Native Yard Tour

 We moved to Mount Prospect in 2008, bringing with us a love of gardening inspired by my mother’s green thumb. Our yard was mostly turf, traditional landscaping, yew bushes, junipers, and plenty of rocks and obstacles. I began simply by planting favorites from my mother’s garden and our previous home, including wild geraniums, black raspberries, delphiniums, tulips, and hostas. Year after year, the landscape changed. The yews and landscaping obstacles were the first to go, and we began adding more native plants from local nurseries. I also experimented with free native landscaping plans from Better Homes and Gardens to learn how different plants could grow together. What started in one corner gradually spread throughout the yard. I now call my approach “Chaos Gardening.” With help from friends and neighbors, visits to forest preserves and botanical gardens, and plenty of wandering online, my knowledge—and the variety of plants in the garden—has continued to grow. The gardens have ...

  Originally hailing from the Northside of Chicago, Robin Jennings, her son, Ewan, and partner, Brian Demski, spent many of their days and evenings exploring the beautiful native prairie of Winnemac Park in Ravenswood. With ironweed standing ten feet high, butterflies dancing on the petals of wild bergamot, and dive-bombing red winged blackbirds protecting their prized nests, the Jemskis fell in love with the beauty of such a wild landscape in their own backyard! After some fun and intense rabbit hole diving on the internet, Robin found her passion in native gardening, and their search for a yard to pursue that passion began. The year was 2021, and Robin, Ewan, and Brian saw a charming house with an even more captivating shed and decided that it must be theirs! Thus, the creation of Mole’s End was born! With trials, errors, tears, and triumphs, after five years, Robin and fam’s garden has begun to take shape into a wildlife wonderland. Though she started with the basic garden shape...

When we moved to Mount Prospect 20 years ago, our yard was mostly grass with overgrown Juniper hedges and non-native dogwood (Cornus alba), both of which were removed by hand. We were lucky to inherit native Juneberry, White Ash and Ironwood trees. Over time we've filled most parts of the yard with a mix of native plantings, fruit, herbs, cut flowers and vegetable gardens. Our main native garden in front began with a simple native seed mix and some potted plants, and has evolved over time to prefer common species like Joe Pye Weed, yellow composites, Bergamot, Prairie Sage, milkweeds, Big Bluestem and other grasses, various sedges, and in spring Geraniums and Golden Alexanders.  Every spring we cut and burn most of the dry plant matter from the prairie and spread it back on the soil. Some of these have lasted 15 years or more, and others are more recent additions collected from wild seed. We credit the good health of our vegetable garden in part to our native gardens, whi...

 We have had native plants in our yard for many years, but this is our first garden designed specifically with native pollinators in mind. We like to think of it as a "work in progress" and hope it encourages others who are just getting started. Our garden is an example of what a first season of native gardening can look like, with a foundation of plants that will continue to fill in and evolve over time. We plan to expand the garden next year with even more native species. Our current plantings include Nodding Onion, Smooth Phlox, Slender Mountain Mint, Monkey Flower, Pussy Toes, Eastern Bee Balm, Prairie Coreopsis, Hairy Beardtongue, Prairie Cinquefoil, Hoary Vervain, Blue Bottle Gentian, and Foxglove Beardtongue. The Go Green Mount Prospect community has been incredibly helpful and encouraging in this journey. This home features an information table with resources to help you begin your native gardening journey.

  We moved into this house in Dec 2022 and starting our native gardening journey in the fall of 2024. The front of the house was covered in yews so large you could barely see the front of the house. We were (and still are) dealing with many weeds prevalent across the property, and given it's a 2 lot property, there is a lot to manage. We decided to turn to native gardening for many reasons - it's hard to deny the beauty of native pollinators, they are beneficial to local wildlife, require less watering, and have been great weed control. We still have a lot to go and have plans in place for the next few seasons, but we've made such a big difference in just a couple of years.