10/26/2026
Four years ago, the seed for Backyard Ecoscape was planted right here. 🌱
It started when a neighbor noticed the attention I put into our gardens and asked me to help with theirs. Around the same time, my volunteer conservation work on local nature preserves was teaching me firsthand the importance of native plants and the threats facing our natural ecosystems. I began growing native wildflowers from seed at home, and watching something I'd grown from a tiny seed become part of the landscape was incredibly rewarding. Soon, it became an obsession.
Our property gradually became my testing ground.
I experimented across sun, shade, wet, and dry conditions, learning what worked—and just as importantly, what didn't. Over the years I created foundation and specimen plantings, a small meadow, rain garden, woodland and spring ephemeral gardens, fern collections, borders, and a dry creek bed.
Every winter, the driveway became a makeshift nursery filled with hundreds of winter-sown native plants.
Those experiments taught me how plants actually behave in a landscape, not just how they're supposed to behave on paper. In January 2026, those years of conservation work, growing, and experimenting finally grew into Backyard Ecoscape.
Now, as my first season winds down, I'm also saying goodbye to the property where it all began.
I've moved west from Downingtown toward Coatesville, expanding Backyard Ecoscape's reach farther west in Chester County and into more of Lancaster County. It's bittersweet leaving these gardens behind, but I'm excited to start Year 2 somewhere new.
New soil. New conditions. New experiments. New gardens.
Year 1 started here. I can't wait to see what grows in Year 2. 🌻
