Fall 2025
By Stu VanAirsdale
Photos by Alisha Jucevic
Some of the key figures in developing the Elephant Hill Test Plot, photographed in El Sereno on Aug. 23, 2025 (clockwise from bottom right): Elva Yañez, Hugo Garcia, Jen Toy, Cris Sarabia, Joey Farewell, Carlos Anguiano, and Will Hourigan
Elephant Hill comes out of seemingly nowhere. Its undeveloped, 110-acre expanse lunges upward from the surrounding roads in the northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno. Legend has it that local police gave the space its moniker decades ago, observing from helicopters overhead the area’s resemblance to its namesake animal. Few if any residents surrounding Elephant Hill admit to seeing the likeness. You can view downtown L.A. from its uppermost elevations, low-lying perches in a nexus joining the surrounding Santa Monica and Verdugo mountains.
On a parcel map, Elephant Hill looks a lot more like a puzzle than a pachyderm, divided and subdivided and plotted over the years by city planners and building speculators who more recently envisioned gated communities and other exclusive housing developments imprinted on the wild landscape. Longtime residents of El Sereno had other ideas, fueled not by NIMBY-ism but rather by interests in basic social justice: Elva Yañez, a born-and-bred Angeleno who had relocated from the Bay Area back home to El Sereno in 2001, couldn’t really see the upside of an upscale new housing project wedged into some of the city’s last remaining natural open space. Neither could Hugo Garcia, 70, a nearly lifelong El Sereno resident and community activist. Their grassroots organization efforts to protect the space, earnestly but fittingly named Save Elephant Hill, spanned years and enlisted support from neighbors, organizational allies, and local bureaucrats alike. They culminated in a legal settlement between the developer and the city that included the purchase of 20 acres from the planned development site for $9 million in 2009.
It was a victory by any standard, but it didn’t solve the core problem of Elephant Hill as a favorite mixed-use destination for a panoply of misuses. Urban hikers found themselves sharing the space with off-road vehicles emitting fumes and noise and rampaging over the natural terrain. Brazen dumpers frequented Elephant Hill under cover of night or even in broad daylight, illegally leaving behind mounds of trash and debris. What remained of the native vegetation struggled against swaths of invasive plants like mustard, castor bean, and the omnipresent trees of heaven waving gently but indomitably in the breeze.
Native plants at the Elephant Hill Test Plot in El Sereno (L-R): Sacred daturs (Datura wrightii), California fuchsia (Epilobium canum), and black sage (Salvia mellifera).
Some of El Sereno’s newer, younger residents had known about the Save Elephant Hill battles of the previous generation and wondered if they might help advance a new phase of conservation there. Joey Farewell had moved to El Sereno from Glendale with his wife and infant son just before Christmas 2021 and got to know Yanez, Garcia, and other locals with mutual interests in restoring—or at least preserving—what was now known as Elephant Hill Open Space. “I explored the entire Elephant Hill area,” says Farewell, 37, an estates and trust lawyer who also serves as conservation co-chair of the CNPS L.A./Santa Monica Mountains Chapter. “In doing so, I met a lot of neighbors—English- or Spanish-speaking, younger or older people—who cared about the place. Maybe they hiked there, maybe they had planted some plants there and tended them. Maybe they wanted to know more about Elephant Hill and what it was. When you have a baby with you, everyone talks to you, and you talk with everybody. I speak Spanish, too, which helps. I got to know my neighbors really well.”
Four years—and many multilayered relationships—later, Elephant Hill Open Space has grown into one of California’s most stunning success stories for urban biodiversity and restoration. At its heart is a 6,000-square-foot (and growing) native plant “test plot” established on Elephant Hill’s eastern slope, not far from Farewell’s own backyard. A new trail, funded by the Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, flanks the garden with terraced steps leading to the top of the hill. The site hosts gardening days, public hikes, nature classes, and other regular programming from organizations ranging from CNPS to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volunteers routinely scale the hillside, hand-weeding invasive plants and hand-watering fledgling oaks, walnuts, and other native trees. Even as the challenges persist, these community stewards safeguard this evolving treasure—and their unique, thriving coalition—in the middle of the city.
