Digging In: Gardening for the Bigger Picture 

By Peter Wimberg

If you follow this column you know that once a year, I discuss the importance of volunteering as a gardener. I believe the knowledge we possess as experienced gardeners should be shared with others. Whether you choose to volunteer at the Cincinnati Zoo, a local community garden, or a school garden, it matters not. If you have the resources to sponsor a garden, that’s great, too. The important thing is to share what you know, the garden knowledge that comes from years of working in the gardens. This year I’m presenting a different way to think of giving back to the community via gardening. What if you considered your garden, the one in your front yard, as a way to contribute to the community?

If your front landscape is dominated by boxwoods and other traditional front yard foundation planting, while your garden prowess is on full display in the back yard, then this idea is meant for you. It’s common for gardeners to create fabulous gardens in the back yard where beds are more generous, the diversity of plants is greater, and the garden is awash in color. If you want to give back to the community via gardening, consider adding a new garden or amending the one you already have in the front yard. Planting with nature, the addition of plants that support native pollinators and birds doesn’t have to be relegated to the back landscape.  The more plants we add to support native insects, the more plants we incorporate into our gardens that stand through winter the better. 

By creating a garden designed with nature in mind in the front of the home, we show those who pass by what gardening with nature can look like. Your new pollinator inspired garden is a display garden showing how we can move away from the expected foundation planting of a row of evergreens and embrace more deciduous shrubs, grasses and generously planted stands of perennials. Your new front garden is an example of how we can use far more interesting and beneficial plants than the overly aggressive, high maintenance Euonymus and English ivy.  

Whether your pollinator garden is wild and intermingled or very orderly, neighbors who are not keyed into planting with nature will see what you’ve created. They will pause, admire, become inquisitive, ask questions, and hopefully, and this is the goal of course, add a garden with nature in their yard as well.  Your new garden, even if it’s of a modest size, serves as a display garden, a teaching garden, and the catalyst for more pollinator friendly gardens to develop. What may be a garden of only 500 square feet inspires several gardens just like it and now, the street has thousands of square feet of gardens planted with nature. 

You don’t have to leave home to have a positive impact in your community as a gardener. You can show your neighbors, with your garden, how the front landscape can be transformed into one that requires less water, little to no chemicals, less mowing and thus reduced carbon and noise pollution, while creating a space that is healthy and beneficial to us and nature. A change in how we plan, plant, and care for our home landscape has to start someplace, why not with your front yard? 

Peter Wimberg is the president of Wimberg Landscaping, located at 1354 US Route 50 in Milford, Ohio. For more on his gardening philosophy, go to wimberglandscaping/changing-the-landscape.