Member Garden: A Garden Grows in Chicago

A buzzing, thriving native plant garden supporting pollinators in the heart of a major city — it may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s not. As Jessica Glowinski Garfield discovered, small urban gardens can host a myriad of bees, birds and butterflies while also overcoming challenging conditions with native plants. And it’s not just her garden; in this Chicago neighborhood, residents are creating a network of native gardens that are bringing biodiversity back to the city.

Garfield moved into her Chicago home in 2019, where she inherited struggling roses and hydrangeas in raised beds in the front yard. As a first-time gardener she was initially unsure what direction she wanted to take. “I thought about gardens in the neighborhood and public parks nearby that made me happy,” she says. “I’m blessed to have expert gardeners around me, and one neighbor in particular has a beautiful native garden. I knew I wanted something like that.” 

She got rid of the roses and hydrangeas (but kept the raised beds and refreshed the soil with mulch), and she hired landscapers to create a new garden area in the backyard, where a small, city-sized driveway wasn’t an effective use of space. She removed turfgrass and added additional raised beds in the back of her property, but most importantly, Jessica patiently observed her conditions before selecting plants. 

This process is important in every garden because understanding sun and shade patterns, and how they change throughout the year, is vital to siting the right plants in the right places. For gardeners like Jessica who have numerous buildings, fences and mature trees in close proximity, it’s a critical step in the garden design process. 

“There was at least one day where I took a picture of my front yard every hour to see where the sun was,” she says. This thoughtful approach meant that Jessica could match plants to her conditions, rather than buy plants and hope they would thrive in a particular spot.

Living with mature trees on the parkway of a city street also required a pragmatic approach. “There is a green ash tree that keeps one area very shady and has a lot of roots, but I knew this ash was native so there had to be other native plants that evolved with it,” she explains. 

With an understanding of her conditions and advice from fellow native gardener neighbors, Jessica used planned gardens from Prairie Nursery and Prairie Moon Nursery, among other sources, to begin creating her pollinator-friendly space. In the spring, there are dwarf crested iris (Iris cristata), Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans), violets and foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) in a dense planting with lots of textures. In a sunny bed, she has royal catchfly (Silene regia), blackeyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) and meadow blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) creating a lively summer combination of colors and shapes.

The plant diversity and continuous blooms draw all sorts of pollinators to her property. There are over 40 plants in her garden known to be host plants, including common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), New Jersey tea (Ceanothus americanus) and golden alexanders (Zizia aurea). The garden is visited by numerous types of bees and butterflies like monarchs and swallowtails, and to provide for insects’ entire life cycle, Jessica does more than offer flowers. “I have a mix of grasses and sedges so there is space for egg sacs, I leave the leaves, and I have little logs and rock piles so there is shelter,” she says.

But, as an urban gardener, Jessica has to contend with pests in ways that differ from how a suburban or rural gardener might. Rats are a fact of life in Chicago, and Jessica avoids putting out bird feeders or providing resources that would draw large numbers of rats to her yard. 

The other important consideration with an urban plot is realism — knowing what will work and what simply won’t fit. “There isn’t room for an oak tree in every backyard,” Jessica says, “but there is still so much value in forbs and smaller shrubs.” Her blueberries and viburnums, for example, provide berries for birds. 

And to make the most of her space, Jessica isn’t afraid to move plants around and find the right site. It was a process to become comfortable with transplanting, but over time she has become accustomed to moving plants as she learns more about changing light patterns throughout her property. 

Looking ahead, Jessica is excited to work with seeds as well as plugs. “I’ve had success this year with winter sowing, so I’m hoping to fill in some spots with bottlebrush grass and wild petunias,” she says. Containers are another feature she is working on. “Black-eyed susans worked really well since they’re biennials, so they re-seed and don’t need their roots pruned in a container,” she adds.

This highlights how natives may seem like they always need extensive space, but they’re actually quite adaptable to containers if you choose the right plants — say, a rudbeckia instead of a silphium with a 12-foot taproot. 

Her other plan? “Just let it grow,” Jessica says. She encourages gardeners to give themselves permission to take small steps, or even to fail. Just a few small areas of a yard or a couple containers with natives can make a difference for biodiversity, and if you can collaborate with neighbors or even public spaces like parks, you can create an interconnected series of communities for plants, pollinators and people.

“I learned how much it matters — even if it’s a few asters or coneflowers, every plant matters and these connections build a community for us and our insect neighbors.”

Rose Rankin is a freelance writer outside of Chicago and a member of the Wild Ones Greater Kane County Chapter. You can follow her on Instagram @bringbackprairies.