Three Sisters

From lawn to garden! On this sweltering 1st day of August, we played Bachata & Reggaeton to keep our energy high for the massive undertaking of converting this corner property into a pollinator garden for our wildlife friends. This garden has over 90% of native plants, with Echinacea, Beebalm, Bloodroot, False Sunflower, Aster, Lady Fern, Woodland Sunflower, Butterfly Milkweed, Northern Sea Oats, Wild Columbine, and many more to support biodiversity in our city.

A big thank you to Anna's Perennials Nursery and Gardens for your beautiful flowers & grasses!

We love to rock & garden! Introducing our newest rock garden with beautiful pollinator-friendly species!

Some of our favourite flowers & grasses were planted in this drought-tolerant sunny space, including Echinacea with Little Bluestem, Blanket Flower surrounded by Blue Fescue, and Yarrow with swaths of Betony & Veronica.

Right after planting, a Painted Lady butterfly & Fritillary butterfly came to visit their new habitat!

A massive thanks to for proving all the beautiful plants, for helping with the installation, and to & for being the most lovely hosts on this hot summer day!

Celebrating yellow! Yellow makes us feel cheerful, stimulates our mental activity, and generates energy…and bees are attracted to yellow flowers in your garden (as well as blue and violet flowers).

🌿Evening Primrose
🌿False Sunflower
🌿Rudbeckia Maxima
🌿Lance-leaf Coreopsis
🌿Rudbeckia laciniata hortensia
🌿Grey headed Coneflower
🌿Cup Plant

We built this natural landscape 3 years ago in the north end of Peterborough. In a neighbourhood that’s considered a pollinator desert. We delawned the entire front yard, and created a native pollinator garden with some of our favourite flowering species - False Sunflower, Echinacea, Butterfly Milkweed, Yarrow, Culver’s Root, Baptisia, Canada Anemone & Asters.

Returning to see the garden flourishing with such vibrant colours & attracting beneficial pollinators gives us a tremendous sense of purpose & joy!

We are so very pleased to have converted another lawn to a pollinator garden! For this fantastic client, we selected a wide range of perennials and many native plants. The line up includes spring bloomers Prairie Smoke & foxglove beardtongue; summer stars Culver's root, yarrow 'moonshine' & false sunflower 'bleeding hearts'; fall heroes Ironweed and Big Bluestem. Thank you .body.wellness for inviting us to your space! We cannot wait to see how this garden evolves once these beauties settle in.

🙌This epic project was, as always a collaborative effort. We are so thankful to have this strong community of ecolandscapers and growers to support us! Thanks to for lending some serious muscle and & Grow Wild! for the fabulous plants. 🙌

⭐️⭐️ Cuteness alert! ⭐️⭐️

Introducing the Red-eyed Vireo - a youngster getting ready to see the world!

All Vireo species build nests of a similar style: instead of resting on the branch, the cup is suspended between the two branches of a fork, the threads deftly woven around each twig. The nest is a beautifully finished piece of art, constructed of fine grasses, bits of birch bark, and paper from wasps’ nests, bound together to the supporting branches with spider’s webbing.

The romance of a morning spent in the garden!
Hands up if your garden is a place of refuge for you🙋. Does it ask you to slow down? Listen? Observe?

"It's a scorcher!" This week we returned to embrace, enjoy and expand on a project from this spring, sweating much more than we did then! What better way to spend a water break than by enjoying the fruits of your labour?

We don't typically see any bloom on this Aconitum (Monkshood) until late summer or fall, but with this year's conditions, we are not surprised to see this beautiful specimen in full bloom. They may be a delight to the eyes, but be aware, Aconitum are poisonous and should always be handled with care.

Our other photos include 2 of our dream team (shout out to for their amazing help today), a portion of this week's project and a glimpse at some of this spring's plantings.

We won an award! Thanks Green Up for the recognition!

Garden building in a heat wave…and we’re still smiling at the end of the installation!

Our proposal for you: build a garden, small or large, that benefits pollinators. This is the year to get started! And here’s some inspiration!

Celebrating this native pollinator-friendly garden we designed & built 3 years ago! Introducing Prairie Smoke, Canada Anemone, False Blue Indigo, Bloodroot, Nannyberry, Wild Columbine, and Amsonia.

Rock and pollinator garden installation complete! Another epic garden building project with over 70 plants, grasses and shrubs, river rock, flagstone pathways, and lots of plants that are aesthetically pleasing & support biodiversity, such as Blue Fescue, Yucca, Pasque Flower, Little Bluestem, and Russian Sage. A big thank you to Anna's Perennials for providing all the beautiful plants!

Slide to the right to see before photos of all the gardens!

