Scroll down for addresses and a map

Get Ready to Be Inspired!

Winnetka Yards Go Back to Nature

Go Green Winnetka is hosting its fourth Yards That Work Sustainable Yard Tour on Sunday, July 14 from 10 am – 2 pm. This is not just another pretty yard tour! The tour will feature six yards and is designed to spark the imagination and show the possibilities of sustainable living in your own backyard.

What to Expect:

• Beautiful Native Plants: See how local flora supports birds and pollinators.
• Fruit & Veggie Gardens: Discover the true meaning of farm-to-table with homegrown produce.
• Rain Barrels & Bioswales: Learn clever ways to manage stormwater.
• Home Compost Systems: Turn kitchen scraps into garden gold!

Tour hosts will share their experiences and wisdom, showing off what works for them and hopefully inspiring others with ideas to make their own yards a sustainable paradise. From new projects just starting out to a three-acre Backyard Flower Lab, there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

Tour Details:

• Six Yards: Find out how different homeowners approach sustainable gardening.
• Free & Self-Guided: Explore at your own pace.
• Rain or Shine: We're on, no matter the weather!
• 
  

Pre-registration requested.  Addresses and a map are available below.

Let’s make our world more sustainable, one yard at a time! 

Elke Anderle and Philip McFarland

355 Birch Street

Our friend, Roy Diblik, once said “nature does just fine without us.”.  And he’s right. Nature doesn’t need pesticides, annual treatments, or fancy lawn services.  It just needs sunlight and rain…and maybe a sprinkler when times get tough.

But that’s not how most landscape companies make money, so we’re tricked into believing that the best gardens need a lot of maintenance and chemicals.  But really, gardens don’t need us at all. We need them. 

For our family, this garden is a daily reminder to roll up our sleeves, get outside and dig in the dirt.  It’s an invitation to let our mind wander and play.  Do we know what we’re doing? No. But every week we sprinkle seeds, bury bulbs, cut flowers for arrangements, and move dying plants around until they find a place they like.  Time spent in our garden is the best kind of medicine. It may not look like the typical definition of beauty, but it’s a place that makes us feel alive.

Roy Diblik, who grows plants at Northwind Perennial Farm, helped us plant our garden 10 years ago. He wouldn’t agree to the project unless we agreed to learn about native perennials and plant our garden alongside him. This mandate was the best gift he could have given us. Ten years later, some plants are thriving.  Some plants are dying. And there are many bald spots yet to be planted. But we’ve learned that experimenting, “painting with plants” and trying to do it ourselves has been nothing but fun.   

The Dunn Family

1213 Ash Street

The Dunn family garden, four years in progress, began as an attempt to attract more butterflies to the landscape—but over time has come to be an environmentalist movement. The garden stands to show the life that plants hold, and the necessity of reversing habitat loss in developed areas to heal natural and human communities alike.

Through trial and error, the garden has grown into a vibrant, living testament to sentiments noted first in the naturalist Nancy Lawson’s novel “The Humane Gardener: Nurturing A Backyard Habitat For Wildlife,” a role model for the family as a manifestation of compassion, cohabitation, and helping life flourish in spaces it is often unwelcome.

Thriving ecosystems belong in the spots closest to home, because humans are intrinsically a part of them—designed for functionality in providing resources to the wild creatures, garden is a gateway to incredibly diverse groups of insects and birds whilst having adequate space for human activity and the family dog.

The garden emphasizes the importance of incrementally healing and restoring life back to a landscape that is, through the lens of wildlife conservation, broken—and introducing dense, biodiverse plantings of native plants, preferably uncultivated, in increments wherever possible.

Laura and Ted Wynnychenko

1085 Oak Street

Laura and Ted built their home in 2011. At that time, they wanted to be environmentally friendly, at least as much as possible.  The home itself incorporates solar panels, a geothermal heating/cooling system, and improved insulation.

Over the years, areas of turf have been replaced with other plantings.  Turf in a shady side yard was replaced with shade-tolerant natives.  As an oak tree matured in the back yard, the distressed turf underneath was replaced with an oak sedge.

