There are many benefits to going native with your landscaping: improving climate resilience, biodiversity and water conservation, and creating a slice of Colorado’s natural beauty in your backyard.

If you are convinced to start Coloradoscaping, here’s a brief road map for beginning your journey.

Consider your starting point

If you’re like most Front Range gardeners, you’re starting with something you don’t love, maybe a weed patch or an annual flower garden that you’re tired of maintaining or a swath of Kentucky bluegrass you’d like to replace. If you want to go DIY, start with a manageable piece. Choose a corner or strip to start with and begin by removing what is there so you have a clean slate to work with.

There are several methods for removing existing weeds or turfgrass; each has its pros and cons.

• “Solarize” the plants to be removed by covering them with clear plastic during several months of the growing season, essentially creating a mini-greenhouse that heats and kills the existing plants.

• Smother the grass or weeds with cardboard or newspaper topped by a layer of mulch. Both methods leave the existing dead turf in place, which can help keep weeds at bay in the future.

• Use herbicides such as glyphosate (aka Round-up) to kill the existing plants. We don’t recommend this for several reasons but some gardeners choose to go this route.

• Use a sod cutter to physically remove the existing grass, which you’ll then have to haul offsite to dispose of.

The Wild Ones online toolkit has a detailed description of these methods and their pros and cons, at frontrange.wildones.org.

Choose a design

Once you’ve got your clean slate, consider what you want from your design: Native prairie? A colorful pollinator garden? A backdrop of native shrubs? Although new gardeners often find coming up with a design intimidating, there are existing templates to work from. One great source is the Low Water Native Plants for Colorado Gardens series, including one for the Front Range and Foothills.

Developed by several Colorado native plant organizations, there are several template designs. You can also order a native “Garden in a Box” online from organizations like Resource Central, where you receive the plants and a design delivered to your door. (Be sure to select one of its native garden options.) And the Wild Ones website has a fabulous design for a residential property developed by Kenton Seth, a longtime native plant landscape designer in Colorado.

If you’ve got beginner’s panic and want to seek help from a professional, there are landscape designers who focus on designing with (and optionally installing) native plants to suit your needs. We recommend asking neighbors in your community who have installed Coloradoscapes for recommendations. While Wild Ones does not endorse particular landscapers, we do have several Wild Ones members who focus on designing native plant landscapes: Danna Liebert of Grounded Growth Landscape Design, Eryn Joy Murphy of Restorative Landscape Design, Caleb Gruber of All Being Ecosapes and Aaron Michael of Earth Love Gardens, to name just a few.

Wild Ones also can offer advice on how to select the right landscaper that highlights some additional designers, also on the website.

Purchasing plants

Finding native plants can be a challenge as many retail nurseries in Colorado stock limited native plants at best. Luckily, two regional native plant pioneers are there to help: Harlequin’s Gardens in Boulder and the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland. Harlequin’s has an onsite nursery with quite a few native species, and HPEC is a nonprofit online native plant nursery with in-person pick-up. New to the cause is the Finding Nectar nursery in Arvada. All have good selections of healthy native plants. For a nursery closer to home, call ahead and ask what native plants they stock before making the trip, and ask if their plants are pesticide-free.

Planting your Coloradoscape

Native plants are best planted in early spring — think April — or fall when temperatures are cooler. Have a plan for how you will protect your new landscape with mulch to help maintain moisture and desirable soil temperature. Wild Ones offers a short guide to planting, mulching and maintaining your new plants including a planting video.

Keep in mind that your new Coloradoscape may take a few seasons to look its best. The first couple of seasons the plants are building the robust root systems that allow them to sequester carbon for climate resilience and to thrive in our arid conditions. Building nature in your backyard takes time but, with patience, will bring you an abundance of garden beauty, pollinators and birds.

Ayn Schmit is a freelance writer and member of the Wild Ones Front Range Chapter, a nonprofit organization.