Last weekend, hidden gardens across the North Fork opened their gates for a quiet pilgrimage. Dozens stepped into sanctuaries alive with wildflowers, hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies — landscapes that thrive without irrigation or chemicals.

Each stop on the tour, sponsored by Rewild North Fork and the Southold-Peconic Civic Associaton, showcased the heart of the native plant movement beginning to reshape the East End. Instead of manicured lawns and imported ornamentals, more homeowners, landscapers and conservationists are embracing gardens filled with wildflowers, grasses and shrubs that evolved in local ecosystems.

Gardeners said the benefits go well beyond beauty. Native gardens conserve water and crucially help restore shrinking habitats for pollinators like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds — creatures whose survival is essential yet increasingly precarious.

The trend is part of a broader movement nationwide, as climate change, drought and ecological loss force communities to rethink traditional landscaping practices. On the East End, organizations like Rewild North Fork and local native-plant nurseries have seen growing demand, with workshops and garden tours drawing increasingly engaged audiences who want to move toward landscapes that reflect the natural beauty of the region while strengthening resilience against extreme weather.

Catmint and purple love grass

Karine Laval and Monika Condrea’s sprawling Cutchogue yard features islands of native wildflowers and plants, humming with industry. Purple love grass, little bluestem, cardinal flowers and catmint sway gently. Bees move lazily from bloom to bloom, their tiny bodies dusted with gold — ignoring the humans.

Master gardener Nancy DePas Reinertsen (pictured above, right, with artist and gardener Karine Laval) took a visitor on a tour of the yard. Overhead, a hummingbird flashed scarlet and green, poised to dive into the red throat of a lobelia.

“Hummingbirds have evolved with lobelias,” Reinertsen said, gesturing toward the slender stalk of the cardinal flower. “They can see red really well. So a thousand feet up, they spot this red flower, this particular tubular flower, and their beaks are these long, narrow beaks which fit perfectly well inside the little tubular flowers. For thousands of years, these two have evolved together. Isn’t that cool?”

Her voice was filled with awe and delight at the endless web of intimate, ongoing negotiations between plant and animal.

Reinertsen’s path back to horticulture was a return to her first calling. After retiring from many years teaching English in Queens, she became a master gardener through the Cornell Cooperative Extension program in Riverhead.

Along with her husband Ralph Reinertsen, she helped carve out one of the North Fork’s first community native plant gardens at Custer Preserve. What began as a modest 375-square-foot plot quickly expanded, as poison ivy was cleared and the town lent a hand. “It became ten times bigger,” she recalled.

That garden would become part of a broader effort — first through the Southold-Peconic Civic Association, the Group for the East End and the Suffolk Alliance for Pollinators, and eventually with Rewild North Fork itself. “We started a chapter last January, and we [have] 11 gardens already on the North Fork.”

The group is working on their 12^th garden with the botany club at Mattituck High School.

“They decided they were taking over an area that was just grass that had been mowed forever and fertilized and all that,” Reinertsen said. The students covered the area over with sheet mulching — a no-dig method that aims to mimic the natural, soil-building process in forests by layering organic materials like cardboard, newspaper and compost on top of existing grass.

Again and again, Reinertsen returned to the intricate choreography of plants and pollinators, telling the story of Monarch butterflies, whose caterpillars feed only on milkweed — a plant poisonous to most other creatures. Deception, too, has its place in nature, she said, explaining how Viceroy butterflies have evolved to look like more like orange-and-black Monarchs to better protect themselves against predators. Nearby, a burst of canary yellow goldenrod blazed in the afternoon sun.

Rewild North Fork has become not just a movement of native gardens, but of gardeners. Reinertsen spoke fondly of neighbors and fellow master gardeners whose yards have become sanctuaries.

“We’re a small community, but we’re growing,” she said. “We’re a small group of really interested, passionate people — passionate gardeners. And gardeners love other gardeners.”

Purpletop vervain

On a back lane near a creek in Cutchogue, Gabi Spielmann walked a small group of visitors through a bounty of gardens and plantings that felt both handmade and self-willed — beds and borders stitched to patches left purposely uncut, the whole place pulsing with natural life.

Salvia plant blooms were bursting with indigo spires. Spielmann, herself a master gardener, pinched a stem and slid it between her fingers. “This is from the mint family. All the plants from the mint family have a square stem,” she noted, smiling at the hubris of human craft measured against the architecture of a flower.

“Look at the structure of that flower. It’s amazing. We’re nothing. I mean — could we even create that? And the color? It’s just amazing to me.” She moved to a tall verbena, its lilac buttons sprawled across the garden.

