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A Garden For Wildlife

@flutterbymeadows

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This garden doesn't keep secrets. It tells me everything.
10 years of native plants, wildlife, and learning how to listen.

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That plant is not for you. It's for them....for wildlife.

I became completely fascinated by the seasonal changes in my yard. Noticing what blooms, what new animals (pollinators too) migrate through, and what moves on once I started gardening for wildlife.

It is genuinely rewarding to step outside and notice that your yard is actually giving something back to nature.

Early on though, when I was adding plants around my home, I focused so much on how I wanted it to look. How it was supposed to be beautiful and tidy.

I was so intent on what I wanted that I completely lost sight of who a garden is for.

I thought gardening for wildlife meant choosing the right plants. And it does. But it also means choosing plants that bloom at the right time.

Because wildlife doesn't experience our gardens as a collection of pretty flowers. They experience them as:
Food
Shelter
Nursery
Rest stops
And sometimes, a fuel station.

When you buy a native plant that looks like absolutely nothing in its plastic pot, you aren't buying it for your own visual satisfaction. You're buying an ecosystem.

Because a garden isn't just for you, it's for them. Hit follow, and let's give back to nature.🌱🐛🦋

#nativeplants #wildlifegardening #monarchmigration #gardenforwildlife taken in New Jersey, USA by @flutterbymeadows

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a month ago

Do birds yawn like people do? It was just supposed to be a walk. Not even a nature walk. Just a late afternoon, I gotta get outside sort of walk.

Instead I found myself in a one-on-one Zoom with a hummingbird species. And a moment of wonder where I stood on a gravel path and waited. I watched.

I waited to understand what are those two doing on a fence wire? And while I stood, wondering why am I filming birds with my phone (and the birds are asking the exact same thing) one of them yawned. It was a darling moment.

Nature is full of surprises. I kept walking. But eventually, I realized every walk becomes a nature walk. I just can't help myself.

Does this ever happen to you? You find nature when you least expect it?

#hummingbird #sonomacounty #hummingbirdsofcalifornia #birdsofinstagram by @flutterbymeadows

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2 months ago

Native plants and the pollinators, birds, insects and wildlife that depend on them evolved together. But over time, pieces of that system were broken apart by development, buildings, roads, and infrastructure, etc. (And other elements like chemicals.)

But what is a system? The word has both Latin and Greek roots meaning "organized whole".

And ecosystem? The Greek prefix eco- means "home", from the word oikos.

So pollinators are in trouble. We notice that they are disappearing. But what is really happening?

We took away their home. Their system. And we didn't offer them a backup plan.

Until now. From a small balcony, or a side yard, to the quad of a campus, native plants can help piece their home back together. What piece of their system are you planting?

Systems that are quietly doing their jobs...nectar, host plants, shelter, overwintering sites. Nature doesn't ask for perfect. It just needs the system to keep working. The ecosystem needs to be intact. And native plants will help place their system back up and running!

🎙️Tap the link in my bio to listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Substack. It's number 34. 🦋

#lesslawnmorelife #nativeplants #ecosystem #nativeplantgarden by @flutterbymeadows

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3 months ago

More people are replacing their lawns with native plants, and it’s one of the best things you can do for wildlife and pollinators. But nobody warns you what’s coming.

Those labels cover sun, soil, and mature height. They leave out the real warnings you might want to know:

Things you’ve never seen before will start eating your plants, and birds will start appearing that eat insects and seed heads. You're going to have holes in those leaves. That's a GOOD thing!

Some native plants will plant themselves. You bought 3. Next season there will be 5.

Some native plants/shrubs need a partner... (nobody gave you the talk about dioecious plants? Then you might not get those berries either!)

Binoculars at breakfast. Always. In your suitcase? Yup, that too. Birding is highly contagious.

You’ll start noticing things you never did, like how cute insects are.

The label tells you what the plant needs. It doesn’t tell you what the plant will do to YOU.

Your powers of observation grow right alongside the native plants. And you may run out of storage on your phone. You will have 16 photos of a monarch butterfly from the same day, but you won't want to delete a single one.

Which warning have you already run into in your own yard? Tell me in the comments, and send this to a friend who’s thinking about ditching some lawn. 🪏

#nativeplants
#plantingforpollinators
#fallisforplanting by @flutterbymeadows

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6 hours ago

Goldenrod is a keystone plant, supporting caterpillars of more than 100 species of butterflies and moths, along with countless other insects.

That paper wasp wasn't there for me. It was there for the goldenrod. Along with 19 of her closest friends, a few bees I couldn't identify and a couple other dauber wasps and flying things that may as well been dressed up for Halloween in all those stripes and metallic sheen.

