This toolkit is designed to empower people to garden with native plants and promote native and sustainable landscapes. We hope to have the answers to your questions on how to be a successful native plant gardener on the Front Range.
If you are beginning your journey to a more sustainable landscape, don’t be alarmed at the amount of information presented here. We always counsel that you should start small, so that you don’t get overwhelmed. Remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good; there is no such thing as a completed landscape (it’s always a work in progress!) and we learn from our many gardening mistakes. These are all truisms. The saying we really love is that a gardener’s best garden is always next year. Next year, I will plant x, y, and z. I will have the garden of my dreams with many more caterpillars, butterflies, and birds!
You don’t need all the information in this toolkit to start. If you start by planting just a few native plants in an already existing flower bed, great! And you don’t need to spend lots of money on this. We will have resources for you to start your own plants, or get plants from other gardeners.
If you’re already on this journey, with an existing mostly native plant landscape, we hope you’ll learn a few new things, but we also hope you will help us populate this toolkit with your own experiences. This is a living resource. We will post available materials for some sections, which may not be complete but at least offer a starting point on the topic, with the intention of editing and updating the material over time.
© 2023 Wild Ones Front Range Chapter
Sections of the toolkit list the primary author; however, many other folks have contributed to and/or reviewed these sections. We would love to co-create this with our members! As the toolkit is under development, we welcome your feedback. Did we miss a topic? Is there a topic you’d like to write about? Are you aware of an existing resource that we should reference? We don’t need to reinvent when there are things out there, but we do aim to get new information out to you.
If you’re ready to contribute, please email us at [email protected]