Déja Daniel had never planted a garden before. Then, just a few days before Earth Day last month, the Howard University senior found herself helping to situate 150 native plants in the ground on a single afternoon.
“I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m getting into,’” Daniel said. “But it really inspired me to want to plant my own garden when I have my own family and my own home.”
The new native plant garden in Marvin Gaye Greening Center came to fruition because Daniel, as president of Howard service organization Revolt, Inc., had signed the group up for the first-ever Wild Visions Habitat Creation Challenge. Hosted by Garden for Wildlife, a company spun off from the National Wildlife Federation, the contest provided 11 DMV-area student groups with free native plants with which to create gardens across the region.
“Every single one of these gardens provides habitat to pollinators — to birds, to bees — but also to humans who really, really deeply need to be in connection with nature,” said Rosalie Bull, Garden for Wildlife’s campus engagement lead and the main coordinator for the Wild Visions initiative.
Garden for Wildlife sells native plants, and donates a plant to a community project for each one sold. As recipients of these donations, student groups from the University of Maryland and Howard, Georgetown, American, Catholic, George Washington and Gallaudet universities planted 10 gardens, totaling more than 5,000 square feet. The plantings took place over the last two weeks of April, culminating with an awards ceremony called “The Plantys.”
Long before any of the planting began, student groups submitted their gardens’ design proposals, vision statements and five-year maintenance plans.
Fortunately, the upkeep of native plants tends to require far less effort than gardening that incorporates plants that wouldn’t naturally grow in the area. The plant species Wild Visions participants received, such as black-eyed susans, milkweed and goldenrod, bounce back more easily from shocks because they’re quite literally meant to live in the region’s soil.
That hardiness inspired the project’s name: “Revolt’s Resilient Roots Garden.”
“They don’t need a lot of maintenance, so really, we can be super hands off and they’ll still live,” Daniel said. “Learning how strong they are, and how they’re made to just take on any sort of challenge, is really amazing.”
People-Scale Solutions for Planetary Problems
Native plants play a huge role in addressing the crisis of biodiversity loss facing our planet: they provide badly needed food and homes for animal species that have seen their populations decimated as a result of climate change, pollution and human development of natural habitats. They also require less water to grow than other plants and don’t need chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
In North America alone, we’ve lost about 3 billion songbirds. Pollinator species, like honey bees and butterflies, have also experienced sharp declines — a trend that threatens agriculture and food systems. Animals provide around 80% of all the pollination needed for crops grown worldwide.
Even in urban environments, humans can benefit from functioning ecosystems. More spiders, for example, means fewer mosquitos.
“We’ve heard people who hear ‘wildlife’ and think [of] rats or cockroaches, and I would say, rats and cockroaches are the things that have adapted to the world that we’ve created: the world of concrete and trash and air pollution,” Bull said.
She said there’s no way to eliminate such insects, which “can survive nuclear warfare,” but emphasized that there are ways humans can help make the world more welcoming to other creatures.
“If we make the world more habitable to insects and spiders and bunnies and wolves and foxes and birds, and all the things that deserve to share the world with us, we will have a functioning ecosystem with the kind of checks and balances that make annoying creatures less populous.”
Bull hopes to run the Wild Visions contest annually, and potentially grow to other metro areas. She sees the program as an opportunity to cultivate not just plants but also “eco-agency,” or a sense that individuals and groups can respond to environmental crises in ways that make a difference. Individuals can plant native species “yard by yard,” she said, and research has shown that adding more native vegetation is a powerful strategy for preventing further species loss.
“Our skies are quieter; there’s less living things around us,” Bull said. “We actually have to take action now to keep a future where we have biodiversity. But this doesn’t have to be a sad or terrifying thing: it’s really an invitation for us to get excited and creative and collective about the way that we go about Earth care.”
The Environment is Where We Live, Too
Daniel said that while she, Bull and fellow HU Revolt member Faith Shepherd were planting the garden, a neighbor spotted them working at the Marvin Gaye Greening Center and joined in the effort.
“She decided to come and volunteer because she had mentioned how she’s always taking from the garden, because they also have a farmers market every weekend,” Daniel recalled. “And so she was like, ‘It’s time for me to actually grow something in the garden.’”
Getting to work with a resident of the neighborhood was “an amazing full circle moment,” Daniel said, and it represented why she wanted to create the “Resilient Roots Garden.”
Several other student groups had planted their gardens on campus, but Garden for Wildlife had also identified some other locations and community organizations interested in partnering on the project. In addition to allowing the group to avoid going through Howard’s administration (the university recently dismantled its student-run community garden on campus), Daniel said bringing the donated plants to grow at the Greening Center allowed HU Revolt to pursue its mission of serving Black communities throughout the District.
“I was just thinking, ‘Yes, this is a great partnership,’ because [the Greening Center] has a need, and we can fulfill it through our organization,” she said. “So even though we’re not really an environmental organization, we still thought that it’d be best to plant this garden for the community.”
In fact, almost half of the organizations participating in Wild Visions aren’t generally focused on the environment. When Garden for Wildlife offered free plants and project support, these groups saw opportunities to fulfill their own missions: reviving an unkept campus memorial garden, honoring Indigenous peoples traditions or forming new neighborhood gathering spaces, while also creating new natural habitat.
“Beyond the individual gardens, with Wild Visions we figured out a way to tap into this enormous amount of passion, expertise and creativity — and also to tap into the established networks of community care that college students already have been tending,” Bull said.
Researchers have repeatedly found that connection to nature and exposure to green space is associated with public health benefits, including reduced crime rates, lower blood pressure and decreased illness and mortality generally. Publicly accessible gardens create spaces for people to connect with the land and with other people.
“There’s a way to deal with the planetary crisis, the biodiversity crisis, that creates fear and isolation and inaction,” Bull said. “And then there is a way to greet it as an invitation to creativity and to community care. And we really tried in Wild Visions to make it the latter.”