The yard features two engineered rain gardens and a 3,000-gallon rainwater harvesting system, which is used for the yard's irrigation.  Also, a few years ago, permission was granted by the Village to place additional native plantings in a small "rain garden" (just a bit of a depression) in the parkway in front of the house.

Ted and Laura describe their approach to the yard as benign neglect, although this does not mean that there is no upkeep or weeding!  They remove natives where they’re not wanted, and let the others live and grow as they happen to. 

April and Russell Potterfield

1190 Westmoor Road

We have slowly transformed our property at 1190 Westmoor into a yard that works for us.  For years, Russell worked to transform a neglected three-acre property, with a clay tennis court and other run-down features, into a property with an orchard of over a hundred fruit trees, a meadow planted with many natives, and a more formal cutting and vegetable garden.

In 2022, we decided to increase the cut flowers we grow and decrease the vegetables.  We found ourselves missing many of the harvests because of our travel schedule so changed out many of the veggies for things like dahlias, zinnias, celosia, etc. In August of 2022, we had so many cut flowers blooming that we started sharing flowers and produce with food pantries. We gave away

over 1600 pounds of produce from our yard, as well as more than 700 flower bouquets between August 29, 2022, and the frost of the same year. 

This was the beginning of The Backyard Flower Lab which experiments in sharing the fruits and flowers of the garden.  This year the nonprofit organization Backyard Flower Friends was formed. We like to think of ourselves as “Your local B.F.F.” Backyard Flower Friends has delivered flowers to community centers, head start programs, homeless shelters, laundromats, domestic violence shelters, food pantries, senior centers, and other community organizations.

Judy Luken-Johnson

1292 Forest Glen South

I love to garden and be outside. My garden is the place where my inner nine year old girl can finally do whatever she wants. NO Rules! It is my playground, my happy place.

Monarda, hyssop, feverfew and columbines seed themselves and grow in different places each year. Bees & hummingbirds visit frequently. I enjoy propagating, evidenced by TOO MANY dahlias, hosta, ferns, iris, day lilies, ajuga, and lily of the valley. I mix vegetables in with flowers—cabbage, herbs, tomatoes, parsley. I use a deer, rabbit, and squirrel deterrent that doesn't harm animals, just smells awful. They know where I live!! And I rarely fertilize my lawn and do not use herbicides on it. 

I have a compost bin which mixes kitchen scraps & leaves to make garden gold.

Rule #1:  Have fun!!  Rule #2:  "Be curious...buy that plant!"  (Yea, I know I said no rules....)

Teri and Colin Cross

828 Bell Lane

Our yard is a hybrid of traditional landscaping and native plants. Many natives have been planted over the past several years whenever there is a need or desire for a new plant or tree. Some areas of lawn have been replaced by a vegetable garden, a shady native plant area in the front yard, a flower garden in the back, and another portion of former lawn that’s “under construction.” We’ve made mistakes, learned a lot, and have come to accept that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” 

We’ve taken advantage of Winnetka’s free parkway planting program and have had two native oak trees planted. It’s the best deal ever—they assess the area, plant the tree, and then care for it with weekly watering during growing season for the first year. 

We’ve learned a lot about removing buckthorn, and its uncanny ability to pop back up again—and what to replace it with once it's gone. (But is it ever really gone?)

Fall leaves are removed from the lawn and pavement and placed in a large open bin on the side of the house—where friends who have home composting systems can come and take what they need to mix with their food scraps. The leaves in the planting beds are left where they fell. Over the winter, they become mulch for new shoots that grow up through them the following spring. Since we’ve been doing this, our planting beds have been thriving just fine without fertilizers.

It took a while for our weekly landscape people to understand what we are trying to do. When telling one of them that we wanted them to leave the clover in the lawn he said, “In the 19 years that I’ve been doing this, no one has ever wanted me to leave the clover.” We’re happy to buck the trend and hope to inspire others to do the same.