Saturday, October 17, 2026
A grassroots ecological movement is quietly reshaping Long Island’s landscape — one backyard and community garden at a time.
ReWild Long Island, a Port Washington-based nonprofit focused on biodiversity, resilience, and the health of regional ecosystems, spent the summer removing invasive species from the Tanglewood Preserve in Rockville Centre and other public green spaces, replacing them with native plants that support biodiversity and pollinators.
“The purpose of the planting is to replace and give space to native plants, as opposed to invasive ones, let the native ones get more of a foothold, which helps restore the local ecology,” Sabrina Yazdpour, a volunteer with ReWild, said.
The ReWild garden at Tanglewood Preserve was established in 2022 on a patch of land overrun with aggressive non-native species like English ivy, porcelain berry and multiflora rose. Volunteers cleared the area to make way for native plantings.
“We pulled a bunch of all the invasives that were here, and then we had a blank slate, and we put in all our native plants,” Yazdpour said. “Now this is the third year in, and things have really exploded.”
The garden is maintained by volunteers, including Yazdpour, Jacqueline Lang and Cheryl Bennett, with occasional help from local student groups such as Adelphi University’s ecology club and members of the Sierra Club, a Long Island environmental organization. From early spring through late fall, they meet monthly to pull invasive plants and monitor native growth.
The group follows the acronym “CROWN,” which stands for Compost, Reduce/Reuse/Recycle, Organic, Water Wisely and Native Plants — the core ecological practices that guide their mission.
Volunteers emphasize the ecological and nutritional importance of reintroducing native plants to the preserve, particularly for pollinators and birds. “When they eat porcelain berry (an invasive plant), it’s actually not the same nutritional content that they need for their long migrations,” Yazdpour explained. “Our native berries are actually much more nutritionally beneficial.”
The garden is designed to bloom across the seasons, providing food and shelter for pollinators and wildlife year-round. Volunteers work hard at Tanglewood and other ReWild gardens during the summer to keep them thriving well into the fall, and the rewards can already be seen. “Sometimes when you come out in the garden in the early evening, you’ll see bees start to fall asleep on the flowers,” Yazdpour said.
Birds and insects rely on a diversity of plants blooming throughout spring, summer and fall, and the volunteers help set the scene for the landscape. “There are asters that are going to be blooming, and some of these purple and yellows go together so perfectly in the fall,” Yazdpour said. “It’s almost like perfect design.”
The team leaves seed heads standing through winter to provide migrating birds with late-season food. They’ve also managed some of the local population of invasive spotted lanternflies — an insect damaging native plants and crops — by planting milkweed, which researchers, have said is toxic to them.
“More field and community ecologists are finding that the lanternflies will feed on milkweed plants, which are a native species that support a whole swath of pollinators, but especially monarchs,” Lang said. “And they find that if the lanternflies eat the milkweed, they die of the toxicity because they didn’t evolve here, so they’re not immune to the toxicity of the plant like other insects that are native, and it’s seeming to be a great way to combat them.”
Maintaining the Tanglewood garden becomes easier as native species take hold. “For the most part, once you have it planted, you’re just coming through to make sure that the plants aren’t being outcompeted by invasives,” Lang explained. “It gets lighter and lighter as the natives continue to establish and cluster closer together.”
To those involved, the project is more than a garden — it’s a local response to global challenges such as biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and climate change.
“These plants help with flood control. They prevent erosion because their roots are deeper,” Yazdpour said. “Invasives typically have more shallow roots.”
For more information on how to participate or “ReWild” your own yard, visit RewildLongIsland.org.
