By Francesca Kelly for Go Green Highland Park

The first thing Candice Dalrymple did when we sat down at Astra Coffee Roasters was to hand me a packet of coneflower seeds. You’ve got to love someone who makes that their top priority when meeting someone new.

She didn’t have to give me the hard sell, however; I love coneflowers because they’re beautiful and easy to grow. Many coneflower varieties are native to the Midwest, and, most important, they attract and feed bees, birds and other pollinators. And that’s what Habitat Highland Park, the program that Dalrymple founded last year, is all about.

When Dalrymple moved here a few years ago, she brought with her an idea she’d learned about from a project already underway in Evanston: Community Wildlife Habitat Certification from the National Wildlife Federation. She recruited a steering committee of like-minded individuals, and Habitat Highland Park officially launched in spring 2022 under the auspices of Go Green HP and the League of Women Voters Highland Park-Highwood, with Rotary Club Highland Park as its sponsor. Dalrymple and other volunteers, including students from HPHS Green School Initiative Club, created pollinator demonstration gardens, designed by Steering Committee member Chris Wren and Susan Becker, on the grounds of Stupey Cabin near City Hall. Here, you can find native plants such as those glorious purple coneflowers, as well as black-eyed susans, goldenrod, and wild bergamot. Native plants have deeper root systems, needing far less water and overall care than non-native cultivars. And they support the native species of our region — bees, birds, butterflies and bats — whose numbers are dwindling due to climate change, pollution and habitat destruction.

Why is this important? Because the foods we eat come directly or indirectly from pollinators. Bees alone pollinate around 90 percent of crops, according to a CNN report. (https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/14/weather/food-risk-bee-butterfly-pollinator-decline-climate-scn/index.html)

You can help by taking part in the NWF Community Wildlife Certification program. How does it work? The National Wildlife Federation gives points to a community for providing wildlife habitats at schools, churches, synagogues, and businesses, as well as for distributing information, reaching out on social media and writing articles. Points are also awarded to the city for each individual household that gets certified as a wildlife habitat. With enough points, Highland Park can be certified as a NWF Community Wildlife Habitat.

Our town is well on its way to certification. Through the public outreach and habitat creation efforts of the Habitat HP steering committee members, Highland Park has earned most of the points needed -– now it’s up to residents, schools and businesses to apply for individual certification so that Highland Park can reach its point requirements for community certification. 

To certify your yard, you will need to meet certain requirements before applying online. It’s not as hard as you might think. “People don’t need to give up all the time and resources they’ve put into their lawns and gardens,” explains Dalrymple. “They could devote one small area to a native habitat.” She mentions that most environmental experts do believe that Americans should swap their manicured lawns for native plants. But Dalrymple feels that any measures taken, even small ones, will help. “I like to think of Habitat Highland Park as nonjudgmental; we just need a certain percentage of the population to be devoted enough to create some sort of habitat for pollinators, even if it’s pots of native plants on the balcony.” Washington Post writer Dana Milbank writes about the gradual changes he’s made in his own garden in this excellent recent column: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/07/suburban-lawn-climate-change-biodiversity/

In addition to growing native plants, you also need to supply a water source for wildlife, such as a bird bath or fountain, as well as provide cover for wildlife to shelter and raise young. Finally, you agree to eschew the use of chemicals that are harmful to wildlife. You can learn more about requirements for certification here: https://www.nwf.org/CertifiedWildlifeHabitat.

Dalrymple is reluctant to be profiled as an “eco-hero,” pointing out that Habitat HP is very much a team effort, with all members contributing equally to the initiative. But you might just see her out there this summer knocking on doors and handing out seed packets — and she’s considering wearing some sort of bee headgear to drive the point home. That’s heroic enough to earn her some accolades, or at least, to give her a few moments of your time to see how you can help create a sanctuary in your own backyard. For inspiration, stop by the Habitat HP pollinator gardens to smell that sweet native-plant fragrance and see what the birds and the bees are really up to. What’s next up for Habitat this summer? A tour of local gardens featuring native plantings, and lots of digging in the dirt with fellow Habitat members. If you’d like to dig along with them, if you own an establishment that could create a habitat garden, or if you just want to know more about this initiative, check out the Habitat webpage here: https://gogreenhp.org/habitat-hp/