New Windsor pollinator garden encourages residents to convert lawns

Cindy Fenton remembers exactly when she became one with nature, observing and caring about the interwoven ecosystems.

She was 8, and she had lay down in a field in her native Lompoc.

“I lay in the grass and looked up to the sky and watched spiders crawl across my hand. It was like a peak experience,” Fenton recalled.

Her love for the interconnected quality of all living things led her to create a habitat for pollinators in her Windsor front yard that “not only feeds me but other beings.”

Her yard has a vegetable garden, six dwarf fruit trees, anda native plant meadow with milkweed and wildflowers for Monarch butterflies ― whose numbers have been decimated by climate change ― bees and other pollinators to feed on.

This allows the cycle of reproduction to continue unabated.

As a member of the Windsor Garden Club, she has led a movement to encourage residents to do the same in an effort to save the planet.

Three years ago Fenton, Cristina Goulart, the town water resource specialist, and others established a Monarch butterfly way station with milkweed at the same site as the existing community garden to sustain them on their journey to nesting sites.

She has since become known as the “Monarch Lady.”

Earlier this year, she joined forces with fellow-Windsor resident Jill Plamann to create the Windsor Community Pollinators Garden to show how beautiful a habitat front or backyard can look.

It began when she asked for help potting milkweed for distribution and the two discovered a shared passion for helping the bugs and birds survive and thrive through converting grass lawns.

“It’s really cool that pollinator gardens are very pretty and very compatible with home landscapes,” Plamann said. “But it’s not just that they’re pretty. The pollinator plants are kind of like the foundation for the ecosystem. The pollinators provide food for lots of other species. Caterpillars have pockets of protein and fat” that baby birds need to thrive, she said. “Bees keep the plants going.”

The new garden, planted in March with small plants amid circles of rocks, pine chips from the town and dirt donated by Ramm Rock and Landscape, is at the far end of the community garden site. It sits next to a grove of oak trees and Starr Creek, across from the town hall at 9291 Old Redwood Highway.

Educational signs will go up next week, Fenton said.

In a year from now, the new garden will be “gorgeous” and “voluptuous” the two women said. There is also a newly started “Sunflowers for Ukraine” garden where people planted seeds on Earth Day.

“It’s just so simple, if people would do it,” said Plamann of converting lawns. She said she put her front yard garden in eight to 10 years ago.

She cautioned that people should put down big pieces of cardboard over their grass, wet it down, walk all over it and follow with 3 inches of mulch such as pine chips — not tear out their grass and put down black plastic.

“The grass rots underneath and the cardboard and grass make beautiful, frothy compost and over time it mixes with the wood chips. I didn’t get one blade of grass coming up all these years,” she said.

Black plastic “is a barrier. It will never compost,” Plamann said. Eventually it won’t stop weeds from poking through either, she said.

“All that work and expense, and you’re actually destroying the ecosystem,” she said. “It’s like that song ‘Big Yellow Taxi” where we’re paving over paradise. We’re not only paving roads, but we’re putting all this black plastic down. We’re killing ourselves!” she exclaimed.

Plants at the new pollinator garden include sages and salvias, Hood Mountain Yarrow, and manzanita trees, all native to the region. Anyone interested in planting their own native species are encouraged to go to www.cnps.org (California Native Plant Society website) and punch in Sonoma County for a list of plants native to the area.

Native plants Plamann has put in her yard include California Dutchman’s pipe vine, which attracts Swallowtail butterflies and does well on trellises; narrow leaf milkweed, the proper kind of milkweed to feed Monarchs; lupine margarita BOP; red buckwheat for beneficial insects; and monkeyflowers for hummingbirds. Also recommended are California poppies and cornflowers.

A book published this year, “Nature’s Best Hope” by Doug Tallamy, is high on both pollinator supporters’ reading lists. It details just how much of the insect and bird population has been lost (70% of songbirds) nationwide and the concept of the Homegrown National Park.

The idea is to create enough pollinator and native plant yards to equal more acreage than all U.S. national parks. There are 40 million acres of lawn in the country, and if just half of the nation’s lawns were converted, that would go a long way toward creating biodiversity to sustain life, Fenton said.

Go to homegrownnationalpark.org for more information.

“In the past, we have asked one thing of our gardens: that they be pretty. Now they have to support life, sequester carbon, feed pollinators and manage water,” wrote author Tallamy.

You can reach Staff Writer Kathleen Coates at kathleen.coates@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5209.