12 Happy Parents Whose Backyard Gardens Became a Home for Hummingbirds, Bees, Migratory Birds and Rescued Animals

My son is severely allergic to bees. His EpiPen goes everywhere he goes. Last week he was stung at school. The nurse called, “No EpiPen in his bag.” I know I’d packed it myself. I called my mother-in-law on the way to school, because she’d driven him that morning while I was on an early shift. Before I could say anything, she said “I’m sorry, my love, it’s on my back seat. He took it out to show me his new keychain and I never gave it back to him. I just saw it a minute ago and I was about to call you.”

The nurse didn’t wait for any of us. She used the school’s backup pen within two minutes, called 911, and the ambulance took him to Children’s. She phoned me from the hallway to say so, and to tell me his own pen wasn’t in his bag.

I got to the ER first. My mother-in-law came running in ten minutes later with the case in both hands like it was hot. My son was sitting on a bed in a paper gown, eating a graham cracker. “I told Mrs. Dale right when it happened, Grandma,” he said. “Just like you taught me.” She sat down on the floor.

They kept him four hours in case the reaction came back but it didn’t, luckily. The pharmacy filled a second pen the next day. One lives on his bag now and one on her key ring, and every morning at drop-off he holds his case up to her car window like a boarding pass.

My mom planted wildflowers the spring after dad went, because she needed something living to look after. First spring, not much. Second spring, a few bees. By the third, the whole backyard hummed, and my daughter started calling it Grandma’s bee garden. Last September a swarm landed in the old oak and moved into a hollow high up in the trunk. We called a beekeeper to come get them. He climbed up, looked, came back down, and said he wouldn’t touch it. Healthy colony, good cavity, wildflowers within easy flight, and he said bees will usually leave if there’s nothing around for them. Mom came out in her pajamas, stood in the middle of the garden, and said, “Good. They can stay as long as they need.”

My neighbor reported my garden to the HOA for being “overgrown.” I paid the fine and kept planting. This August, a woman in a state wildlife agency jacket knocked on my door, and I braced for round two. She was a biologist. Their acoustic recorders kept picking up migratory warblers on our street every fall, and when they walked the block looking for why, mine was the only yard with native shrubs, seed heads left standing, and a bird bath. She asked if they could set up a small monitoring station by my back fence for the migration season. I said yes before she finished the sentence. The neighbor who reported me watched the agency truck sit in my driveway from her porch for almost an hour.

I have a neighbor who spent 40 years wanting a garden. His wife said it would be too messy, and with her bad hands she couldn’t have kept one up anyway. She passed last spring. By summer he’d put in wildflowers, bird feeders, and a small pond. I watched from my kitchen window every morning, and one day I asked how he’d learned all of it. “She left me her gardening books,” he said. Twenty years of them, and in the margins she’d penciled plans: a pond in the back corner, a bench by the fence. He pointed at the bench he’d built last month. “I think she wanted this too. She just didn’t think she could do it.”

Long story short my mom started feeding the stray cats behind her garden at 68. Within a year there were seven regulars, so she called a local rescue group that does trap-neuter-return and got all seven fixed. She adopted two of them herself. Then a family of opossums showed up at the back fence, and when she put out a shallow dish of water, migratory birds started stopping by too. Last spring her doctor said her blood pressure numbers were the best they’d been in 15 years and asked what changed. She said, “I got busy.”

I dug a small pond two summers ago and stocked it with a few goldfish. My wife said it would just breed mosquitoes. The goldfish ate the larvae, and last spring a pair of ducks moved in. Then a heron started stopping by every morning at six, mostly for the goldfish. My neighbor’s kid began coming over before school to watch it, then his mom came along, then the guy from across the street. Last Tuesday I counted seven adults standing around my pond at 7am in total silence. Nobody had planned it. My wife brought out coffee for everyone and said, “I take back the mosquitoes.” That was so funny you can’t imagine.

My dad built a birdhouse every winter for years and hung them all around the same corner of the yard. Mom called it a waste of lumber, and none of them ever got a tenant. Last spring I talked him into moving the oldest one to a post at the edge of her wildflower bed, and within a week a pair of bluebirds moved in. He called me from the backyard, whispering like we were in a library. “Your mother is standing at the kitchen window. Don’t tell her I told you.” Bluebirds were her mother’s favorite bird. She hasn’t called the birdhouses a waste since and she bought a hummingbird feeder last week. He pretends not to notice which is an act of kindness, I think.

My daughter found a hummingbird on the patio last April after it flew into our window. It was stunned and barely moving. She put it in a shoebox with air holes, set it somewhere dark and quiet, and called a wildlife rehabber, who told her to give it an hour. 35 minutes later we heard buzzing inside the lid. She opened the box in the backyard and it flew off. The next morning there was a hummingbird at the feeder outside her bedroom window at exactly 7am, and again every morning after. She’s nine and sets an alarm for 6:55. I said it might not be the same one. She said, “It’s the same one, Mom. Every day. That’s not maybe.” It stayed until September, and she’s already asking when it comes back.