Red Fence Garden - The Hellstrip

My Efforts at Urban Native Plant Gardening

Late last year I stole some land from the city of Quincy, Massachusetts.  Or more like I borrowed it and gave it back to nature.  It really depends on how you look at it, I suppose.

I was inspired to do this bit of guerrilla gardening by the city itself, who had just planted a tupelo tree in front of my house, and a friend in Belmont, who offered me all the free native plants I wanted.

I have a small property - under 5,000 square feet, including a house, a shed/garage, and a long driveway. I don’t have a lot of room.  But I love growing things. And I love free plants. I also live on a very busy street, full of commuters and pedestrians that I figured could use a nice garden to enjoy just as much as the pollinators and birds do.  So I decided to claim the large hellstrip, otherwise known as a median, and put a fully native plant concept garden on it.

I set down a few parameters:

• Only planting plants native to North America

• Keeping plants under three feet tall

• Safety first - nothing near the edges that could fall into the street or onto the sidewalk and impede traffic, or encourage children and animals into the street

• Using free materials and plants whenever possible

• Making it appealing - a garden for the wildlife as well as the passers-by

There was a lot of work to do on the front end.  First I got my husband to help me strip off all the weedy salt-damaged grass, and then I covered it with cardboard-topped with mulch. (I spent about $40 on mulch).

Then I added some free stepping stones to make a path, and an old broken concrete bird bath as sort of a “ruin.”

After that I planted what had seemed like a lot of plants, but once I got them in, seemed like just a few plants, because this hellstrip is really large.

I added pale pink yarrow, goldenrod, violets, black eyed Susan’s, coreopsis, an eastern prickly pear, white asters, evening primrose, blue vervain, and a few other things I don’t remember.

But that’s the thing, I do want to remember.  Half the enjoyment is in the journey. And because this is a concept garden, I also want to show the ups and downs of getting a native plant hellstrip garden established. 

My native plant garden is still far from perfect. I’ve been battling a couple really annoying weeds - quackgrass and nutsedge.  Yarrow wants to grow everywhere. But I’ve added pink spiderwort, foxglove beard tongue, and a few other lovely early-blooming plants.  It’s getting nicer and nicer. And it’s already a million times better than that forgettable and ecologically disappointing patch of grass it used to be.

So here’s Red Fence Garden, in its second year, and hopefully beyond. I hope you follow along as I work to make this space beautiful and beneficial for the environment!

Hellstrip Garden, year 2