A Testimonial for Growing Native Prairie Plants in a Garden

by Gail Fennell

Nature Regina volunteer garden leader

David Suzuki Foundation Butterflyway volunteer

Today, we know climate change affects pollinators and we encourage people to grow native plants to help the pollinators thrive. But this is not news for Nature Regina members.

In 1993, members of the Regina Natural History Society, better known now as Nature Regina, led an ambitious project to create a display garden of native Saskatchewan plants. Located at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) and named the Regina Plains Native Plant Garden, the name clearly identifies the vision the garden founders had for their project.

At the same time, the City of Regina was promoting xeriscaping as a way to reduce water use. Nature Regina members saw an advantage to demonstrating how the beautiful plants that have always grown here would not only look fabulous in gardens but be easier to care for than many cultivated plants. In 1996 the Leader-Post Weekender ran a feature interview with one of the project members on growing native plants in city gardens.

The Native Plant Garden was flourishing and a big shift seemed imminent in gardening to using fewer resources and to growing beautiful native plants. The RSM Manager and Visitor Services staff loved the garden for year-round school interpretive programming. The garden even became a Monarch Way Station.

When I arrived in Regina in 2017, the first thing I looked for was a native plant garden where I could volunteer. The garden at the Museum was just what I had in mind - lots of native plants, close to where I live, and friendly volunteers to work with.

Nature Regina's Conservation Director and several other board members, the RSM Director of Programming and Exhibits, Wascana Center staff and I sat down one snowy day in January 2018 to plan a rejuvenation of the Native Plant Garden. 2019 would be the Garden's 25th anniversary and we wanted her looking her best.

Eleven volunteers, some who volunteered for many, many years before I arrived, dug, raked and potted for about 250 hours that summer, taming the vegetation, reshaping paths and planning how we wanted the Garden to look. When all the hard work was done, we celebrated with a garden party before our September meeting. Tours of the Garden, ladies in garden hats, tea made of Giant Hyssop leaves and flowers from the garden were all part of the fun.

Our volunteer group has grown to about 45 people who are very generous with their time over a much longer season - the first week of May to the last week of October - than when we first began the rejuvenation. Added to the group are youth and business volunteer groups who enthusiastically dig in to help at the Garden for a day and sometimes even several days and nearly double the number of volunteers at the garden.

Over the last 5 years the plants, the birds, the insects and arthropods have been our teachers as we human volunteers learn how to be part of their community and pay attention to what they are telling us.

The plants tell us who they want for neighbours, where they like to grow, how much water they need, how much sun is best for each. They tell us by growing where they want to grow, even if it's not where we thought they should after reading books and talking to experts. When they thrive, the plants are telling us, "We know how to grow and thrive on a prairie, even in a city garden."

If we watch them, the bees and butterflies, the ambush bugs, ants and beetles, the myriad fly species, tell us which flower shapes and colour and size they like best by which flowers they visit. When they are thriving, the insects are telling us we have made the right choices for what to grow and which spaces and vegetation to leave for their nests and eggs and pupae.

When we change the flowers or how many of a flower species, we change the insects and arthropods too.

For thirty years the health and resilience of the garden and its inhabitants has been paramount. We have never used any chemicals for any reason - not fertilizers, and not any sort of weedkiller, no matter how many quack grass roots we pulled out in the early years.

In 2022, the Society for Organic Urban Landcare awarded our garden their national Greener Greenspaces certification. It is the garden that wins the award, not the volunteers, because it is the garden that is an example of how a healthy greenspace is more than just green plants. It is a resilient community from the soil and water through the plants and wildlife to the air they breathe. The certification has to be applied for each year. Ideally, more is done each year to ensure resilience and health so the space is not left on its own to cope with an ever-changing urban landscape. The garden won certification in 2023. This fall we will apply again because we are increasing plant diversity which will lead to better wildlife diversity.

Visitors to our garden want to know about which plants to grow for bees and butterflies and birds. They can see for themselves how a plant looks or how the bees behave or which butterflies might come to their garden if they grow a plant they see in the garden.

A walk along the garden paths tells us more than books and videos ever can about how we to live in a city and still have nature close to us; that we can enjoy spending time with wild beings who are completely different than ourselves without taming them.

More and more people are looking for more diversity of plants, insects and birds in their gardens than was the norm when our native plant garden first began. Now it is more important than ever to have local supply of plants that are truly local to Regina's ecoregion. The commercial supply of native plants, especially ones for Regina, is a drop in a bucket compared to the demand.

Our garden suddenly has a new purpose! Volunteers from the Garden grow its seed to fill a huge gap in the availability of local native plants. Thus began the Regina Seed Sitters Club in the fall of 2022. Seed Sitters is a community outreach project of our garden joined by volunteers from the David Suzuki Foundation Butterflyway. Volunteers grow the seeds to seedling stage, then Nature Regina and the Butterflyway volunteers find homes for the plants in public spaces and residential gardens.

One thing the volunteers at the garden remember to do, no matter how busy the day, is take time to smell the flowers and enjoy being in our beautiful garden.