A Little Habitat for My Humanity

Sunflowers, cowpen daisies, and bee plants dominated the author’s yard in 2025. Photo by Lauren Vanier.

By Lauren Vanier

As an enthusiast of this planet, I find myself increasingly distressed by global news. It can be paralyzing at times. If I’m spiraling, the serenity prayer comes to mind - accept the things I cannot change, have courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It feels similar to the familiar phrase “Think globally, act locally,” with an emphasis on the latter. Fortunately, us plant people have capacity to influence positive change - change that, though incremental, cascades into the larger world. After all, plants are fundamental to the existence of life on Earth.

In order to feel like my tiny efforts are engaged with the big picture, I’ve started thinking of myself as a land manager, and my yard as a habitat restoration project. I moved houses in February, and as someone in the “Kill Your Lawn” camp, I was especially thrilled that the lawn had been completely stripped and replaced with, probably literally, a ton of raw material.

The move coincided with enrolling in the Coconino Master Gardener certification course. My motivation for joining the program was multifaceted. Foremost, I wanted to learn more about horticulture. As an early-careerist with a rather broad environmental degree, I was also looking to solidify my more-than-casual interest in plants. Another major motivation was to meet like-minded people, and the volunteer requirements would push my introverted self into the community.

To fulfill these requirements, I started gardening with botanist Jan Busco at the Museum of Northern Arizona. While MNA has a dedicated vegetable garden, they also manage for and take records of plants growing on their extensive grounds. We pulled weeds and planted prickly pear cactus on the Easton Collection Center living roof (a Platinum LEED Certified building) and irrigated, trimmed shrubs, and collected seed from the pollinator sections of the Colton Garden. We collected data on the timing of species emergence, flowering, and fruiting, all the while chatting about the plants we’ve seen and our experiences in seeing them. Volunteering at the Museum proved to be a productive exercise for a wannabe botanist.

Meanwhile in my lawn-stripped, cinder-mulched yard, thousands of mystery seedlings were emerging. I took the opportunity to ask Jan about each species coming up in my yard. I would have been less willing to let the prolific Dragonhead mint (Dracocephalum parviflorum) or horseweed (Conyza canadensis) grow, for example, but she reinforced their ecological value so I embraced them. I was also taking mental notes of what was allowed to grow and what was pulled, shaping my method of ‘gardening by subtraction.’ The first year of managing my habitat was steered by interacting with a botanist, but wouldn’t have been complete without guidebooks and modern tools such as iNaturalist, SEINet, and the USDA Plant Database, which have made plant identification more accessible to the wider public.

Later in the growing season, without any real input, the yard exploded in cowpen daisy (Verbesina encelioides) and Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleomella serrulata), creating eye-pleasing sprays of yellow and pink that supported a huge number of pollinators. They came up so densely that I couldn’t navigate within the space. My habitat patch was in its first stage of ecological succession, or the process by which species composition changes over time within an ecological community. The removal of the grass lawn was a disturbance event, and the plants that grow in disturbed places are called pioneer species. Many invasive species in our region thrive on disturbance, so the native pioneers that came instead were a relief. I watched as birds and insects fed on the flowers that bloomed continuously from these tough plants, despite Flagstaff’s hot summer and poor monsoon. With every new species, I felt a renewed sense that I was living in a biological haven, one that I wanted to expand, supplement, and share with my neighbors.

I’ve applied various terms to my gardening method, ranging from self-importance to self deprecation - native plant gardening, succession gardening, gardening by subtraction, and lazy gardening to name a few. Regardless of method, I ended up recording 34 native species, and have several specific goals to improve this little patch of habitat in the coming years. Ultimately, my first year as a Master Gardener has me feeling like I am successfully supporting an ecological community, and equally importantly, that a human community is with me.

Lauren Vanier, University of Arizona Associate Master Gardener, is a co-chair of the Gardening, Etcetera column. She finds joy in wild plants, and hopes to emulate nature’s complexity in her garden. If you have a gardening story, reach out to her at laurenvanier@arizona.edu. Gardening Etcetera is written for the community by certified Master Gardeners of the University of Arizona’s Coconino County Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program. To learn more visit https://extension.arizona.edu/programs/coconino-county-

master-gardener.