Sharing your yard with nature

Your home landscape can be an amazing opportunity to collaborate with nature. With thoughtful plant choices, you can invite more biodiversity into your yard. Even established landscapes will benefit from plant additions that can increase traffic from your favorite birds or provide forage for bees and other pollinators.

Most home landscapes are a monoculture of grass plants. While turfgrass certainly has its advantages in areas with high foot traffic, its shallow roots and growing habits tend to require more inputs with regard to nutrients, water and time to maintain it.

Consider letting the “weeds” take over your lawn. The key is to choose the plants that you would like to have growing in your lawn versus allowing the truly undesirables to establish themselves.

Interplanting broadleaf plants such as Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens) amongst your turfgrass will fix nitrogen from the air and enrich your soil, as well as attract pollinators to your sunny lawn areas. Creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum) and ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea) are other plants that can coexist nicely with turfgrass.

If you would prefer to keep your turfgrass pure, then consider other areas of your lawn that might benefit from groundcovers. They can save you from having to mow a steep bank while also creating a thick green carpet that prevents soil erosion.

Likewise, in the shady areas of your lawn where turfgrass simply will not take root, there are groundcovers that will gladly move in. Some options for plants here include cranesbill geranium (Geranium maculatum), spotted deadnettle (Lamium maculatum), Pennsylvania sedge (Carex Pensylvanica) and foam flower (Tiarella cordifolia).

If you have room for trees in your landscape, consult your local nursery to select the right ones for your property. Trees are hard workers, sequestering carbon in their deep roots and offering habitat to many different animals.

Another idea to welcome more biodiversity into your yard is to increase your planting area by adding perennial beds. Determine how you use your turfgrass and carve out beds that complement your needs for play zones and walking paths.

If you have a tree on its own surrounded by a circle of mulch, shape a planting bed around it. Perhaps the bed can connect two lone trees together. 

Use sheet mulching to naturally suppress the grass in the designated areas and build up the beds with organic matter in preparation for planting.

Once ready, plant the beds with perennials and shrubs chosen as much for their beauty as for their biodiversity credentials. Prioritize native and/or pollinator-loving plants that offer a variety of bloom times and flowering longevity so you are feeding pollinators from early spring through late fall.

As the plants mature, the need for bark mulch should be reduced or eliminated. Any bare spots can be filled in with groundcover plants.

Sharing your yard with nature can be as beautiful as it is beneficial to the environment.

(Amy Simone is a University of Vermont Extension master gardener from South Burlington.)