“It’s impossible to know everything you need to know to do conservation,” Yañez says. “You have to have people who are experts like Joey who really get the native plants and naturalists who are specific to the entire habitat. You need policy people who get those dynamics and what it takes to protect land—usually involving money, right? My background was in community-driven policy advocacy. We needed to organize the community. There was no way this could have happened without the community stepping up.”
The figurative path to the native plant garden at Elephant Hill somewhat resembles its literal path: nonlinear, steep, and shaggy.
Prior to joining the conservation effort, Yañez had a background in public health advocacy, pushing back against culturally specific alcohol advertising that targeted Latino, Black, and Asian consumers and later advocating for local smokefree policies in communities throughout the United States. Dealing with the pernicious influence of these industries was the most difficult part of that work, but the lessons informed how to take on conservation-focused land-use challenges. “You don’t get this kind of work done without a fight,” Yañez says. Soon after she started to organize for Elephant Hill, she pivoted to environmental policy work at the Trust for Public Land (TPL).
“I needed to learn about conservation,” she admits today. “I worked on social and health justice issues. I wasn’t a naturalist. I don’t have native plant experience. So in the midst of all that, I changed careers. I went from working on tobacco to working on conservation and continue to rely on my policy skillset to ensure environmental protections for Elephant Hill.” Among those lessons, Yañez says, was how to navigate bureaucracies and make connections with land-use decision makers at varying levels.
Elva Yañez pictured at the Elephant Hill Test Plot in Los Angeles on Aug. 23, 2025.
Such pursuits would keep Yañez and Garcia busy for most of the next 20 years. Garcia, who was in second grade when his family moved to El Sereno in the early 1960s, was already a well-established community organizer with roots in the Chicano Movement of the ’60s and ’70s. His experience with environmental justice organizations and community engagement throughout Los Angeles County fortified the Save Elephant Hill campaign when he joined it in 2004, attempting to fend off the gated enclave planned for the space. His community outreach would eventually make a critical difference in the warm reception for the Elephant Hill garden among many El Sereno residents, many of whom had never heard of a test plot or perhaps knew what a native plant was. “There was a kind of environmental education that needed to happen,” says Garcia, who met regularly with people in the eastern, western, and southern residential pockets around Elephant Hill. “Sometimes it had to happen one-on-one and sometimes in group settings.”
That work’s underpinnings can be seen in their original Save Elephant Hill movement, which arose in the early 2000s from a boom in luxury real estate speculation in and around working-class El Sereno. Some of the new developments involved sizable incursions into hillsides and other open space, quietly arranging exceptions to local zoning and environmental regulations. “People were outraged because there was nothing to stop developers from doing that,” Yañez recalls. One such developer purchased nearly 13 acres on Elephant Hill, reviving a dormant project that would permit 24 houses. After local agency approvals expanded the development’s size to 25 acres, a California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) lawsuit followed.
Hugo Garcia pictured at the Elephant Hill Test Plot in Los Angeles on Aug. 23, 2025.
“Most of the people in the community, once they heard about it, argued that this type of development would really not serve our community,” remembers Garcia, who sat on the neighborhood council that developed land-use positions for city consideration. “Instead, it would take from the community the largest remaining open space in northeast L.A. This was a big one that we needed to get involved in. We opposed that particular development and supported open space development in the future.”
Finally, as part of a settlement with the developer in 2009, the Los Angeles City Council acquired 20 acres of the property in question. This ended the legal challenges but raised another question of how to formally protect and steward the newly acquired land. In 2012, city officials rezoned the 20 acres as open space, which meant that at least a portion of Elephant Hill would be protected for good. Nevertheless, the rezoning didn’t mean the city was suddenly in the conservation business. The open space still needed to find its way to a proper land manager. Yañez turned to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (SMCC), a state agency charged with preserving open space and wildlife habitat around Southern California. SMMC was the ideal partner for the organizers in El Sereno: The conservancy’s mission explicitly emphasizes accessibility and interlinking public lands, and Elephant Hill is part of the wider Repetto Hills system adjoining the Santa Monica Mountains to the west. “Where are the priorities for conservation?” Yañez asks today. “They’re not in poor, low-income communities on degraded land. The Santa Monica Mountains, on the other hand—pristine habitat—that’s a priority. So we decided to work with that.”
