Left Hand Laurel Catherine McCall

This month's Left Hand Laurel goes to Catherine McCall for her work on the lovely pollinator gardens around town, and just in time for the harvest season. McCall came to the U.S. from the U.K. for post-doctoral work as a research scientist in 1985, and moved to Niwot in 2011.

She started her work on the public gardens when she found her own gardening space to be confining. "My garden here is not big enough, so I started to...put in flower beds or vegetable beds in my neighbors gardens," McCall said. She started expanding to her neighbors' gardens, in particular removing unsightly burdock on the corner of Franklin and 3rd Avenue, and replacing it with all sorts of flowers that the pollinators of Niwot love.

After improving much of 3rd Avenue, McCall moved on to create a lovely garden in front of The Wandering Jellyfish Bookshop and a gravel garden on Niwot Road. "In the landscaping world, a 'hell strip' refers to a planting area bordered by sidewalk and asphalt, which requires particularly tough plants to survive," said Victoria Keen, a friend of McCall's and her nominator for the Left Hand Laurel.

McCall said the gardens "act as sort of examples of what could be done. Hopefully we'll have a chain of gardens...to bring a sort of coherent visual garden theme throughout the town. And also to use a lot of plants that would be good for pollinators."

When asked about her passion for gardening, McCall replied, "It's a great culmination of being outdoors and physical work – the kind of gardening I do -- which involves digging up rocks and such. So you're outdoors, you're in the fresh air, you get the pleasure of putting in and taking care of plants and seeing them flourish. And then there's a design element to it. I mean, certainly the types of gardens I put in, there's a sort of challenge because you're working with plants that sometimes like slightly different conditions, and they grow at different rates.

"In the gardens I put in, I try to have something interesting in the garden for at least nine months of the year, starting with the very early spring bulbs in February and March, and going right through to November with the late flowering grasses and mostly prairie plants."

McCall does an enormous amount of work on her own, from providing plants and gardening supplies, to maintaining the gardens. She also gets a lot of help from her neighbors. "I've had a lot of help from all the muscle on 3rd Avenue," she said. McCall recalls one particular stone that had been embedded in the ground which was lovingly dubbed "The Niwot Flatiron," which ended up requiring five people to dig it up and move it upright.

"The pitfalls are, you look at a patch of ground and it looks straightforward, but quite often you get these sort of wrinkles during the creation of the garden that are a lot more work than you thought," said McCall of the challenges of creating a garden.

During the Honey Bee Harvest Festival – which celebrates the pollinators that populate Niwot – McCall was featured as a speaker in the Tom Theobald Speaker Series, giving a presentation on ethical alternatives to controlling mosquito populations.

According to McCall, most counties choose to control mosquito populations by spraying insecticides in neighborhoods, but it affects other bugs and even birds that eat the poisoned insects. One alternative which is much less harmful are mosquito buckets, which take advantage of mosquitoes' instinct to find water to lay their eggs. The bucket contains a solution of water, organic matter, and a larvicide which targets the mosquito larvae, avoiding all other bugs and birds.

When McCall was invited to speak, she saw a great opportunity to educate the public. "I thought it was just a good opportunity to give people an idea of what they can do that might work. And at the same time, not piss off the people who are, for very good reasons, trying to control the mosquito population." She says that she has a lot of sympathy for representatives of Boulder County, who have to mediate between environmentalists and people concerned about the viruses mosquitoes can carry, such as West Nile virus.

"My feeling is that if we can just have areas in small towns like Niwot where people pretty much get on board with a more environmentally benign way of controlling mosquitoes, then we provide these little havens for pollinators and insects generally, in a town which isn't being soaked in insecticide," she explained. "And things that sometimes start small will expand if they work and if they're not too onerous."

McCall clearly has a lot of love for the town of Niwot that she gives back to by creating beautiful gardens everyone can enjoy. "It's the feeling that it is truly a community here and that is beyond price. You can't buy that. You know, you can buy an amazingly fancy house...but it doesn't guarantee you have the neighborhood and the community that is interesting and supportive and Niwot has that. That's amazing, it's very rare, you know."

As for her long term goals, McCall has big hopes for the pollinator gardens. "(With) all the live music, the art, I'm just hoping that gradually having beautiful small gardens around town will end up being another feature. It might end up being something that people come to Niwot for, to wander around and look at all the beautiful flowers."