I’ll be honest with you: I grew up doing yardwork only when my allowance depended on it. I did the bare minimum. So when I tell you that I now spend my weekends weeding, hauling mulch, hunting for prairie smoke at native plant nurseries, and literally running around my yard yelling “catch the vision!” to my spouse, please know that nobody is more surprised than me.
This is not a story about having a green thumb. It’s a story about what happens when you just start.
How It Started (Spoiler: Not Gracefully)
When my spouse and I bought our first house in 2022, the yard was an afterthought. We spent 2023 training for RAGBRAI. In 2024, my spouse split some hostas, put in a line of perennials, and we threw some spring bulbs in the ground in the fall, then assumed the squirrels ate everything and didn’t bother to mulch.
Then one spring morning in 2025, flowers started pushing up through the grass. Right in the middle of the grass. Those bulbs had survived. And something shifted in me.
We dug out the grass around them (do not recommend), added more bulbs, laid down mulch, and suddenly I was hooked. I started researching what pollinators needed. I spotted a hummingbird and immediately drove to a nursery. I found clearance plants and dragged them home like treasure.
I started seeing the yard not as grass to maintain, but as space to use, for beauty, for biodiversity, for something that mattered.
What a Few Seasons Can Do
Two years later, here’s what I didn’t expect:
- At dusk, we don’t need fireworks. We have dozens upon dozens of fireflies.
- Hummingbirds visit our mints, salvias, and bee balms. Bees of more varieties than I can currently identify work the flowers all day. Last summer, we watched a monarch butterfly emerge from its chrysalis after finding dozens of caterpillars on our tiny baby milkweed plants. For the first time in years, I found a real ladybug. Not an invasive Asian beetle. An actual ladybug.
- Birds are nesting, bathing, landing on flower heads. The yard is alive in a way that a lawn simply isn’t.
And here’s the thing about Iowa right now: that aliveness matters beyond our own joy.
Why This Is Also About Our Water
On June 8th, Central Iowa Water Works entered a Stage 3 Mandatory Water Warning, a ban on residential lawn watering, for the second year in a row. It wasn’t issued because of drought but because nitrate concentrations in the Raccoon River, the Des Moines River, and our infiltration gallery have been elevated for so many days that our nitrate removal systems–literally the best in the world–are running at near-constant capacity. (On July 1, we moved to a Stage 2 Watering Alert where people are asked to water their lawns 50% less.)
These are extraordinary systems doing extraordinary work. And right now, they are overwhelmed.
Watering your lawn in the summer puts a lot of pressure on those systems and a ban is a way to ensure the water coming out of our faucets meets EPA standards. Converting lawn to garden won’t fix upstream agricultural policy. That work requires showing up at the statehouse, voting for candidates who take water quality seriously, and sustained collective action over years.
But here’s what I’ve learned about that kind of long-haul advocacy: it requires fuel. It requires the kind of deep, embodied hope that comes from watching a monarch emerge from a chrysalis in your own backyard, or counting fireflies at dusk.
Joy is not a detour from climate work. Joy is climate work. It’s what keeps us going.
A yard full of deep-rooted natives and perennials that requires no irrigation, filters water, feeds pollinators, and sparks wonder in your neighbors? That’s not a small thing. That’s a living, growing argument for why this work matters.
Native plants and perennials do something turf grass simply cannot: they put down deep taproots, sometimes reaching several feet into the soil, which allows them to absorb and filter water far more effectively than a shallow-rooted lawn. That matters more and more as Iowa’s climate shifts toward the pattern we’re already living, longer dry stretches punctuated by heavy, short bursts of rain. Turf grass struggles with both. Native plants were built for both. Their deep roots hold through drought and when the downpours come, those same roots slow the water down, draw it in, and reduce runoff. A native garden doesn’t just survive what Iowa’s weather is becoming. It’s part of how we respond to it.
You Don’t Have to Do It All at Once
I didn’t. Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I started:
Just pick one spot. A corner. A strip along the fence. The patch where the grass doesn’t grow well anyway. Start there.
Kill the grass. Lay down cardboard or newspaper, wet it, and cover it with mulch. It smothers the grass over time and you don’t have to dig anything out.
Ask your neighbors and friends first. I have received gifted milkweed, coreopsis, aster and more from people who were thrilled to find a home for their divisions. Post on your neighborhood social media page and ask if anyone has plants to split. You will be amazed.
Shop the clearance aisle. End-of-season plants are deeply discounted and usually perfectly healthy. This is how I built out most of my garden.
Look for natives. Iowa has extraordinary native plants: pale purple coneflower, black-eyed Susan, blazing star, little bluestem, common milkweed, ironweed, Joe Pye weed, columbine, wild indigo, culver’s root… These plants evolved here. They know this soil, these rains, these insects.
Even a pot counts. If you rent, or have only a balcony, a couple of containers with pollinator-friendly annuals make a real difference. Zinnias, lantana, and salvia are easy starting points.
And don’t get stuck in perfection. Natives are extraordinary and worth seeking out. But gardening is also personal. Alliums aren’t native, and after a long Iowa winter, they bring me joy. Marigolds and snapdragons remind me of my dad. Purple irises remind me of my mom and my grandmother. That connection, to memory, to beauty, to the people who shaped you, is worth planting too. Find the balance that works for you.
Then Tell Someone
Once you’ve done it, share it. Post a photo. Put up a sign. Talk to your neighbor when they ask what you’re planting.
The Iowa Wildlife Federation has a program where your landscaping can become a Certified Wildlife Habitat so you can put a sign in your yard and spark curiosity in everyone who walks by. If you’ve got milkweed, you can it certified as a monarch waystation too. Signage matters. It gives people language for what they’re seeing and permission to imagine their own yard differently.
This spring, I finally felt like my spouse caught the vision. Standing in what used to be a fairly unremarkable lawn, surrounded by alliums, newly planted natives, and coneflowers filled with bees and fireflies, and a bench where we can take it all in, he got it.
You will too. But you have to plant something first.
This weekend is a great time to start.