These last few weeks have been hotter than Hades and it’s been a real struggle to keep anything green alive. While a little beat up, the plants below, now affectionately known as “the Rocky Balboas” of my garden, have proven to be as tough as nails, thriving without much water or care. So, if you’re looking for beauty with backbone, give these flowers a try:

Black-eyed Susan (top photo)

Dwarf Jewel Nasturtium

Echinacea

Red Fountain Bleeding Hearts

Downy Skullcap

Sometimes it’s really hard to want to sit down and watch documentaries about all of the world’s problems. In fact, it can be a downright emotional and draining experience—one that I usually try to avoid after seven years of working for an animal protection organization. That said, I did recently watch Queen of the Sun: a very worthy film about the global plight of bees.

While I already knew that these busy little insects were in rough shape, I wanted to become more educated about the problems they faced. So, in a nutshell, here is what I learned: Thanks to the continual disappearance of natural areas, intensive monoculture, and the proliferation of sprawling, manicured lawns, bees all over the planet are lacking places to call home and they are dying. So many and so rapidly, in fact, that if more of us don’t start taking action in our own backyards to help these tenacious pollinators, food production worldwide will become increasingly threatened.

Happily, I also found out that a great way to make a difference in the comfort of your own home is simply by cultivating beautiful plants. Already, I have a number of bee-friendly flowers and herbs incorporated into my landscape—including lavender, sage, mint, oregano, rosemary, yarrow, poppies, black-eyed Susan, and mint—and there are a ton more that are super easy to find at local nurseries and grow in pots, window boxes and yards. Yep, it’s really that easy to lend a bit of habitat help to our tiny winged friends!

First, let me begin with a confession: I didn’t always like vegetables. In fact, I used to hate a lot of them, though I would eat most any put in front of me. After all, I was raised in the country; there were five kids and tight budgets, so we grew food. And, sometimes, my mother would spend long hours canning and freezing the harvest so that we could reap the rewards all year. I swear no pasta sauce ever tasted as good as hers and I am certain it has to do with the fact that it came from our soil. Even so, I just didn’t care for the garden spoils and the way they just sat there like sad afterthoughts on the side of my plate.

Now, as farmers’ markets everywhere start to bring their A-games to lucky cities across the U.S., I find myself getting all giddy at the prospect of fresh radishes, beets and squash. Why the change? Well, I suppose much of this latent enthusiasm was probably born of my switch to a plant-based diet more than a decade ago, as it was through this transition that my tastes gradually evolved, and I began to really experience the complex and varied bursts of flavors a garden could offer. I don’t remember exactly when I reached that point, but I know it must have been a profound day because I finally see the beauty in every bean, green and herb, and they perpetually excite me.

That said, imagine my delight when, on a visit to Chanticleer near Philadelphia, I discovered one of the sweetest vegetable plots I have ever seen. Marrying and mixing whimsical art forms with a wide variety of rich, colorful and aromatic herbs and vegetables, it was ripe with teachable moments, and by the time I finished smelling, touching and photographing my way through it, I was more inspired than ever before to go home and do something about my obsession with edibles once and for all. I still have a ton to learn, so I am starting small this year, but I hope that one day soon I’ll get back to my roots, taking my own shot at preserving each summer for the winter to come. This time, however, I will adore every bite of it.

Long before any of us ever claimed our respective spots on the planet, there’s a pretty good chance that plants were growing right in the place where we now sit. Known as “natives,” these plucky species valiantly held their ground, evolving over time to become integral parts of our landscapes. And, as true testaments to the genius and tenacity of nature, these plants have not only expertly adapted to very specific environmental conditions, but they’ve also come to play important roles in our ecosystems, providing habitat and food for birds, bees and other beneficial critters that help support all life.

Being so hardy, low maintenance and beautiful, you’d think natives would be growing just about everywhere but, alas, the opposite is true. In fact, these once prolific and wonderfully varied species have been disappearing for some time, mostly due to natural area depletion and an onslaught of invasive plants. Plus, try finding natives at your local nursery or big box store, and you’ll be lucky if anyone has even heard some of their names.

Happily, there is, however, an increasingly robust movement led by passionate gardeners and conservationists nationwide who are taking matters into their own hands to lovingly propagate as many natives as they can, and then make them available to equally passionate buyers. These plants may not be so easy to find at first, but with a little digging, you can find them in more and more pockets of the country, as this extensive and impressive database from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Texas will reveal.

As for me, I’ve made a pledge that for every non-native I plant, I will put in a native too. So far I’ve added some lovely anemone, columbine, black-eyed Susan, Bowman’s root, downy skullcap, goat’s beard, and Jack-in-the-pulpit to my yard and I can’t wait to see how they progress. Now that I’ve gone native it seems that I can never go back because as someone somewhere once said, gardening is an act of resistance. I can’t remember for the life of me who it was, but I know that it’s true. And, when we preserve biodiversity with the plants we choose, it is certainly a service both noble and just.  

Bricks. I guess my obsession with these useful, albeit heavy, little suckers started almost two years ago when I discovered hundreds of them sunken into the ground in a place where a garage once stood in my backyard. At first, they seemed to me rather sad and kind of annoying – stark reminders of a former owner’s disastrous attempt to build a structure in a place that was doomed to flood. But that was just me being boring; I had yet to see the possibilities of giving them new life.

