Riverdale gardeners restore native habitats to support pollinators and revive urban ecosystems

Native plant life is all the buzz in Riverdale, where a quiet revolution is helping pollinators thrive and landscapes reclaim their identity.

What may seem like overgrown patches of weeds taking root in street tree beds and neighborhood parks are flourishing ecosystems designed with a purpose: to give pollinators a fighting chance. But many green thumbs are moving beyond traditional floral gardens, opting instead to revive urban landscapes as resilient and self-sustaining habitats.

Pollinators — bees, butterflies, beetles, birds and bats, to name a few — do the invisible work of carrying pollen between plants, sustaining not only the reproduction of flowers and trees but also much of the human food supply.

Without them, ecosystems unravel.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 75 percent of flowering plants and 35 percent of global food crops rely on animal pollination. But in the past few decades, pollinator populations have dropped at alarming rates, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reporting more than 40 percent of insect pollinators, including bees and butterflies, are at risk of extinction, largely due to habitat destruction, pesticides and climate change.

In Riverdale, what began as small gestures of neighborhood greening has evolved into something more ambitious — a movement to rewild the urban landscape, one native plant at a time. The aim is not to embellish natural spaces with seasonal blooms, but to restore functioning habitats as havens for pollinators within an urban landscape.

Jodie Colón, head of Friends of Spuyten Duyvil, has spent more than a decade stewarding Henry Hudson Park, Shorefront Park and, most recently, sidewalk tree beds in front of the Spuyten Duyvil Library. Her goal isn’t to curate a tidy garden, but to manage a wild urban ecosystem, one that utilizes native flora over invasive ornamentals and ecological function over conventional aesthetics. 

“Our philosophy is, these are all native trees,” Colón said, indicating those scattered throughout Henry Hudson Park. “We need to maintain them, care for them. They host more pollinators than so many of the pollinator gardens combined.”

A single oak tree, for example, can support more than 500 species of caterpillars, according to the National Wildlife Federation. That’s the kind of ecological infrastructure Colón believes should be maintained in urban green space, not manicured lawns or mulch-filled beds of imported ornamentals.

She is quick to note real ecological care doesn’t always align with public expectations; what may look like an unkept patch of greenery to a passerby is a thriving habitat built with intention — drifts of native ferns, grasses and perennials that self-seed and spread.

“A lot of people are like, ‘plant a flowering pollinator garden,’” Colón said. “I say we don’t need another pollinator garden. I say if you want to plant, plant natives. I say plant natives once. Weed invasives forever.”

That approach is echoed at the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture, 4450 Fieldston Road, where a years-long restoration effort has transformed the grounds. Once overrun with Japanese yew and invasive vines, the property is now a living classroom of native flora, like foxglove, goldenrod and wild strawberry.

Steve Toriello, a longtime member of the society, sees pollinator advocacy as a moral imperative. 

“We have a native pathway,” he said. “We’re raising consciousness about native plants and pollen, the importance of pollination and pollinators, and how they’re under threat.”

The society’s aim, he said, is to be stewards of the land, reviving what was here long before development. QR-coded signs dot the facility’s grounds, inviting visitors to learn more, record observations and contribute to ongoing community pollination efforts.

In Ewen Park, a third restoration effort is quietly reviving the landscape, this one by the Stewards of Ewen Park. They’ve removed aggressive invaders, like knotweed, that once dominated the hillside. In their place, native plants now rise, milkweed, mountain mint and goldenrod among them.

“To some people, it still looks messy,” Julie Jenkins, head of Stewards of Ewen Park, said. “But that’s because we’re trained to see neatness as beauty. What we’re doing is shifting that idea, showing that beauty can be messy.”

This spring alone, Jenkins and her group of volunteers added more than 380 new trees and plants to the space. And in a rocky, flood-prone section of the park, they maintain a wetland habitat particularly fit to support late-season pollinators preparing for winter.

The organization’s long-term goal is to create a pollinator corridor, a linked network of flowering plants that allows all bees, butterflies and birds to travel through an otherwise fragmented, largely concrete cityscape.

“We’re not just gardening,” Jenkins said. “We’re reestablishing what should be here. We call it pollination through rehabilitation.”

In a world where climate change breeds environmental uncertainty, this approach offers something Colón said is in short supply these days — hope.

“We’re not focused on just stopping the bad, we’re focused on making the good more possible,” she said. “Every group has different goals. My goal has always been to build awareness, give people some action they could take and understand that not everybody has the same perspective. There are places for different management styles.”