Several years of meetings and consultations with SMMC ensued, with Save Elephant Hill lobbying the board to help preserve the city land for the residents of El Sereno. As a conservancy, SMMC had neither the capacity nor the charter to manage the land itself. But it could support a partial transfer of the land—5 acres—to the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA), a joint powers authority created to manage property owned by SMMC and two local park districts. The SMMC board approved a grant to MRCA to officially acquire the property from the city, bringing the community’s vision of open space at Elephant Hill closer to reality.
And then… nothing.
For nearly a decade after the MRCA acquisition of land on Elephant Hill, Yañez, Garcia, and their neighborhood allies continued to push for improvements to the Elephant Hill Open Space. At three community meetings in 2014, MRCA officials heard El Sereno residents prioritize public access, restoration, and wildlife protections as long-term stewardship goals. The off-roading and garbage dumping continued apace, ravaging the hill. The organizers’ dreams of a formal trail, public programming, and other amenities at the space labored against the inertia of Los Angeles bureaucracy.
Meanwhile in nearby Glendale, a young attorney and his wife inhabited his parents’ back house and socked away money for a place of their own. They found it in 2021, tucked near the bottom of a street that dead-ended into the weedy eastern slope of Elephant Hill. “We wanted to be somewhere with hills, wildlife, hiking trails, and a lot of history,” remembers Joey Farewell, the conservation co-chair (with Julie Clark) of the CNPS L.A./Santa Monica Mountains Chapter. “We wanted to be close to my parents. El Sereno really ticked all those boxes.”
When he moved to El Sereno, Farewell learned quickly about the long conservation fight that had protected the open space and undeveloped portion of Elephant Hill near his house, and how much of Elephant Hill’s 110 acres remained unprotected. In addition to his day-to-day work practicing estate-planning law, Farewell had some experience with environmental and conservation law. He asked his new neighbors how he might be able to support or help advance the community’s long-term work to protect the open space. Fortunately, local environmentalists with El Sereno-based non-profit Coyotl + Macehualli connected him with Yañez. Farewell’s first phone call with Yañez lasted an hour, at the end of which Farewell was so fired up by her and Garcia’s efforts that Yañez happily welcomed his advocacy for formal parkland at Elephant Hill. “In certain ways, El Sereno––and really much of northeast L.A.––has this promise of green spaces that L.A. was supposed to deliver,” says Farewell, citing the hundreds of acres of preserved open space at Ascot Hills City Park in El Sereno and Ernest E. Debs Regional Park in Montecito Heights—both just a few miles away from Elephant Hill. “If you’re anywhere within the triangle of these parks, you are really blessed with a lot of wildlands. There just might not be the access that you want to them. And that’s something that Elva has fought for at Elephant Hill.”
Joey Farewell pictured at the Elephant Hill Test Plot in Los Angeles on Aug. 23, 2025.
Farewell stepped sensitively in his advocacy, aware of El Sereno’s legacy of redlining in the 20th century and the present-day perils of gentrification in the heavily Latino neighborhood (not to mention the colonization of Indigenous land that became Los Angeles in the first place). “I think it’s important to recognize that as any newcomer to the area, your presence can have both positive and negative effects,” Farewell says. “You need to be clear-eyed about that and do your best to support the community and the people in it.” For Farewell, that could look like anything from participating in clean-ups to helping Yañez and Garcia advocate for funding to eliminate unauthorized off-roading on Elephant Hill. “I just wanted to help move the ball forward in a way that they envision and that we can help them do, and to be a positive influence on the community—you know, rather than just someone who came in and painted their house a different color.”
