Why You Need a Habitat Garden

Andrea Hurd • March 13, 2019

Does your outdoor space give you joy? Does it allow you the opportunity to connect to the natural world?

Or is it a source of worry, an expensive responsibility, a time-consuming chore?

If you lean more toward the second feeling than the first, you're not alone. When we lead busy lives, spending time in the garden becomes a taxing chore. It can seem like there's always something to do, and not enough time to get it done.

When we first meet our clients, many of them are overwhelmed by their outdoor spaces. Our goal is to help create enjoyable gardens for our clients, where they can relax and settle into a relationship with the natural world. A garden that hold life, such as a diverse array of butterflies, birds and bees, as well as a myriad of colorful plants that bloom year round, is one that can relax our minds, and calm our fears.

Building gardens with an eye toward creating places that invite butterflies, birds and bees is commonly known these days as habitat gardening. Habitat gardening is about building and maintaining gardens by designing them through a way that creates serene spaces full of life, color, beautiful scents, and fresh air. As a bonus, this kind of garden requires less maintenance than traditional gardens because its design works with, rather than against, nature.

Habitat gardening is also about taking a critical look at the standards of both the landscaping and agricultural industries and questioning what we as homeowners and garden makers can do to improve the environment, improve our health, and improve our communities by taking better care of our local environment and the living beings who depend on it.

As a firm with thirty years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining gardens based on permaculture and ecological design principles, we've learned how to create and sustain ecologically beneficial gardens that are also beautiful, inspiring places for human beings. The pictures below show one of our client's gardens before and after; at Mariposa, we want everyone to have a space like this, that takes the stresses of the day away by providing a garden that is teeming with life, one that allows you to connect to the natural world.

We want to share our expertise and knowledge of how to build ecologically inspired gardens with homeowners and members of the gardening community in this blog. Starting one garden at a time, we are working to restore and regenerate the health of our local and even our global environment. We’d love to start a conversation with readers, too; feel free to use the comments to tell us your opinions, experiences, learnings, successes and failures.

Next up: How to design your garden with nature in mind.

A brick walkway leading to a shed in a backyard.

A path surrounded by tall grass and trees leading to a house.

Before and after photos show the change from traditional to habitat garden at this Oakland home.

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Summer Is Almost Here, Start Thinking About Your Soil

By Andrea andrea • June 9, 2025

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.

Happy Spring!!!

By Andrea andrea • May 3, 2025

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 Cleaning For Habitat

By Andrea andrea • April 28, 2025

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).