Gardens for Wings is a community wildlife garden, meant to provide habitat for pollinators like butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees. It began in 2009 with HOPE homeschool students, interested in learning and teaching about pollinators and their habitats, who were granted this garden space by the City of McBain. In 2011 it received recognition as an official Wildlife Habitat, certified by the National Wildlife Federation. If you look closely you may find monarch caterpillars munching away on their milkweed host plants, hummingbirds hovering while sipping nectar, or perhaps one of Michigan's 400 native bee species pollinating some beebalm or echinacea. We hope you'll join us for our free events, held throughout the summer and fall. They include storytimes, art classes, seed collecting and citizen science projects like tagging and releasing migrating monarch butterflies through the Monarch Watch program.
This garden thrives on sunshine and volunteers LIKE YOU! We hope you'll consider "adopting" the garden for one week this summer. A 30-minute visit will give you plenty of time to pull any grass/dandelions and look for signs of wildlife using the area. Please contact cache owner to get on the volunteer schedule or if your community group would like to do a service project helping to care for our community garden! Visit www.pollinator.org to learn more about pollinators, their decline, and how you can help by adding native plants to support them. Resources for assistance include your local Conservation District, MSUE and NRCS offices. Remember to be kind to pollinators... they are responsible for 1 out of every 3 bites of food you eat!