As summer unfolds, we find ourselves savoring the simple, joyful moments that our gardens bring. This season beautifully highlights our ongoing commitment to supporting urban wildlife habitats. It’s such a joy to watch butterflies dance through the flowers, birds flit among the branches, and bees busily explore each blossom. Creating gardens that nurture life is one of the most rewarding parts of being a gardener. The Beauty and Benefits of Meadows One of the best ways to invite butterflies, and other pollinators, into your garden is by planting a meadow. Not only are meadows breathtakingly beautiful, but they also provide a vital habitat for a wide variety of wildlife. A meadow’s open structure—filled with a mix of grasses, annuals, and perennials—creates a welcoming space for butterflies to find food and shelter. From marshy wetlands and mountain slopes to deserts and beyond, meadows are a part of natural landscapes all over the world. Perhaps that’s why we feel so connected to them. Lawns and open parks echo this connection, offering a familiar sense of peace and wellness that meadows inspire.  Whether nestled in a wild landscape or blooming in a city garden, meadows offer butterflies both food and shelter. The greater the diversity of flowers, especially those with long and overlapping bloom times, the more butterfly species your garden will attract and support.

CHECK YOUR SOIL! Isn’t it great to feel the longer and warmer days of late Spring? I love the feeling of going outside and seeing the sun, shining brightly on all of the green leaves and beautiful flowers. It is so wonderful to feel the glow of summer approaching. What a joy to get caught up in that glow, while we watch the gardens grow gorgeously. However, that joy makes it easy to forget that here in the Bay Area, we are entering the months long dry season. Our Mediterranean climate shifts this time of year, which can transform gardens from showing lots of flowering and new green growth, to gardens where soils and plants become dry and damaged. This transition can lead to health issues in the garden over the coming weeks and months. While plants are still thriving from the lovely winter rains, the soils are now drying out. We often don’t realize that the soils are becoming too dry because at this time of year, it takes plants longer to show signs of stress. However, if we know what is about to come, we can stay ahead of the dry season and the damage that hydrophobic soils can do to our garden.

With the warmer temperatures and longer days, gardens are literally bursting with hope. New leaves unfurl and early blooms emerge under the lengthening days and warming temperatures. April never fails to inspire me with its magical expression in the natural world. Each year, as this phenomenon occurs, I am delighted by the immense force that nature has to replenish and re-emerge anew. Being able to count on the small miracles of leafing out and blooming helps to give stability in an unstable world. Tending a garden is not only therapeutic for our soul, but also will help heal your local environment.

Spring is an amazing time of year to witness rebirth and transformation in the garden. Buds are swelling, flowers are beginning to bloom and butterflies are starting the procession of early, mid and late seasonal emergence into the garden! All of the subtle and beautiful change that happens day to day draws us gardeners out into the garden to witness the fullness of spring. During March, we see a chorus of changes in the garden, each element playing in harmony. Paying close attention to how your garden is changing and developing during this season can help you to become a better guardian for habitat protection. In Mariposa’s newsletters and articles , we discuss that in order to protect habitat in the winter garden, one must be very careful. Many grown pollinators and butterflies, as well as their dormant eggs gather protection under the leaves and in the dried stems of flowering perennials such as Echinacea (purple coneflower) and Rudbeckia (black eyed Susan).

How to cultivate life in your garden and provide more habitat for pollinators!

As the reality of climate change looms larger, the need for individual action becomes imperative. Our weather is growing hotter, rain patterns are erratic, and fires across the Western US are increasingly more destructive.

Gardening connects us to nature. It also invites us to think like scientists. The garden is our laboratory where experimentation, observation, and evaluation are a part of the process. ​

We're so excited to announce that we won the California Landscape Contractors Association 2023 Beautification Award for Small Design/Build Installation!

Is the drought over? Do we still need to conserve water in our homes? Can we go back to watering our gardens? Folks who live in Northern California, where we have been experiencing extreme drought conditions for the past several years, want to know.