Farewell joined CNPS in 2017, precipitating a natural convergence of open-space conservation and interest in native plants at Elephant Hill. Soon, that convergence included a L.A.-based project called Test Plot. Founded in 2019 by the landscape firms Terremoto and Saturate, Test Plot has since become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit led by Jen Toy, Jenny Jones, Max Kanter, and Alex Robinson. The founders’ goal was to establish restoration gardens on degraded land in neighborhoods in Los Angeles and beyond. Native plants featured prominently in the gardens, centering objectives like low-tech, low-budget, hyperlocal, climate-resilient planting, and experimentation—with permission to fail. Detailed project logs on Test Plot’s website track years’ worth of trials, errors, successes, and setbacks. The first Test Plot, just north of Dodger Stadium at a parched, depleted patch in Elysian Park, successfully established both a garden and a proof of concept that the organization carries into the present day: Through the simple investment of time and care, it is possible to re-establish relationships that are regenerative and reciprocal with the land and each other.
“We’re not guerilla gardening,” says Toy, who continues working with Test Plot from her home base in Berkeley. “We’re forming partnerships with land managers and trying to develop a stewardship strategy together.” Such a strategy for Test Plot covers not only how to select the right plants for local pollinators, but also how to navigate policy and permissions at city agencies. “That can be daunting for some people,” Toy says. “But we’ve tried to create a simplified process so that it’s easier for people to approach agency managers with a clear, tangible proposal. My vision is for there to be an ecological and social network of test plots in communities everywhere where people are deeply rooted. The areas where we work are human-created landscapes. They may feel wild, but they’re still very much integrated in the urban fabric.”
Jen Toy pictured at the Elephant Hill Test Plot in Los Angeles on Aug. 23, 2025.
Farewell learned about Test Plot on Instagram, studying its efforts around Southern California and the Bay Area. He instantly knew it was a perfect match for El Sereno and Elephant Hill. He loved its model merging biodiversity with community empowerment. He contacted Toy about Elephant Hill, and together they looked at a site rife with trash and invasive plants in a tight-knit neighborhood that sought more access to nature. As Farewell saw it, such a project was as much about recreation and transformation as it was about restoration. “You can preserve the land and the oaks and the walnuts, but if people don’t feel safe going up there, then they’re not gonna go,” he says. “We want people to feel safe. This is their public land. The idea of putting a native plant garden and restoration project right at the end of the street, where there’s clear total public access? Or where someone old and someone young can equally access it? That was just a dream.”
Yañez was on board as well, conferring with Toy and joining preliminary brainstorm sessions with Farewell about the would-be Elephant Hill Test Plot. “I thought it was a great idea,” Yañez recalls. “The test plot was something very concrete that would activate the land by bringing volunteers to do restoration, which was a shared goal with Save Elephant Hill.”
The only catch was getting the land managers at the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority to allow the project on its acreage at Elephant Hill. This was no small challenge: Weighing a spectrum of concerns about safety, viability, and cost, MRCA exercised an abundance of caution—and time—as it assessed next steps at the site. This bureaucratic dance was familiar to Save Elephant Hill, which had worked with MRCA since 2016 on mitigating and patrolling the explosion of off-roading at the open space (particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic). Meanwhile, Save Elephant Hill volunteers went door-to-door to marshal community support for the test plot. “I knew that if we got the plants and the people power to do the project, and if CNPS would support it, then MRCA would support it,” Farewell says.
When the project landed on Sarah Kevorkian’s desk in June 2022, an ally was born. “I’m a civil engineer,” says Kevorkian, a lifelong Angeleno who grew up in Glendale and today serves as a deputy chief of wildfire resilience for MRCA. “But,” she adds, “some of my coworkers joke, ‘Think about her as a civil engineer who really wanted to be a landscape architect.’ ” Kevorkian could envision a test plot of California native plants surging to life amid the weeds, with trails and events drawing the community to the site. She also saw the bureaucratic hurdles—apprehensions about vandalism and offroading through the test plot, for example, or questions about who would pay to install and maintain the test plot. Kevorkian knew about Test Plot’s work around L.A., and she knew that the organization could bring significant energy and seed funding to the Elephant Hill site, in part by involving students from the landscape design course that Toy taught at USC.
