Winchell Neighborhood
Wednesday, August 28, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
This is an open-house style tour. The garden owners will be at home between 6:00 and 8:00. Stop by in any order you wish.
The gardeners’ stories:
1444 W. Maple Street
The evolution of our yard in the Hillcrest neighborhood from scrubby patch of grass to a diverse, small “meadow” is in about its 10th year. The initial catalyst was my intense dislike of mowing grass. Picking up a copy of Tom and Nancy Small’s “Using Native Plants to Restore Community” fed my interest to try something different. Over the years my understanding of the importance of this little patch of wildness has changed as well. Initially I was most concerned about the plants and the design of the garden. My focus soon changed to include the hundreds of insects that depend on it. Now, of course, I see the birds and the animals I rarely see–the dozens of meadow voles and the occasional fox–as part of the community. We have lots of folks walk by while I’m in the front garden who stop to find out what this is all about. It occurs to me that that never happened when the yard was a monoculture of grass. These neighbors and passers-by who stop to look, observe, and wonder are an important part of our “meadow” community now too!
1518 Spruce
We moved into this house in the summer of 2020. We fell in love with the historic architecture but the landscaping was incredibly bland and lifeless (vinca, English Ivy and Chinese Yews), resource-dependent (lawn on sandy soil) and achingly hot (no trees to shield the south-west afternoon sun). I immediately started on the transformation of the yard. First step was to remove the vinca and Ivy off the slopes but since they were very steep and sandy the challenge was to do so without causing too much erosion. I used the cut-stump treatment rather than pulling and then I immediately planted fast-growing natives in between the existing boulders. Sand Coreopsis, Sideoats Grama, Dotted Horsemint, Field Pussytoes, Prickly Pear Cactus and Western Sunflower rooted-in fairly fast. After the slope was secured I moved on to killing most of the lawn on top of the hill and shaping out sinuous beds for gardens. First priority was to plant canopy trees and mid-layer shrubs and understory trees. The herbaceous layer garden began during the next spring of ‘21. The goal was a wispy, semi-formal aesthetic with short-growing native oak savanna species.