Our yard is more than just a place to sit and relax, more than just a garden.
It’s a living landscape: a habitat where birds, butterflies, bees, toads, and other little creatures can find food, water, cover, and a place to raise their young. A place where there are no pesticides or herbicides that would harm these creatures or people.
It’s a place that’s full of life — a very exciting place to be!
It’s the kind of place you, too, can have in your own yard, whether you have a small urban space, a medium-size suburban lot (such as ours), or acreage in the country.
We hope the experiences and information we share in this website help you create your own habitat garden and will inspire you to become a good steward of your own piece of the earth, helping preserve a healthy planet for future generations — both human and non-human.
“Caring for Our Piece of the Earth” course
In addition to this website, I’ve created a FREE 6-session discussion course called “Caring for Our Piece of the Earth.” It’s available as PDF files on the Habitat Gardening in Central New York Wild Ones chapter website.
It’s designed for groups of 8-12 people, but individuals are welcome to use it, too.
But it’s more fun in a group! Why not get a group together and meet at a local library, in a community group, in your home — or even as an online group?
Certifications
- The National Wildlife Federation certified our yard as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat (since renamed as “Certified Wildlife Habitat”) #27815 in 2000.
- Monarch Watch certified our yard as Monarch Waystation #581 in 2006.
- Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes inspires and informs our landscape decisions.
Join us in creating a healthier planet!
Reflections
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
~ Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
To me the choice is clear. The costs of increasing the percentage and biomass of natives in our suburban landscapes are small, and the benefits are immense. Increasing the percentage of natives in suburbia is a grassroots solution to the extinction crisis …
Our success is up to each one of us individually. We can each make a measurable difference almost immediately by planting a native nearby.
As gardeners and stewards of our land, we have never been so empowered — and the ecological stakes have never been so high.
~ Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home, pp. 286-287
The time for treating our patches of the planet as blank palettes for our creative expressions is over.
Now we need to become guardians, not gardeners, to weave the web of life back together, patch by patch.
It is time to step up and be part of the solution to the problems that are engulfing our world. To be part of a patchwork quilt of hope.
~ Mary Reynolds, landscape designer and author of We Are the Ark
We are the first generation to know that we face unprecedented global environmental risks, but at the same time, we are the last generation with a significant chance to do something about it. Time is running out for us to leave a legacy of which we can be proud.
~ Johan Rockstrom, as quoted in The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric
Few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
~ Robert F. Kennedy
[T]he rule of no realm is mine … But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task … if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair and bear fruit and flower again in days to come … For I also am a steward.
as spoken by Gandalf in The Return of the King