Think of nature as an arch. Every plant is part of its architecture. Remove a keystone, and the structure begins to crumble. That's why planting native plants like goldenrod is so important.

Goldenrod is holding that architecture together, one bloom at a time.

And that's why the flowers we choose matter. I plant various species of goldenrod for this very purpose. Planting native species is helping to piece the whole ecosystem back together, one piece at a time.

#goldenrod
#insects
#nativeplants
#habitatgarden taken in New Jersey, USA by @flutterbymeadows

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4 days ago

Can a caterpillar change how I see native plants? On the last day of September, I was surprised to find a bumblebee on white snakeroot in the woods. I don’t often see bumblebees there. Or I don't get out much. Not really sure which.

I took a few photos. Three days later, when I looked again, I noticed the caterpillar right beside the bee, on the same plant.

I had completely missed it.

I was so focused on just that one thing (the bee), that I missed the other half of the story. And I started thinking about how often we do the same thing when we plant a garden. We plant for the butterflies and forget the caterpillars they start as.

For a long time, we looked at plants mostly as decoration. We filled our gardens with plants from other places because they were beautiful, unusual, or the new thing we should grow. Slowly, those plants began to take the place of many of the plants that had always belonged here.

We changed the picture without necessarily realizing what we were taking out of it.

And when those native plants were displaced or removed…so too was much of what depended on them. The caterpillars. The moths. The butterflies. The birds. The pollinators. The countless small lives that had evolved alongside those plants and required them to survive.

Maybe look at your own garden. Sometimes paying attention means noticing what you saw. Sometimes it means realizing what you missed.

You can learn from both.

And maybe that's the real shift in focus. Not just gardening for what we want to see, but learning to see the garden for what it’s doing: supporting life. Not just being decorative ornaments alongside tidy lawn lines. by @flutterbymeadows

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7 days ago

It's spooky season alright. And what's spooky is that I did not plant this New England aster in this bed. Where did you come from? I'm asking the aster and the butterfly, actually.

This New England aster (it's growing in a pile of Northern sea oats) and my best guess is it traveled over from the rain garden. That area sitting just a few feet away.

And the monarch? Somewhere north of here, a female laid an egg on a milkweed, and this male has been flying toward Mexico ever since. Navigating by some amazing innate way. Neither of them was invited. Both of them showed up anyway. And I'm totally okay with that.

I keep thinking that a native plant garden isn't something you finish. It's something that constantly shifts and changes. And the joy you get as the gardener? Well, sometimes plants that land in places on their own. And sometimes a gorgeous male monarch butterfly in early October.

What's shown up in your yard that you didn't plant?

#monarch #nativeplantgarden #monarchmigration #nativeplants taken in New Jersey, USA by @flutterbymeadows

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11 days ago

Fall plant sales are happening, so here's what I wish I'd known earlier: buy plants that get eaten.

A chewed leaf? Good thing. Dried seed heads for the birds? Even better. A native garden feeds local and migratory wildlife, and that's the whole point.

I didn't buy these plants for myself. The American goldfinches are the ones eating. Asters, coneflowers, and black-eyed Susans are all seed-bearing natives, and each one keeps feeding something long after the blooms fade.

Maybe it's not a garden. Maybe it's an invitation.

Leave the seed heads. Invite the wildlife in. Look for host plants for caterpillars. Include trees and shrubs if you have the room. A garden that can offer nectar, pollen, and/or berries? That's no garden, that's feeding an ecosystem.

What's going in your cart this fall? I'm ready to chat plants for 🐛🦋🐝🐦 and amphibious friends too.

#gardeningforwildlife #birdlovers #nativeplants #wildlifegarden #sustainablegardening by @flutterbymeadows

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12 days ago

“Oh look! Poop! YAY!!!”

It is an absurd thing to say from looking out the kitchen window, but to a wildlife gardener, a little mess on the deck means something I was planting for is alive and well.

I am always excited to find frass (the fancy word for caterpillar poop) right under my coral honeysuckle vine. Because in October, it means a clearwing hummingbird moth caterpillar is hiding out on the vine chewing away until it's big enough to pupate in the ground below, tucked under leaves.

Next spring and summer, a whole wave of pollinators and insects will be buzzing through our yards. But where do they actually come from?

Some, like monarchs, dragonflies, and birds, arrive by magnificent migrations. But so many of our favorites don’t arrive from anywhere at all. Lightning bugs, swallowtail butterflies, and these hummingbird moths (among others) are already here. They are busy in the garden right now, hidden in plain sight, preparing for winter.

Their winter home is in the very things we are conditioned to clean up now in the fall. They are tucked away in the leaf litter, while birds will rely on the standing seed heads left on the stalks for vital winter food. Next year's life is right beneath our feet and right in front of our eyes.

