Let's Get Gardening!

From left to right: foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia), golden alexander (Zizia aurea), and Virginia spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana) are all iconic spring-blooming natives that can be found cultivated or wild in our watersheds!

If you didn’t take the hint from the heat, our watersheds have officially woken up from their winter slumber. The spiderworts are opening in the morning, the golden alexanders are blossoming, and local gardeners are itching to get this year’s starts started! If you’re planning out your tomatoes and your beans and wondering how you can help make your garden great for you AND your pollinator neighbors, read on!

It can be tough to determine the best way to start gardening for our waterways. A lot of our current gardening practices are cultural – our hostas were recommended by a neighbor, we cut our lawn every single Sunday morning, and our lilacs were grown from cuttings from our grandmother’s house. And I want to be clear that there’s nothing wrong with that! Gardens can and should be celebrations of our families, neighbors, history, and selves. We can also add and amend things in our garden to be better to the neighbors we don’t think about as often– the bees, the birds, the bats, the rivers, and more. 

With that in mind, check out our top tips below for kicking off your 2026 garden in a way that celebrates what you love and supports our watersheds!

• Research what plants will work in your yard, and also what makes you happy. For example, do you have tons of shade and love white flowers? Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) is a shade-loving, spring-blooming native that may work well for you! Visit our webpage dedicated to Bay Loving Landscapes for some of our favorite resources to conduct this research. 

• Consider adding a bed or row of some native flowers near your veggie beds – these draw pollinators, add habitat, and are often quite beautiful. With this method, you and the beneficial bugs next door get something to eat! 

• Reduce or pause use of fertilizer, particularly for your lawn. Lawn grass roots are itty bitty; they are often unable to soak up all the fertilizer we put down. The result? All that excess fertilizer runs off into our rivers, also known as nutrient pollution. Want to learn more about that? Join us at our River Report Card event on May 14th for the debut of our data from the 2025 water quality monitoring season!

• Reconsider pesticides and herbicides.  No one wants ticks or mosquitos, but broad pesticide applications can harm innocent bystanders, like the bees, lacewings, and butterflies we depend on for pest control and pollination. 

• Remove invasive plant species as is feasible for you. I’m never going to be the one to tell you to get rid of your nana’s heritage rose bush – that doesn’t lose its sentimental value just because it’s non-native. But the English ivy choking out your oak trees? Spring is a good time to identify, evaluate, and formulate a removal strategy for invasive management, so you can follow up in winter. 

• Relax! Sometimes, the best thing we can do is a little bit of nothing. Let the leaf piles rest a bit longer, or even find a spot where they can decompose down and refresh your soil. Give the fleabane daisies a chance to bloom before you mow them down. Let the world wake up a bit and get moving. Try to tune into nature’s pace – it’s slower, softer, lovelier than we often realize. 

Looking to get your plant starts for the spring or need to get some gardening practice in? There are great opportunities coming up! Our partners at Providence of Maryland are hosting their annual spring plant sale May 1st and 2nd, featuring many Maryland native plants. Check out their website for more details and say hello if you see one of our staff members there! 

Arundel Rivers is also hosting some planting-related volunteer events coming up, including a weeding & clean up at the Southern District Police Station on Saturday, April 25th to enhance our recent project. If you're interested in joining us for a morning of planting and weeding, please email lily@arundelrivers.org.

Interested in helping out another day, or want to find out how you can best volunteer with Arundel Rivers? Email me at mairin@arundelrivers.org. 

Best fishes,

Mairin Corasaniti

Community Engagement and Education Manager