Turning a Hellstrip Into a Pollinator’s Heaven.

Beyond our home’s property easement is a space owned by the city or county.  Property owners are required to maintain this area. The typical landscape choice is grass. It is easy to mow, and it is green, right? But it is also an opportunity to create a little bit of heaven.

This rectangular space along the front of your home is used for entering your yard, deliveries, and by the mailman to reach into your mailbox. But can it be useful for something else?

Depending on your landscaping style, and if you are not in an HOA-ruled community, what about turning that small strip into a pollinator garden?

Benefits of a Florida pollinator strip include colorful flowers seasonally and no need for mowing or pesticide use. A selection of native and non-native annuals and perennials will provide ample diverse resources for butterflies, birds, and other pollinators. The cons will be a need for rainfall or another water source and more oversight to catch weeds as they germinate (and they will come). Pollinator gardens are not “no maintenance.”  

Designing a pollinator garden always starts off with soil testing, assessing sunlight, and a clean palette. Do not be apathetic and halfhearted about ensuring that your garden is weedless before you start. No need for landscape fabric. It is worthless keeping weeds out and will be a source of frustration in the future.

Owner: Ellie Dorritie, Hellstrip in Buffalo, NY. July 2025.

Once you know what you are working with, then you can select your plant palette and whether you want to start with seeds or plants. It is up to you. Planting seeds is less expensive; just remember that planting seeds will require monitoring and mulch to reduce the weed factor. (they will come.)

If you can afford it, planting annuals and perennials provides an instant effect that will give you satisfaction. I like to go with a combination of two-thirds plants and one-third seeds. Mark your seed areas with signs so that you do not pull sprouts up thinking they are weeds.

Start off with clearing a small area and as you have success, each season you can continue to remove your grass and substitute flowers and shrubs. Planting a heavenly area in your Hellstrip will be divine for pollinators. They will come.

This month’s Landscape Malpractice Tip #38 is a sad one. The photos were taken one year after installation. It is an example of poor design, ignorance of horticulture basics, within both municipal and commercial entities, waste of money and good plant material. Along with a “who cares?” attitude.

A commercial landscape designed by the developer/builder to get a C.O. and permitted by the municipal building department to receive approval and provide a C.O. (certificate of occupancy) Just get it done.

• ·Prime example of “instant landscape.”

• Two large canopy trees, Taxodium spp. one installed in undersized, curbed beds in the middle of the parking lot.

• The other cypress planted too close to the curb and other plants.

• The Muhly grass needs full sun and not spaced correctly — planted too close together. Muhly’s mature size is too big for that small bed and is not maintained.

• The Liriope muscari needs shade and mesic soils. It is not getting enough water to handle the sunlight.

• The Ilex vomitoria ‘Schillings,’ is fine, albeit planted in a yawn-inducing formal row instead of naturally spaced, but okay.

•  One small Redbud. It is fine.

• African iris in the far bed is fine, just overplanted.

Plants in native landscapes should be spaced based on their mature size, alongside other plants that have similar growing requirements.

Landscape architects and designers should know what the future site conditions will be and need to use mature sizes as a guide for the number of plants to spec and how far apart to space. Muhly grasses are 5’ to 6’ wide at maturity. With an 8’ x 10’ bed with an eventual 20’+ tall cypress tree in the middle, there should only be one to two Muhly grass spec’d, not four to six.

Using native plants in unnatural landscapes, (middle of parking lots and cement curbs) is not natural and looks terrible. Eventually companies get tired of looking at the high-maintenance, dead plants and trees in ugly areas. These mandatory “native” landscapes are then cleaned up and filled in with turf, or rubber mulch, gravel, and cigarette butts. Municipal code departments who permit these atrocities should know better. Who cares? The property owners who deserve guidance in planting native habitats should care, and the wildlife who deserve to have their environments protected care. We all should care.

Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s my idea of bare-bottom was the Coppertone advertisements of its sunscreen lotion. A frisky puppy tugging at a baby’s diaper displayed on billboards and magazines, bare-bottom became synonymous with nostalgic Florida beaches. It became an iconic symbol selling millions of dollars in suntan products.

Back to the future in the 21st century, a frequent public display of landscape malpractice is what I call “bare-bottom syndrome.”  It’s when landscape maintenance companies or homeowners, especially ISTJ and ESTJ personalities, engineers, or linear thinkers, use their pruning tools to cut straight down the sides and tops of shrubs. They look perfectly neat and straight… for a while.

After one to two years of cutting the branches and leaves with straight lines prevents the shrub from receiving adequate sunlight to the bottom of the plant. This causes the plant to drop its leaves, resulting in a bare bottom with a V-shaped shrub. Leaves only at the top of the plant and no privacy.

To prevent losing your foliage, cutting shrubs with a slight angle outward at the bottom will enable the plant to keep bottom branches growing leaves.  

Rejuvenate improperly cut shrubs in stages, prune the tops first so that the area is smaller than the rest of the shrub. Allow sides to grow out.  Prune thereafter at a slight 80⸰ angle allowing the bottom to be larger than the top of the shrub.

Pruning your shrub correctly without bare-bottom syndrome, you won’t need to have nostalgia remembering what your plants looked like when you first installed them. Your hedge will stay full and dense with plenty of leaves at the bottom. .  

See the graphic for correct angle.

Teresa's Top Five

My Top Five Landscape Plants That Add Color

1. Crotons – Codiaeum variegatum

2. Coleus – Solenostemon scutellarioides

3. Sea Mahoe – Hibiscus tillaceau

4. Rubber Plant – Ficus variegata ‘Ruby’ and ‘Tineke’

5. Copperleaf – Acalypha wilkesiana

I’m guessing the homeowners are big fans of Dr. Seuss or their landscaper tried really hard to get the shrub tiers straight, but it didn’t end well. This reminds me of my Momma trying to cut my bangs straight and I would hear “oops” and she would go back to the side of my head and try again, and again, only to stop when my bangs were only 2 inches long. It did grow back. If this is your landscaper, stop them. There are correct ways to get an exact cut.

• Take string and a ruler and measure the string for each level’s height of the topiary. Tie the string to the top and hang down to the ground. Take your pruners and clip very lightly where the string (don’t clip the string) is marked. Then take your level and balanced in into the shrub and cut the foliage along the balanced level. Eyeballing isn’t a good idea.

• You can also take a ruler and just measure between the tiered foliage to get exactly the height you would like.

• Clip very lightly. This is not a job that needs a pole saw trimmer, but small hand pruners. And it should take you more than 3 minutes to prune 3 shrubs.

If you like the Dr. Seuss theme, go for it. But think about adding garden art to your beds, or large colorful orb or whimsy, so it looks like it’s a deliberate magical garden theme. If your landscaper is having “oops” moments, it’s time to find a new landscaper.