This September’s Life-Friendly Garden Tour, our 27th tour over 17 years, is an invitation for anyone with a garden, no matter how small, to consider joining Homegrown National Park. To learn more about what we are doing, visit the Garden Tour home Page here. To visit the gardens on the Tour September 8, here is the map!
A printable version of the map is available as a brochure here. Please refer to the online map for full descriptions of the gardens.
The green flowers indicate hosted gardens. Hosted gardens will be welcoming guests during the hours of the Garden Tour. Until the next tour, please be respectful and view these gardens from the street.
The golden flowers indicate unattended planting strips and public gardens. These are open for viewing from the street any time!
At our August 2024 Monthly Meeting we showed a video of entomologist Doug Tallamy explaining the idea of stitching together millions of tiny habitats to create a 20-million-acre sanctuary for biodiversity in the United States. He’s a fascinating speaker and shares wonderful photographs of the plants and animals he studies.
This question of how choices made by individual gardeners affect the larger environment has been evolving over the years of our tour. Even what we mean by “environment” or “nature” has evolved. When Watertown Citizens for Environmental Safety began in 1979, the original environmental concern was the hidden danger of radiation from the old nuclear reactor at the Arsenal. Ten years later in 1989, when Bill McKibben published The End of Nature, we had to stretch our minds to comprehend the threat of human-created climate change. We began to wake up to the fragility of all the interdependent systems that sustain life on Earth.
Henrietta Light organized the first garden tour in 2007 as a project of CURE, the Chemical Use and Reduction Education task force, in order to demonstrate that it is possible to create beautiful and bountiful gardens without the poisons that were then routinely used. Much of the focus of those early tours was on raising food organically, using compost and environmentally-friendly alternatives to pesticides and herbicides. As community gardens were built at Nichols Avenue, Grove Street, Union Market, and Arsenal Park, they were added to the tour in addition to private homes.
In 2014 Friends of Bees was formed to respond to the Colony Collapse Disorder that was devastating honeybee colonies and seemed to threaten all bees. This added a new educational dimension to our garden tour: “No bees, no food” and “Bees don’t want to sting you” and “Bees depend on nectar and pollen from our flowers to feed themselves and their babies.” Pam Phillips’ enthusiastic learning about native bees continues to deepen our knowledge of their essential role as pollinators and how gardeners can support them through their life cycles.
We also learned of the insidious harm of systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids, not only sprayed on plants but also applied to their seeds so that every part of the plant becomes toxic to insects. This became another focus of education and advocacy, as we sought out nurseries and seed suppliers that were neonic-free and advocated for laws to limit the use of neonics, in addition to the glyphosate in Roundup that was decimating the wildflowers that feed native bees and butterflies.
As Monsanto and Bayer were bent on destroying the web of life, biologists and citizens’ groups were mobilizing to understand and protect it. A new appreciation for the vital role of native plants was emerging. We had come to realize how completely dependent Monarch butterflies are on milkweed for their survival; now we were learning that there were countless other such pairings of native plants and pollinators. Grow Native Massachusetts began offering native plant sales as gardeners embraced a messier aesthetic that was more life-friendly. The slogans “No-Mow May” and “Leave the Leaves” began to gain popularity. Some of us reclaimed the planting strips, or “hell” strips, and bump-outs along our streets as mini-meadows. Online webinars proliferated in response to this new eagerness to learn about the intricate partnerships among soil, plants, insects, birds and humans.
Friends of Bees and the Life-Friendly Garden Tour have more partners also, as we have been joining forces with Watertown Community Gardens and Trees for Watertown, as well as new city departments dedicated to conservation. We could never have imagined 17 years ago that the DPW would publish a flier encouraging residents to plant native flowers in their planting strip or reach out to us for help planning a pollinator garden at DPW headquarters! Since then, public pollinator gardens at the Senior Center, Filipello Park, Boylston bumpouts, Knowles Delta, and the Greenway have all been added to the Garden Tour map. What’s more, the City Manager’s office has joined the Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, and the Conservation Commission are giving out free signs for pollinator-friendly gardens. That’s a lot of progress in a short time!
Now comes Doug Tallamy with a new previously-unknown-to-us strand in the food web: caterpillars as baby bird food. Who could ever imagine that chickadees need 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one clutch of chicks? Thanks to the patient work of graduate students counting moths and caterpillars, Tallamy has identified what he calls keystone plants that support an astonishing number of insect species. Two of these keystone plants in Massachusetts are Oak and Cherry. By good fortune, Sharon Bauer has one of each growing in her small garden. They started about thirty years ago as an acorn and a cherry pit, and as they have grown, so have the number of birds successfully fledging babies on her property – nine species now. She has never seen the caterpillars that are in the video, but now that Doug Tallamy has connected the dots, we know they must be there, playing their part in this tiny corner of Homegrown National Park!
To learn more, we highly recommend his books. Nature’s Best Hope is a great place to start. Dr. Tallamy’s books are available at Watertown Free Public Library here.
He also has some interesting things to add in this video of him at the Mt. Cuba Center. Plus lots of butterflies!