Over the next three months, Kevorkian kept the MRCA staff apprised of her deliberations with Farewell, the local CNPS chapter, and Test Plot. At most, MRCA had imagined a trail there, winding east-west through the open space. Now, in a notoriously water-scarce environment, the community wanted to stamp more than 6,000 square feet of native-plant garden. “I was excited because I was familiar with the project, but we didn’t have a template for this specific kind of program,’ Kevorkian recalls. “We didn’t know what that partnership was going to look like; we weren’t sure about the test plot’s maintenance. When you’re planting plants, you need to have a long-term plan.”
“We’re not guerilla gardening. We’re forming partnerships with land managers and trying to develop a stewardship strategy together.”
Toy referred MRCA to Test Plot’s success at diverse sites like Elysian Park, Rio de Los Angeles, and Baldwin Hills. The plots demonstrated how community-led landcare could successfully manage biodiverse habitats within parklands facing threats ranging from wildfire to pollution. It also applied a philosophy of closely observing and managing the land as a means of restoring it—a classic stewardship approach that resonated with the staff at MRCA. “Part of our process is trying to understand what the land wants to be, so that it feels somewhat inevitable,” Toy says. At Elephant Hill, observing the land meant understanding it didn’t want to be covered in garbage and tire ruts and stands of invasive mustard. But it also meant ongoing stewardship and protection—in addition to restoration—by humans to achieve that goal. “Design has been really important for us in terms of helping to negotiate how people interact with these spaces,” Toy continues. “A lot of times, ‘conservation’ means to put a rope around something—to say, ‘That’s for the critters, and we need to stay out of it.’ But I really believe that a lot of urban landscapes need to be actively managed.”
The test plot site on Elephant Hill in November 2022, before the community planting day. (Photo by Carlos Anguiano)
On Sept. 14, 2022, the MRCA board ratified a plan permitting the Elephant Hill Test Plot. A public-private partnership comprising six stakeholders including MRCA, CNPS, and Test Plot joined community volunteers to prepare for planting more than 200 native plants in November. Work teams cleared mustard and castor bean and readied the soil. Several weeks before planting, a culture bearer from the Tongva Tribe—the traditional Indigenous stewards of the O’Chuunga (Place of the Wild Rose) area now known as El Sereno—blessed the land. On the big day, more than 80 volunteers planted two dozen species of native trees, shrubs, and grasses, from Southern black walnut (Juglans californica) to coffeeberry (Frangula californica) and three different types of salvia. A neighborhood celebration followed.
Perhaps no one was happier about the test plot, however, than Mother Nature, who sent 2.3 inches of rain to El Sereno the following night, followed by 40 more inches of rain through the winter of 2022-23. The record amount of precipitation for the area established the plants almost instantly. “There’s no irrigation up there,” Farewell says. “It showed the serendipity and magic of knowing that we were going to get lucky with this project. It just took that first storm to know, ‘Hey, you know what? This project is gonna work.’ ”
Indeed, the next spring brought the inaugural superbloom at the Elephant Hill Test Plot. (It also prompted a vigorous effusion of mustard, which the volunteers tore out for the clothing company Olderbrother to convert to experimental fabric dye for garments at its Venice flagship store.) The next wet season brought more plants, more volunteers, and, courtesy of El Niño, another 25 inches of rain.
The scale of the test plot’s success dazzled folks inside and outside El Sereno. Cris Sarabia, a longtime CNPS member and former board president who helps lead the South Coast Chapter, used to drive his old Nissan Sentra on Elephant Hill with his friends as a teenager in the 1990s. Almost three decades later, Sarabia contributes to planting, weeding, and maintenance at the test plot. He says the sense of community and purpose was enthralling from the start.
“I told Joey, ‘Dude, lean on me for whatever,’ ” says Sarabia, who in his day job serves as the conservation director with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. “ ‘This is what I do for fun and respite, but this is also what I do for work. Be it with my brain or physically, I’m gonna help you.’ ” Sarabia didn’t even know Farewell was with CNPS until they met at Elephant Hill. Over the last two years, the pair has hosted grant-supported educational programming through a partnership between CNPS and Save Elephant Hill. “Everybody’s working together toward this ultimate goal of saving this gem in the center of the city that hasn’t been paved over,” Sarabia says. “These places are so important for so many reasons, but working here is kind of full-circle for me.”
