Celia Llopis-Jepsen

She helps people turn their yards into wildlife spaces by adding native plant gardens.

Yeah, I know, right?

Like, as far as I know, the birds don't actually come and land on Paula's hand when she calls them.

But nevertheless, like, she's got a lot of birds and bees and frogs and things, which also her grandchildren love.

But that neighbor, you know, who said that to her, like, started planting native plants, too, and so have several other of her neighbors.

I have talked to people who are feeling like, well, I want to do a native plant flower bed, but I don't really want spiders to show up.

Or I want to make sure snakes won't be around.

And it doesn't really work that way.

So for some people...

Getting into wildlife-friendly gardening may mean also kind of working on some of our aversions to these things.

These are ultimately beneficial animals.

But I do want to get into ticks specifically, which no one likes ticks.

Ticks are legitimately a very big concern because they can make us really sick.

So the question is, like, if you ditch some lawn in favor of a flower bed, does that mean you're going to have more ticks around?

And scientists are looking into that.

So far, the research that I've seen, it suggests that flower gardens don't really increase ticks.

The real factor here is if you're living basically where ticks want to live.

Like,

If you're living right at the edge of the woods, woods have a lot of ticks.

They're going to crawl into your yard, whether it's lawn or flower beds.