Build a Native Plant Sanctuary

What’s Required

A passion for working with Nature to rebuild biologically depleted landscapes into thriving and diverse habitats for pollinators, beneficial insects, and other interdependent animals that will benefit from functional environments. Designing your sanctuary garden with native Colorado plants is crucial for enhanced habitat resources.

Be prepared to receive the gifts from the land and her creatures that you work to support. You will transform into an ever-evolving citizen scientist as you move into greater awareness and observation of the dynamic and mutually beneficial relationships of the natural world of which you can play an integral part.

Before diving into the creation of a functional sanctuary habitat at your residence, school, work campus or community landscape, let’s first examine the historical actions that have critically reduced local and national ecologies, wild habitats and devastated native flora and fauna.

The History

We humans, being at the top of the food chain, enjoy the greatest creature comforts: favorable housing, access to food at the grocery store and from our gardens, but not so for beneficial insects, pollinators, and animals. They must exist in our transformed environments where the reciprocity between organisms and their food sources has significantly deteriorated.

Decades of clearing indigenous landscapes and building urban and suburban environments have replaced the nutritious original food sources with nonnative plant species that are very challenging for animals and their young to feed on. From an early age we have gleaned, by mostly nonverbal cues, that our gardens and landscapes are things of beauty and status and mistakenly assume that the local park or the narrowly forested tracts along our highways and byways are sufficient for wildlife to sustain themselves.

Doug Tallamy, entomologist, ecologist, author, and educator has championed the efforts, education and outreach of rebuilding pollinator habitats that have been destroyed by man’s persistent encroachment. His extensive body of work includes books, lectures, articles, and digital media, part of which is linked below.

Tallamy inspires, showing the way to rebuild wildlife preserves in our gardens, landscapes, and communities. In creating these dynamic environments, he states that, “doing so represents the last opportunity we have for sustaining plants and animals that were once common throughout the U.S.”

He goes on to state that, “we have heard little about the rate at which species are disappearing from our neighborhoods, towns, counties, and states. Insects tend to be specialists, feeding on and pollinating a narrow spectrum of plant life, sometimes just a single species. Ninety percent of the insects that eat plants can develop and reproduce only on the plants with which they share an evolutionary history.”

The debate whether native plants are superior to introduced exotics in nutrition, cover, and other habitat resources has been studied by Tallamy and his team. They establish that, “introduced plants are not the ecological equivalents of the native plants they displace because they do not support the diverse and stable food webs that run our ecosystems. Exchanging plants that support all our animal diversity for plants that support only a few species is ecologically indefensible.”

Welcome Homegrown National Park! HNP is a grassroots solution and a call-to-action organization to regenerate biodiversity and ecosystem function by planting native plants that create new ecological networks. HNP was inspired by Tallamy and Michelle Alfandari. Tallamy notes that, “catalyzing a collective effort of individual homeowners, property owners, land managers, farmers, and anyone with some soil to plant in to start a new habitat by planting native plants and removing most invasive plants. It is the largest cooperative conservation project ever conceived or attempted. The success of HNP is accomplished through small efforts by many people.”

The Journey Takes Shape

Let’s begin and discover nature’s amazing potential to renew and transform your landscape into a thriving, interdependent wildlife habitat. You will be delighted that you no longer need to travel to other destinations to be captivated, inspired, and renewed by nature because you will witness it directly from your own window, back stoop or close up.

Having the unfettered opportunity to observe the magnificence of the big and small wonders that unfold and metamorphize in your sanctuary garden will be a gentle reminder of how delicately threaded you are woven in nature’s intricate web.

Building the Sanctuary Habitat

A crucial aspect of your native plant sanctuary is plant selection and design. Incorporating and layering multiple plant types beginning with the tree canopy, shrub layer, perennials, grasses, groundcovers and mosses. This builds a mutually supporting network through which nature’s intelligence creates rich biological associations to restore ecosystem function for wildlife.

• Plant Selection: Choosing your native plants is an exciting process and a journey unto itself. There is a co-evolutionary dynamic between the native plants and the animals that seek out specific plants for their sustenance, shelter, and assistance in their reproductive cycle, to name a few.

• Sun/Shade: Site your sanctuary habitat with ample sun and some shade as plants must be companionable regarding sun/shade and water requirements.
• Soil: Creating a stable and prospering habitat begins with soil health and tending to it by amending it with a natural compost of your choice.
• Water: Know your plants’ water needs and be mindful not to overwater and waterlog the soil as the oxygen supply to the roots is limited or non-existent in an overly saturated environment. Determine the method you wish to use to water your garden, as there are many options to choose from: garden hose, drip system and an in-ground irrigation system.
• Cover Your Soil: When the garden is planted, cover the soil with 2-3 inches of a natural mulch. This will retain soil moisture, suppress weed seeds, nutrify the soil web and moderate soil temperatures in the summer and winter. There are many beneficial mulch types: compost, bark mulch, hay, straw, and a living mulch (low growing annual or perennial plants that improve soil fertility and can attract beneficial insects).

Keystone Plants

An important ecological anchor in the garden are keystone plants. Tallamy’s research has demonstrated that keystones are highly productive plants that support the most animal species and by planting just one you can help restore biodiversity. Conversely, landscapes that do not contain one or more species of keystone genera will have failed food webs, even if the diversity of other plants is high.

Listed here are a few of the pivotal backbones of Colorado keystone genera:

• (Populus) Quaking Aspen and Eastern Cottonwood ~ Deciduous trees
• (Quercus) Gambel Oak ~ Deciduous tree
• (Prunus) American Plum ~ Deciduous tree
• (Salix) Coyote Willow ~ Deciduous shrub
• (Pinus) Ponderosa Pine ~ Conifer

The Wrap Up

Below are exceptional resources to help you build a native plant sanctuary through curating native plants that will help restore local biodiversity and ecosystem function to your garden and landscape.

Gardening for Life: Doug Tallamy  https://homegrownnationalpark.org/not-in-our-yard-doug-tallamy/

The Xerces Society: Native Plants for Pollinators & Beneficial Insects in the Rocky Mountains: https://www.xerces.org/publications/plant-lists/native-plants-for-pollinators-and-beneficial-insects-rocky-mountains

The National Wildlife Federation: By using your zip code, find native plants from your locale that are ranked by the number of butterfly and moth species that use them as host plants for their caterpillars: https://nativeplantfinder.nwf.org/

The National Wildlife Federation: Keystone Native Plants for the Southern Semi-Arid Highlands: https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/Garden-for-Wildlife/Keystone-Plants/NWF-GFW-keystone-plant-list-ecoregion-12-southern-semi-arid-highlands.pdf?sc_lang=en&hash=C0D9384B40B8E106877474BFC95DABC1

Homegrown National Park: https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

Homegrown National Park’s Ten Things to Get You Started: https://hgnp.wpengine.com/getting-started/

Doug Tallamy, Books: Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope