Wild Ones Capital Region NY offers tours of two gardens on Saturday, August 15, 2026. Learn more about Jenna & Sam’s garden in Schenectady below and Christine’s garden in Guilderland here.
Register here to attend.
Jenna & Sam writes:
Though we’ve lived in our house in Schenectady for about two decades now, we didn’t really plant much at first, and when we tried, we didn’t particularly know what we were doing. One planting that did take, though, was a white pine next to our driveway, which now provides a kind of evergreen tunnel for our cars and which provided a home this spring for a family of robins. The rest was largely lawn surrounded by hundreds of feet of invasive privet hedge and a frustrating amount of barberry, burning bush, and bittersweet.
One of our first major projects was to dig a koi pond. For over ten years our fish overwintered in the pond, but this past winter’s frigid temperatures broke our filter, and we wound up losing our fish, so we are still trying to determine what the pond’s next phase will be. After we dug the first pond, we wound up learning about how to create a pond filtered naturally by plants and created a small wildlife pond further back in the yard, which soon filled with dragonflies and water beetles and many bathing robins, catbirds, and cardinals. Inspired by that success and by a mallard pair visiting the old koi pond for a couple of days this spring, we think we’d like to make the former koi pond more of a haven for wildlife with natural filtration too–and would welcome any advice!
Despite a love for Korean and Japanese pines, we’ve definitely been shifting to more native plants in the past few years and have added hundreds of them to our quarter-acre lot, including bayberries, trilliums, various viburnums, sneezeweed, various native sedges, coneflowers, huckleberries, birches, two native magnolias, spice bushes, sourwoods, several ferns, pin, scarlet, and white oaks, witch hazels, dogwoods, eastern red cedars, hazelnuts, ninebarks, a sycamore, many asters, Joe Pye, Culver’s root, beach plums, and on and on. You’ll notice that I mentioned quite a few trees for such a small space. We are planning for quite a shady garden in the near future. This decision was partially inspired by Garden in the Woods in Framingham, MA, but also by Tallamy and Darke’s The Living Landscape, and the need to create a livable space in the hot months of summer for both people and wildlife. Our tearing down of those hundreds of feet of twelve-foot-tall privet and burning bush also made us long for tall things to grow up and create our much-missed privacy screen again, so we leaned pretty heavily into planting up the place with native trees.
You’ll have to return in five or six years to see how the shade has grown and what ferns and sedges and spring ephemerals have moved in to replace some of the sun-lovers.