For many of us, our yards are as personal as our living rooms. Front yards introduce our home to passersby. Backyards can be our private havens or our favorite places to meet with friends and enjoy the quiet of a summer afternoon.
But our yards can be so much more. They can be important parts of habitat wherever we live, helping to support a healthy, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem.
About six years ago, my partner, Bernie, and I looked around our lot and decided to make it into a sanctuary for us, for pollinators, for birds, and for wildlife. We live in a small town, with a sidewalk separating us from a very busy road. There are homes to the south of us and a wetland between us and our neighbors to the north. Directly behind our lot is a wooded area, and beyond that is an open field, a good-sized beaver pond, and more woods.
A little research convinced us that we could take many steps to add diversity and make our yard more “natural” — and two were so important that, even if we did nothing else, we knew we’d get results.
The first was to plant shrubs, trees, and perennials that are native to our part of the world in northwest Vermont.
In any given area, songbirds, insects, and plants have evolved together. As birds evolved, they learned what trees, flowers, grasses, and bugs provided the food they needed. And the insects learned what plants, as adults and as larva. And then plants protected themselves by evolving chemicals that taste bad or are toxic — and then the insects evolved to tolerate those chemicals so they could keep feeding on those plants — and so on, for millennia.