We are smiling but this morning we were grunting, sweating & crying as we worked hard to remove 20 year old shrubs from this space. A new pollinator garden was planted with native species including prairie smoke, beardtongue, false blue indigo, false sunflower, asters, and turtlehead. Wildlife get ready to go wild for your new space!

A beautiful day for our first de-lawing of the year! This funky seed head is just another treat from the fabulous spring bloomer, Pasque flower, and typically lasts well into the summer.

This pollinator garden features a flagstone walkway, baby swale and berm to direct rainwater, edible, scented and, of course, pollinator-friendly plants. Swipe right for a glimpse at the lawn we bid farewell.

This May Long Weekend stop off at The Little Building Company to get some frozen yogurt, butter tarts or to buy yourself a little sweet sauna. On your way out, check out the lovely pollinator garden we built last year! And returning this year to maintain!

We’ve been really busy the last couple of months doing what we love most - gardening alongside nature!

Here are some sweet things we’ve found while on the job:
🌱blue speckled song sparrow eggs
🌱apple blossoms
🌱white lipped snail frolicking in juniper
🌱majestic Pasque flower, a native Ontario flower

Three Sisters are back in action! How lucky are we to work outdoors, to celebrate this beautiful Earth and to work amongst some of the most creative and hand-working people!

Although edible, Garlic Mustard is highly invasive! Dig it out - Now is the time.

Need more convincing - read this:

Garlic mustard has two distinct life stages over its first two years. In the first year, it grows only a cluster of leaves shaped like a rosette, while a strong root system develops. Plants that survive the winter produce flowers and hundreds of seeds in their second year. Dense stands produce more than 60,000 seeds per square metre. Stands of garlic mustard can double in size every four years.

Garlic mustard seeds are easily spread by people and animals. They can remain in the soil for up to 30 years and still be able to sprout. The plant can grow in a wide range of sunny and fully shaded habitats, including undisturbed forest, forest edges, riverbanks and roadsides. Garlic mustard does not provide a valuable food source for native wildlife.

Happy Earth Day! What a great honour it is to work with plants - we’ve come to deeply appreciate that when we are surrounded by plants, they become our greatest teachers. And that one of the most profound ways to engage with nature is to take a moment to observe.

🌱Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is one of our favourite spring ephemerals! They are found in semi-shaded, light-wooded areas, especially along the Trans Canada Trail. What a delight it is to see them thriving in our client’s gardens!

Jazzed to be back in gardens today for our first round of spring clean ups!
Yes, it's that time again, although we've started earlier than ever this year due to this spring's incredibly mild weather.

We caught a glimpse of several of the Prairie Smoke (2nd photo) that we planted last year - a favourite native species of ours and a beautiful early spring bloomer.

Our third photo captures our nemesis - creeping bellflower - alive and well in many many gardens already this spring. Please join us in digging this invasive plant up!
Thanks to .tannery for lending a hand!

Bee house workshop complete! After the grade 9 students at Lakefield College School finished assembling the homes with phragmites stems & birch branches, they painted the bee hotels in wildly colourful designs. The next step is to place them close to the pollinator gardens they built last year.

What do bees need? Habitat, food and water…just like what humans need. Let’s do as much as possible to protect wild bees who are important pollinators but are declining at rapid rates.

This past week, we harvested phragmites for a bee house workshop we are leading at Lakefield College School. Phragmites is an invasive plant causing damage to Ontario’s biodiversity, wetlands and ecosystems.

The only positive thing that we’ve been able to find with this invasive grass is that the stems are hollow - a perfect home for native bees to create nesting chambers in the hollow stems.

Once phragmites have been harvested, we cut off the seed heads & place them in a garbage bag. They cannot be composted - or else you’ll be spreading seeds elsewhere.

We’ll share photos of the completed bee houses next week! For more info on phragmites, visit Ontario Invasive Plant Council and Invasive Species Centre to learn more.

Happy International Women’s Day to all the fantastic, strong AF, and beautiful women we’ve had the immense priviledge of working with on our rewilding journey (of ourselves and our landscapes)!!

The botanical beauty of Costa Rica!

If you care about butterflies, birds & pollinators, READ THIS. https://ow.ly/oc3c50Qtask

"For too long the lawn care and pest control industries have normalized meaningless, divisive terms like “overgrown.” We need to take the language back..."

It’s that time of year when Three Sisters delivers Christmas cards, your local Santa Claus! Except without a sleigh, we are using the power of our legs! Today’s winter adventure led us through Jackson Park on a 12km run before heading across town.

Thank you to our community, our clients, and our partners for another fabulous year! A big thank you to Anna's Perennials, Griffin's Greenhouses, Green Up, For Nature Gardening, County Blooms, Gardens Plus, Bee City Canada, and The Pollinator Partnership for your continued support & inspiration!