Del Benson is Bombus Native Gardens.

I spent my childhood in a small town in Southern Illinois playing in both my mother’s beautiful (but native plant-free) garden and in the woods and fields beyond my home. Once my family got the internet in 1995, I spent increasingly more time indoors, but after spending my teen years and most of my 20’s being a musician, I started taking walks in a prairie reconstruction called Meadowbrook Park in Urbana, IL.

As soon as I started going off-path into the Big Bluestem and Blazing Star I started to see insects and animals I hadn’t seen since I was a child. I found deer beds to lie in and watched the Red-winged Blackbirds scold me from Wild White Indigo branches while the cicadas hummed. I didn’t know it then but because of these walks, I would eventually be lead from vegetable gardening to permaculture to horticulture to landscaping to native plants to getting involved with climate activism.

I got all that from just having natural areas accessible to me! Who would I be if my Mom hadn’t been a gardener? What would I be doing if the people who owned the wooded lots and fields next to my childhood house had mowed it all down to build houses? Would I be here writing this if Meadowbrook Park had not been willed into existence and cared for by so many volunteers? I think I wouldn’t. So much ecological activism is motivated by grief and you can’t grieve the absence of someone you’ve never met.

Those early years spent putting roots down outside created a lifelong relationship with the land and its inhabitants and I hope I can facilitate a relationship like that for you so you can see a native plant or insect and think “hey, I know her.”

In my free time I sew clothes, study Talmud, and try to live up to my cat Bean’s expectations.