Twenty years ago, Marilynn and Tom Torkelson moved into their new home in the rolling suburb of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, about 20 miles west of Minneapolis. Traditional gardeners, their primary interest was growing veggies and their biggest crop was turf grass.
This is an excerpt from the Wild Ones Journal
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Their new home appealed to them because of a pond in the backyard and wide boulevards in the front. Marilynn and Tom loved to canoe and swim in Minnesota’s ample waters with their two young children, and cared deeply about water stewardship issues.
For over a decade, the family enjoyed seeing the backyard pond attract geese, herons, egrets and songbirds. When Tom mowed the very large lawn, he left a buffer of tall grass between the lawn and the pond to protect the pond water from runoff. Their deep passion for clean water issues led the Torkelsons to seek information about wetland management.
A rain garden with a pagoda or alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) in the rear of their home helps to improve water quality.
Imagine their surprise to discover that the buffer they were maintaining was entirely nonnative reed canary grass, a major threat to natural wetlands and one that out-competes most native species.
While taking a class on capturing stormwater in 2010, Marilynn learned stormwater basics: that rain falls on impermeable surfaces, including roofs, driveways and compacted turf grass, and that it flows quickly into storm drains carrying pollutants that include salt, herbicides and excess nitrogen from fertilizers and pet waste. In Minnesota, storm drains empty directly into rivers, lakes and ponds.
But at this class, Marilynn was also introduced to the Wild Ones Twin Cities (Minnesota) Chapter’s activities and native plant sale. She immediately joined Wild Ones and became an active member of the Twin Cities group, serving as the publicity chairwoman. Subsequently, she helped establish a seedling chapter that is now known as the Prairie Edge Chapter. It’s a thriving chapter with Marilynn serving as president.
And in only five years, the Torkelson yard has morphed from a sterile, cement-like expansive lawn to an award-winning native plant habitat and wild refuge. They used the stormwater “treatment train” philosophy to install a variety of best management practices. The term, stormwater treatment train, has loosely been used since the mid-1980s to represent a series or variety of approaches to manage the quantity and quality of stormwater runoff.
The Torkelsons started by developing rain gardens to capture all of the rainwater that fell on their 1/3-acre property. A series of changes included installing eave gutters to control the direction of roof runoff toward several backyard rain gardens. The treatment train, which turned the 12-degree slope of the front yard to the street into a 35-foot by 40-foot rain garden, included a primary garden, a short retaining wall, an additional soaking area, and a bermed boulevard garden. This slowed down the stormwater, reduced erosion, leveled storm surges, and removed pollutants. The Torkelsons also restored the shoreline by removing invasive plants and planting natives in their place, such as swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), turtlehead (Chelone glabra), sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) and common boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum).
All of this landscaping was also accompanied by ambitious and diverse native plant installations. Currently, the Torkelsons have more than 150 species of native forbs, sedges, grasses, trees and shrubs. Marilynn has many favorite plants, but when pressed to name them, she admits to loving shade plants like plantain-leaved or seersucker sedge (Carex plantaginea), Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans), anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), zigzag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis) and wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium), whose flowers bloom and remain pure white for months.
In a true “build it and they will come” story, there is now a lot of wildlife activity happening and their yard has come to life. With the native plant stalks providing winter interest, an array of animal tracks can be seen in the snow in their yard — and a blank slate of snow in the neighbor’s yard.
Last summer, Heather Holm, author of “Pollinators of Native Plants” and “Bees: An Identification and Native Plant Forage Guide,” discovered a healthy variety of native bees in the Torkelson’s yard, including the rare and endangered rusty patched bumblebee. The birds, frogs, butterflies, moths, native bees and small mammals provide a clamor of color and activity in this biodiverse habitat. And the peoples’ lifestyle has improved, too, as Tom only has to mow some paths through the gardens. He and Marilynn also enjoy the waterside quiet in a double glider swing.
The community recently took notice of this beautiful yard, and in 2016, the Torkelsons were awarded the Spirit of Eden Prairie Award that “recognizes significant investment and enhancements … to overall vitality, accessibility and sustainability of the community.”
Surrounded by acres of neighbors’ mowed lawns, their home shows the community how to bring a yard back to life. Indeed, if you plant it, pollinators and animals, as well as the whole community, will benefit.
Written by Marilyn Jones (past president of the Wild Ones Twin Cities Chapter)
Photos by Tom Torkelson