The other day, I was driving behind a commercial landscaping truck. The tailgate listed all of their services: grass cutting, garden design, mulching, pruning, and snow removal. I looked at it and felt a bit sad. Not a single mention of supporting wildlife, protecting habitats, or planting for pollinators.

We're tidying up the "mess" without realizing that the mess is exactly where next summer's magic is growing.

When we rush to cut down every dead stalk, remove spent flowers and blow away every leaf, we aren't just cleaning. We are erasing next year's pollinators and winter bird food before they ever get a chance to thrive.

Let’s keep our gardens a little messy this season.

Share this post with a friend who needs a little reminder to stash the blower and shears. taken in New Jersey, USA by @flutterbymeadows

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14 days ago

Hummingbirds evolved right alongside native flowers built for their long, slender beaks, long before anyone thought to paint a feeder red.

I grew up just a few miles from where I live now. My childhood yard had plenty of woodpeckers, blue jays and cardinals, but I had no idea hummingbirds even lived in New Jersey until my mid-twenties.

When I finally started adding native shrubs, trees and perennials to my own yard years later, everything changed. I realized they weren’t just passing through by accident, they were looking for a reason to stay.

A ruby-throated hummingbird weighs about as much as a penny. It spends nearly six months of its life right here in our yards before flying all the way south for a warmer winter where there are ample flowers. A sugar-water feeder is a great way to offer a quick snack. But a continuous native bloom cycle from April through October? That’s what sustains them for the long haul.

When you tune a garden to bloom across all three seasons...from early columbine and penstemon to midsummer bee balm, right into late-season cardinal flower and asters, you aren't just giving them nectar. You’re providing a rich, natural habitat that hosts the tiny soft insects they rely on for essential protein.

And that continuous bloom cycle (flowers I highlight are from my own garden, Zone 7a) does not just power hummingbirds' insatiable thirst. Those same plants feed other birds too: warblers gleaning insects in spring and fall, and juncos and sparrows riding out winter in the underbrush. And of course we know plants are for the caterpillars too! Fun fact: the caterpillar of the clearwing hummingbird moth on slide 7 also eats coral honeysuckle as one of their preferred host plants!

Feeders are good for a quick hit. Native plants are what give them so much more. I do hang a hummingbird feeder, but no fancy red dye. Simply boil 1 part white sugar with 4 parts water, after sugar is dissolved, cool, and store in fridge until ready for filling.

Follow @flutterbymeadows for simple tips after ten years of native plants changed what I was seeing in my yard...from the very first time a tree swallow stopped me in my tracks. It's been a ride. taken in New Jersey by @flutterbymeadows

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21 days ago

I wish more people understood what's actually happening in a native plant garden this time of year. It's the Autumnal Equinox today too!

The native plant garden isn't done. It's just changing jobs...

1. "Messy" is the garden doing its job. Collapsing fronds, dropped leaves, fading foliage...none of it is neglect. It's the plant finishing its season on schedule.

2. Energy is moving down, not up. While everything above ground looks like it's winding down, the roots are busy pulling in nutrients to store for next year.

3. What falls isn't waste. Leaf litter and spent foliage become a natural mulch blanket, insulation, and habitat all winter long. Removing it removes all three. All kinds of creatures are overwintering in and under those leaves. They should stay where they are.

4. Fall isn't the end of the growing season at all, it's the start of the resting one. Just as necessary, just less visible.

5. Slowing down is the whole point, of the plants, and maybe of us too. Fall is permission to let things be a little quieter for a while.

Happy equinox!! The nights only get longer from here right?

#leavetheleaves
#autumnalequinox
#habitatgarden
#ecologicalgardening by @flutterbymeadows

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24 days ago

A garden isn't just a collection of decorative plants. It's a system that has to keep working through all four seasons.

Every small habit shift over time, leaving the leaves, saving a standing stem like coneflower for birds to forage on, or planting one late-blooming aster...compounds into a thriving ecosystem throughout the year.

Native plant sales are in full swing. But before filling your cart, ask yourself: is your garden's ecosystem actually on that planning list? A working garden isn't justa collection of pretty bloomns. It is more than that. It's a living system that needs to support wildlife across all four seasons.

Before you buy your next plant, stop and look. What does your space actually need? ls there something missing? Berries in winter? Soft landings for caterpillars?

Before you add more, take note of what might be missing.

I created a free 4-page printable Habitat Tracker to help you spot missing seasonal gaps in your yard before you shop the fall sales.

Comment TRACKER below and send the guide straight to your DMs. by @flutterbymeadows

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a month ago