Get Wild in Your Garden

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The designation might not mean much to the critters in my garden (they can find me without the help of a yard sign or a certificate), but in going through the process I made a statement not only against climate change but also in favor of something: in favor of nutritious seeds in wintertime and feathered nests in the spring, in favor of slippery tadpoles, fat grubs, and delicate egg cases suspended from blades of grass.

The application lists five components of habitat gardening and several options for satisfying each requirement. I started with an easy one: sustainable gardening practices. I had already eliminated chemical pesticides, substituted compost for chemical fertilizer, limited my water use, and planted drought-tolerant native plants. “Reduce lawn areas” falls under the sustainable gardening category, and I had ripped mine out several years ago and had planted ornamental grasses, asters, lavender, and salvias.

Next on the list: food sources. I’m guilty of going for the more glamorous options. My showy fuchsias produce nectar; aster and sedum offer a buffet of pollen in late summer; and glorious purple coneflower gives way to dramatic seed heads in the fall. But for herbivorous insects, which birds feed their young, the ideal food source is tree leaves, and a big bushy tree isn’t something I can accommodate in my small garden. I settled on a variety of California lilac, a woody shrub that’s native to my area.

It’s not enough to give wild creatures a bite to eat; they need places for cover too. I don’t have space for a cave, rock pile, or thicket of dense shrubbery, but I’ve got a nesting box for bees, a rotten log or two where bugs can hide, and plenty of ground cover to give small creatures a place to crash. I need only two kinds of shelter to meet the requirement, but I want more. I call Ellin Beltz, author of Frogs: Inside Their Remarkable World (Firefly, 2005). “Frog habitats are incredibly easy,” she says. “Find a damp place in your garden. Turn over a broken flowerpot so there’s just a little opening near the ground. That’s it.”

Beltz also helps me with the trickiest part of the certification: water sources. Birds and other wildlife need clean water to drink and bathe in. But here’s the problem: I live just a few blocks from the ocean, and it rains almost nonstop in the winter. In this soggy environment, I don’t want to install a pond or fountain, not to mention the effort and expense. I also worried about inadvertently turning my yard into a breeding ground for mosquitoes and West Nile virus.

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