatoes? Or that a bee specialist—the pruinose squash bee—pollinates your pumpkins and zucchini?
The loss of just one specialist pollinator could have devastating effects on our food supply. But we’re not here to lecture you on the doom-and-gloom stuff. Gardening with natives is also fun. As the tour goers witnessed first-hand, native plants enliven your garden. There’s nothing more satisfying than walking down the path and hearing the drone of bees, or watching a hummingbird dip its needle-nose beak into a trumpet bloom.
Would you open your garden to public tours? Why or why not?
Learn more about the national organization Wild Ones.
This sounds really fun, though daunting with that many people. For sure you have to show off those awards! We've only done random spur-of-the-moment tours of our gardens for curious neighbors, UPS delivery workers, the guy who delivered our car, door-to-door political candidates... you never know when a kindred spirit is going to stop by.