Certified Pollinator Gardens are beginning to blanket the Eastside! By helping local pollinators like butterflies and bees, they help our neighborhoods and our entire region thrive.

Do you know the secret to a blooming backyard, and to a thriving Eastside ecosystem? Sun and soil are important, but it’s the butterflies, bees, bats, and hummingbirds that bring your garden and our world to life year after year.

Our Eastside Pollinator Garden project is a fun, free community program here at Eastern Sierra Land Trust that helps us engage in conservation from our own backyards, while helping these buzzing, fluttering creatures find the homes and nourishment they need.
We’re in the middle of 2019’s pollinator garden certification process right now. We started working with this year’s participants in spring, and we’re excited to watch their 14 new, beautiful gardens all be certified in September.

Marie Ring, our Education Coordinator and AmeriCorps Member, has been scheduling garden check-ups with these gardeners throughout the summer, to help them along in their process. She’s been having tons of fun checking up on their pollinator-friendly habitats. She’s seen it all! At one garden, she’ll play with little kids as they splash around in an oversize bird bath. At another garden, she’ll be encouraged to taste all kinds of onions and vegetables.

Marie shared a couple of new little tricks to help any garden:

  • Rock art is one way to simultaneously organize and beautify your garden while limiting water use. Many gardeners use lines of rocks to visually separate different types of plants from one another, while others use rocks to create mandalas or other artistic arrangements in their garden. Get creative!
  • You can create bee nesting logs in your garden to make nests for native bees. Just take a log and drill holes in it, and the bees will do the rest! You can even drill holes of all different shapes like hearts or stars.

Are you curious about the process of certifying your garden? Would you like to build a beautiful home for the birds and the bees? No matter what level of gardener you are, we can help! Contact Marie at or (760) 873-4554 with any questions about this program. You can find more information at this link.

Marie is staying with ESLT for another year of service through the AmeriCorps Sierra Nevada Partnership Program! We are grateful that she’ll continue to share her skills and joyful attitude with us and our community here on the Eastside.