In this month’s Food X, the Center’s Population and Sustainability Media Specialist Kim Dinan shares a short essay about how she transformed her driveway into a thriving garden — featured on HGTV and in Sierra magazine — that feeds her family and native pollinators. In addition to working at the Center, Kim is the author of a travel memoir, The Yellow Envelope.

Read on to learn about her garden and how you can take action to save pollinators like bees and butterflies.

Today you’d never know that I used to park my Prius where the bee balm and echinacea bloom. A few years ago, as the pandemic raged on, I began to feel a primal need to put my hands in the dirt. I yearned to plant a garden. Growing my own food felt both practical and a bit like sorcery — and I needed some magic in my life. Like so many others during those tough lockdown years, I was struggling with the demands of life, work and parenting. Joy was hard to come by. I needed to build my own refuge. 

The trouble was that the only flat and sunny spot on my property was the driveway. A Google search led me to the nonprofit Depave, which helps folks swap paved surfaces for green spaces. Pavement, I learned, comes with a whole slew of environmental problems, like water pollution from stormwater runoff and rising temperatures from the heat-island effect — not to mention the cumulative harms of burying the natural world in concrete. 

I became obsessed with freeing the starved Earth beneath my driveway. It didn’t take long before I found myself with a pry bar and an asphalt recycling dumpster, methodically dismantling the driveway.

Now I walk the garden three times a day, noticing the little changes: the first red raspberry, the purple flash of a new maypop.

I watch as the wildflowers poke through the soil and the Carolina jessamine coils one more time around the fence. A quarter-inch of growth is something my whole family celebrates. To any outsider nothing is different, but my family and I marvel at the incremental changes.

Endless buzzing insects — including hummingbird moths, eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies, and imperiled monarchs — have all stopped by to fuel up in my garden. Not to mention black snakes, black bears, rabbits, turkeys, chipmunks, moles and deer. 

I’ve spotted dozens of birds, including rose-breasted grosbeak, who migrate from North America to South America. Some grosbeaks, I’ve learned, cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single night. That they choose to use my garden as a stopover is the kind of thrill I revisit in my mind for weeks, long after they’ve winged themselves back into the air and crossed state lines.

I always knew the garden would provide me with food — and it has: crunchy sweet peppers, mangled and delectable carrots, tomatoes dripping in seeds.

I’ve tasted nothing more delicious than the first juicy bite of a watermelon that I watched grow for months, its vines slowly leafing out and creeping across the soil. 

But it turns out that the garden’s slow pace has nourished me the most. It’s taught me a thing or two about the time it takes to bloom.

Take, for example, my apple tree — which last year produced just a single fruit. Before I was a gardener, I might have written that tree off. But I’ve learned that a fruitless season doesn’t mean a fruitless life. I’m watching closely. The apples are on their way.

~ Kim Dinan

Wildlife, especially pollinators, need places of refuge. All too often they find concrete or pesticide-poisoned plants instead. But each one of us can help, whether we’re depaving a driveway, rewilding a lawn, or planting boxes on a balcony.

Do you know a gardener who’s passionate about saving pollinators? Forward this email and share our resources on social media — you can find us at @Choose_Wild on Facebook and Instagram.

Then take action to help save pollinators in wildlife refuges from toxic pesticides.

Write to me anytime with questions at EarthFriendlyDiet@BiologicalDiversity.org.

For the wild,

Jennifer Molidor
Senior Food Campaigner
Population and Sustainability Program
Center for Biological Diversity