At dusk, her tobacco plant wakes and perfumes the path. “The native moths love to pollinate this plant because it opens at night and the fragrance is more present during the evening.”

Every few steps, she pointed out another union of beauty and usefulness. A holly (“if I want to decorate with this for Christmas, I have to get the berries before the birds”); a native clethra whose flower “just fills my house with the fragrance. The bees love it!”; a fig — “Because I’m Italian, I have to have figs.”

In the fruiting quarter, kiwis were finally beginning to oblige her after years of waiting; black currants and gooseberries were cloaked in a net to protect them from birds.

Spielmann and her husband Karl’s ethics are stitched visibly into the place.

“We don’t throw anything out … we’re not into the plastic vinyl fencing … It just doesn’t blend in with the garden. Instead of having all that plastic,” she said, and patted a sturdy length of repurposed wood fencing that looked like it grew right out of the ground.

Toward the back of the property was a garden full of wildflowers.

“This is my first garden that I decided to let it go wild,” she said of a meadow-in-progress where wild chicory open when it’s cloudy and the asters are staging a late-season bloom. Nearby, she crushed a sprig between finger and thumb: “This is … mountain mint,” she told a visitor. “Smell that.”

At the end of the tour, Gabi sent the North Fork Sun home with a stalk of purple vervain, a verbena with shimmering purple flowers, that she’d wrapped in comfrey leaves.

“Plant it in your garden with the comfrey leaves,” she said. “They’re great fertilizer.”

‘Buzzing all summer’

In Greenport, a few blocks from Stirling Basin, Beth Haskell and Hilary North turned a clipped lawn into a wildflower meadow.

“We’re in the third year of the project,” Haskell said.

The modest, knee-high meadow was freckled with coreopsis and seedheads rattling softly. Royal blue cornflowers lingered at the edges. Nectar-rich, bell-shaped foxgloves rose to meet pollinators.

The couple’s process is simple.

“We don’t deadhead, we don’t weed, we don’t water,” Haskell said. “We just leave it and then and basically cut it down again in early spring and then we see what happens.”

The first year, North and Haskell covered the area of lawn beside their home with cardboard and plastic bags, killing it and ultimately removing the dead sod. They aerated the meadow well, and with fistfuls of deer-resistant seed mixes from American Meadow, they “broadcast the seed,”  Haskell said.

“You mix it with sand, and then you just … indiscriminately throw it out into the space. We had marked off certain areas as paths … so that we could get into [it] … and so then the next spring, lo and behold … we got blue pins, we got poppies, we got zinnias, some coreopsis … It didn’t take much to get all sorts of good pollinator plants. It was buzzing all summer.”

Year two brought foxgloves.

Iridescent blue dragonflies

When Tyler Armstrong bought his one-acre property in East Marion, it was little more than a mowed expanse — grass clipped “down to a nub everywhere.” The previous owner loved his mower, but left behind the bones of possibility: old apple trees from a long-ago orchard, a shed, a garden — the skeleton of what would become a very different kind of property.

“When we bought the property, it was all lawn. All the way to the edge … Every inch of it,” Armstrong recalled. “So we’re like, let’s make a nice kind of rolling meadow along the edges. Have less lawn mower, support native insects and birds.”

Rather than a tightly managed landscape, Armstrong let nature reclaim corners and edges. Sassafras seedlings appeared on their own, and he left them to grow into groves. Native grasses like little bluestem and purpletop seeded themselves among the birdhouses and bee balm.

With a low fence and the family dog as patrol, deer stay mostly at bay, and the meadow has become a stage for dragonflies, garter snakes, turtles and songbirds.

“You see lots of beautiful, iridescent little blue dragonflies and great birds,” he said. “So I feel like it’s working out — supporting wildlife.”

The transformation was helped along by Armstrong’s father-in-law, a longtime nursery owner who brought his tractor to scrape and seed the edges in the early years. Since then, Tyler has kept the process simple: compost reseeding, no chemicals, no watering. The result is a patchwork of native plants and species that together form what he called “an easy meadow.”

Armstrong’s favorite area of the backyard is the outdoor shower, where grapevines have taken hold, and after three years are producing “a lot of grapes.

“So this year, I got to realize my dream of taking an outdoor shower while picking grapes,” he said.

It is the kind of small luxury that felt perfectly North Fork: a homegrown Eden where practicality mingles with pleasure: where a rolling meadow shelters butterflies and box turtles and where clusters of fresh grapes, warm from the sun, are savored one by one under falling water.