Homegrown National Park

This Eastport property had a biodiversity problem hiding in plain sight. Aggressive invasives — trumpet vines and forsythia — had crowded out the native plantings the family loved, and persistent deer pressure made restoration a question of resilience as much as design.

Over a multi-year engagement, Spadefoot rebuilt the property as a layered native ecosystem with two distinct landscapes working together. In the front, we restored a pocket prairie — a homage to the 40,000 acres of grassland that once covered central Long Island and of which less than 0.1% remains today. Warm-season grasses like little bluestem and switchgrass form the matrix, threaded with cardinal flower, blazing star (liatris), wild bergamot, mountain mint, and goldenrod. Within a season, the planting was alive with bumblebees and butterflies.

In the back, we established a wetland forest anchored by a bioswale — a shallow planted depression that intercepts stormwater and lets it soak back into the groundwater table instead of running off. Young red maple, black gum, and sweet bay magnolia form an emerging canopy over an understory of clethra, spicebush, winterberry, and highbush blueberry, with cinnamon and hay-scented ferns blanketing the forest floor. Boulders and winding restoration paths tie the spaces together, while towering 25-foot pines anchor the older canopy. Trumpet vine gave way to native honeysuckle, and rose mallow, milkweed, and osmanthus were layered throughout — chosen as much for deer resistance as for habitat value.

Today the Eastport property is a certified Monarch Butterfly Waystation, home to praying mantises, a thriving bird population, and the kind of layered, living landscape the family once feared losing. Frank told her the biodiversity would double. She thought he was wrong. He wasn’t.