The volunteer group has attracted supporters and beautified Saratoga Springs streets.
When you stroll along a city sidewalk, you might notice a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb. The grass doesn’t serve any meaningful ecological function. It’s usually there simply because it’s easy for the city to install and more attractive than bare dirt. But ecologically, aesthetically, and functionally, this strip — alternately referred to as a boulevard, verge, tree lawn, median strip, or a handful of other names — is a waste of space (unless your dog needs to poop). In the 1990s, horticulturist and gardening writer Lauren Springer Odgen dubbed these neglected, garbage-collecting, trampled-on areas “hellstrips,” and suggested that — instead of existing as patches of useless and often-dead grass — hellstrips could offer opportunities to beautify streetscapes and provide food and habitat for urban wildlife.
Since then, people across America have been transforming hellstrips into beautiful mini gardens that complement their front yards and make sidewalks a visual delight. Some have been guided in their efforts by books like Evelyn J. Hadden’s Hellstrip Gardening. Others are taking action in other ways. For example, in Saratoga Springs, New York, a small environmental nonprofit called Sustainable Saratoga recently launched Hellstrip Heroes, a program that encourages residents to take advantage of hellstrips to grow native plants, pollinator gardens, and small trees. Participants are informally grouped into two categories: Hellstrip Helpers and Hellstrip Heroes.
“Hellstrip Helpers are the people who are planting annuals, or perennials, or trees in that hellstrip area, things that require less watering than turf grass,” explains Kelsey Trudell, Sustainable Saratoga’s executive director. “Hellstrip Heroes take it a step further and fill that space with native, pollinator-friendly plants that turn them into habitats — a sort of paradise for our native pollinator species.”
Hellstrip Heroes has been around only since early August, but it has already attracted avid supporters who have helped beautify several Saratoga Springs streets. For example, just outside The Spring Street Deli, a few blocks east of Saratoga’s downtown core, Sustainable Saratoga volunteer Diane Goodwin designed and planted a pollinator garden brimming with sunflowers, goldenrod, scarlet beebalm, and blue lobelia, among other plants. The showpiece garden inspired several of Goodwin’s neighbors to follow suit, and now several neighboring sidewalks near the market are ablaze with colorful greenery. In future years, Sustainable Saratoga’s Pollinator Palooza — a June event at which the organization raises money by selling pollinator plants like buttonbush, red columbine, swamp milkweed, and spotted bee balm — will be a great resource for many prospective Heroes.
To Chris Burghart, another active Sustainable Saratoga volunteer, hellstrip gardens prove that attractive gardens don’t always have to be carefully manicured plots of identical non-native annuals like zinnias or marigolds purchased from garden centers — which is what Burghart believed when she first started gardening years ago.
“I wanted to do what everybody else did, because, you know, that’s what a gardener does,” Burghart says. “They put in the perfect plant and then try to figure out how to maintain it and not let it grow too big. And then they put dyed mulch around it. But that’s not how it is in nature.”
Burghart, who likes to stroll in local parks and observe the wild abundance of native flora, applies lessons from those environments to her gardening: “I just want it to look natural,” she says. “When you go down this gardening route, you realize that plants grow together in communities. They evolve together and work together. They figure it out instead of someone putting a plant in and making it stay there forever with no other plants around it so it always looks perfect. It’s okay to have [all the different plants] just kind of grow together and work it out.”
These “messy” hellstrip gardens, in which only moderately-tended plants share restricted space and limited nutrients in the soil, are also great for birds and for insects like butterflies, bumblebees, wasps, and flies — all critical pollinators that help ensure that the plants will propagate into the next season. Pesticides and herbicides, obviously, are a big no-no. Ideally, says Burghart, hellstrip gardens can provide urban passers-by with a sort of gateway to nature and its inhabitants that they might otherwise have little exposure to or ignore.
Burghart cautions that it can be challenging to plant in hellstrips. Some towns may not permit it, so if you want to try it, check with your city hall first. Also, hellstrips are exposed to road salt, foot traffic, fumes from passing vehicles, heat radiating off adjacent concrete and asphalt, and pesticides or herbicides used by the municipality to maintain the grass. It’s important to choose plants that can withstand these conditions. Sustainable Saratoga has posted a list of pollinator plants that thrive in Saratoga’s planting zone. And while hellstrip gardens planted with native plant species don’t require the same careful attention as traditional perennial gardens, they need to be weeded once in a while or clipped back so that the greenery doesn’t droop over onto sidewalks or impair visibility for motorists. But once they’re established and left (mostly) alone, hellstrip gardens can transform downtrodden patches of land into little pieces of heaven for insects, birds, and humans.  Â
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