1. Create awareness in the community on the importance of planting native plants and trees in our landscapes.

2. Engage our community and city to increase the native plant footprint in Worthington and create a “pollinator pathway” to track native gardens.

3. Acknowledge homeowners who are already planting native plants and trees in their yards.

   Please let us know if you have a native garden (you can add your property address to the Worthington Pollinator Pathway map we are creating), you’d like to stay informed or get involved in this project. Select the link below.

Small flowering native plants, native shrubs, and trees play critical roles in helping our ecosystem: Hosting native insects, sequestering CO2 in our soil, water conservation and they do not need chemicals and require little maintenance since the plants are native to Ohio.

The vast majority, 85%, of the land east of the Mississippi is privately owned. So, property owners can play a big role in supporting ecosystem.

The typical American yard has plants that are native to Asia or Europe. Insects do not lay their eggs on those plants, so our insect population is dropping precipitously. Insects are the foundation of our ecosystem, so their loss contributes to loss throughout the food web. Other factors contribute to insect decline as well, but providing host plants or native plants, is something anyone with a piece of land, or a place to put flowerpots, can do to help reverse this precipitous decline.

Watch the video below from Homegrown National Park.