I can’t remember the exact moment I saw their potential last year, but somewhere in between stewing over the bricks and stressing about cleaning them up, I eventually realized that they could solve a different problem in my yard: My flower beds were borderless but I didn’t want to spend any money on garden fences – especially ones made of plastic or treated wood.

Getting a bright, green idea, I started digging out the bricks to see what was what – noting that they came in a number of different shape and sizes; some had holes and some didn’t; some were long and some were short. They were eclectic, quirky and rustic, and they fit my design aesthetic and personality perfectly. After that discovery, I was hooked, and my husband and I began hauling bricks up the hill to serve their new purpose in defining the once imaginary lines of my garden beds.

This year, the madness only continued. As soon as the weather warmed, even more ideas crept into my brain and the ritual of lugging bricks resumed, turning me into a sort of a modern-day Sisyphus as I carried more and more up the hill. Once I amassed all the pieces to my new puzzles, I quickly put my visions to work, building some cute, flower-shaped raised rounds in which I sowed seeds for three varieties of kale and two types of chard. Next, I created a two-layer raised bed that’s now home to my cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, and basil (last year my straw bale experiment was an epic fail so this is Plan B). And, finally, after finding inspiration on Pinterest, I planted nasturtiums in the holes of the bricks lining my garden path to up the ante.

So, I guess if you’re thinking right now that I seem awfully pleased with myself, you would be right. It not only makes me happy to have overcome another challenge in my fledgling green space, but the best part is also that the whole project didn’t cost a dime. Heck, in the process of hauling all those bricks, I think I even lost a few pounds too, and you really can’t beat that either.

There is nothing that makes my heart skip a beat quite like a plucky, thrifty plant that rises like a phoenix from the soil each year to make my fledgling garden feel almost like paradise…almost. Ever since I put down roots in a place to call my own, I have been growing cone flowers, bleeding hearts, Russian sage, and other flowers like these for their striking appearances and ability to proliferate in a very pleasant sort of way—unlike their weedy cousins who make it their mission to complicate my life.

This is not to say, however, that I don’t appreciate annual blooms—I love wonderfully edible marigolds and nasturtiums, and, of course, zinnias—but being a sort of practical person, I tend to want to get a lot of value out of the plants I buy…and nothing makes for a return on an investment better than a beloved perennial that comes back with a beautiful vengeance every spring.

While another one of my recent gardening blunders has been a sheer lack of planning in terms of perennial placement (I carelessly threw my first batch in the ground without considering colors combinations and growing habits) I have been able to remedy awkward plantings a bit this season, moving some beloved species around to locations where they can better thrive, and introducing some cherished new additions in their place. And, while I am sure any seasoned gardener would still be horrified by my choices, I am really excited to see how my green space evolves over time.  

When I moved into my house less than two years ago there were so many conifers you couldn’t even see the exterior. And so, while the decision literally made me sick to my stomach, and involved much deliberation and many tears, I authorized a local tree service to cut down the majority of the ones in the front and along the sides of the house so that my hubby and I could secure homeowner’s insurance. After that, I am sure you can imagine just how many bald spots we suddenly had on our hands.

I’m going to come out and admit that I have no idea what I’m doing in my garden, and this was never more apparent than in the way I dealt with the loss of those pines. Driven by impulse and a need to nudge nature along, I just started planting without any rhyme or reason in order to supplement the pitiful, struggling ivy that had been fighting to survive beneath those trees for years—not acting any better than the person who had foolishly planted such giants there in the first place. It seemed like a good idea at the time to get ahead of the weeds but I was making terrible mistakes.

The most severe of these came to light this spring: As soon as last year’s perennials and this season’s weeds broke through the earth to meet the sun, I discovered I was overrun by an army of purple-green seedlings (numbering, it seems, in the tens of thousands). At first, I thought maybe they were returning herbs but when they didn’t smell, the reality of their true identity hit me deep in the gut; they were the evil spawn of some random plant my sister had reluctantly given me the year before with a warning that it would spread. But, just like a naïve horror film heroine, I threw caution to the wind and blindly put it in my garden without even knowing what it was (and, admittedly and stupidly, I still don’t).  

I had known about invasive species for years. I have friends who work as conservationists and I’ve always been conscientious myself. So, how could I let this happen? The answer is mere impatience and carelessness; even ego. Still, as I pull these and other weeds out of the ground, what begins as smoldering frustration, eventually gives way to contentment at simply being out in nature and daydreaming about what my garden will one day become. And, of course, there are the little victories, too: For every 10-20 of those little gremlin-like suckers I rip from the soil there is a new columbine or black-eyed Susan that will add beauty to my world.

“The environment is where we all meet, where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.” – Lady Bird Johnson

I’ve never been especially well known for my patience. Nor have I been known any better for my ability to focus on one goal, dream or desire. I always want better, and I never want to wait for change, joy and edification to come. At the same time, I aspire to be all kinds of people at once: an adventurer, a photographer, a rescuer, an advocate, a writer, a lover of horror films, a baker, a DIY crafter…essentially someone who can beautify, delight, shock, and save the world in the same day.

But all of this is not to say that this is a bad way to be: I feel pretty fulfilled most of the time even if I don’t ever quite seem to fit anywhere in particular or ever really excel at any one special skill. All the same, this is where my little urban garden comes in. Here is where I hope to slow down and learn a few lessons—to become someone who is inspired but also able to tend, wait and slowly evolve. And maybe—well, hopefully—I will eventually grow into the person I really want to be.