Carlos Anguiano was a USC freshman in fall 2022 who had maneuvered his way into Toy’s landscape architecture design course during his first week of classes. He read the catalog description for ARCH 542 and sensed that the course’s blend of community relations and practical design would prove valuable to his environmental studies major. While he contributed to two months of prep and the eventual planting at Elephant Hill, Anguiano says the community collaboration that semester proved particularly enlightening. “Listening and hearing what the community needs—I will carry that with me for tons of future projects,” he says. “The community needed a space that would be sustainable for years to come and that would grow with the community. A well-balanced ecosystem is what’s most sustainable.”
Area residents Naomi Guevara and Will Hourigan contributed in 2023 and continue to work with Farewell as co-stewards for the project, helping oversee maintenance, events, and other programming at Elephant Hill. “It’s really interesting to see Elephant Hill transform into something else and to see native plants really telling the story of how we can restore it to what it was once before,” says Guevara, a landscape architect who focuses her work closely on native plants in varieties of urban settings. Hourigan, an engineer by trade and an El Sereno resident, joined the Elephant Hill effort after meeting Farewell on a hike in the nearby Mount Washington neighborhood. Hourigan knew that not everyone in El Sereno shared the larger vision for a test plot to restore the hillside. But like his co-stewards and the rest of the Elephant Hill coalition, Hourigan prioritized the most inclusive land use that could activate the space for the neighborhood and visitors of all ages. “Part of the reason I got involved is because I have kids,” Hourigan says. “They’re 5 and 8. We wanted a place where they could grow up with the plants and feel at home.”
Observers beyond El Sereno took note as well. The Theodore Payne Foundation included the Elephant Hill Test Plot on its lauded garden tour for the first time in 2025. The nearby Indigenous charter school Anawakalmekak, just south of Elephant Hill, has harvested mulefat (Baccharis salicifolia) and other plants for its cultural practices. MRCA, which has since collaborated with Jen Toy and Test Plot on two more projects in Los Angeles (at Rainbow Canyon and La Esquinita), has since acquired another 3.7 acres of the open space and recently installed a terraced trail leading to the crest of Elephant Hill. “The test plot has activated the space and allowed a lot of programming to come in—giving the community tools for wildfire education, for instance,” says Kevorkian, the civil engineer who shepherded the test plot at MRCA. She even attended a birding event there with her father, who had lived in the area for decades without knowing the Elephant Hill Open Space was even there. “He kept saying, ‘This is amazing; this is so beautiful,’ ” Kevorkian recalls. “He was really touched.”
(L-R) The Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) installed a new trail near the Elephant Hill Test Plot in summer 2025. Joey Farewell and his son Callum at Elephant Hill Open Space on Aug. 22, 2025.
“I feel like we’ve created this magical neighborhood space that I love to go to over and over again each season,” says Toy, who estimates the Elephant Hill Test Plot’s established native-plant footprint having expanded to nearly 20,000 square feet with years of nourishing rains. Out goes the invasive mustard and horehound, supplanted by Western vervain (Verbena lasiostachys var. lasiostachys), California cudweed (Pseudognaphalium californicum), and flashes of southern bush monkeyflower (Diplacus longiflorus). “I see how it changes, see how it evolves, and think about what the future could be. It’s been an exciting place to experiment and try new things. And it’s just a source of endless beauty.”
Yañez, the longtime El Sereno resident and organizer, also sees that multi-faceted example as the test plot’s primary significance—its example as a restoration site, a demonstration garden, and a public destination. “It shows people exactly what the restoration of Elephant Hill would look like if it was done intentionally and there were resources put behind it—if you had more people like Joey committed to making this happen,” argues Yañez, who also credits the efforts of neighbors Garcia and Hourigan, stewards like Toy and Guevara, and officials like Kevorkian as essential to the greater Elephant Hill transformation. “That’s the big win: It’s a demonstration of what could be,” Yañez says. “And from a restoration standpoint, the plants are beautiful, and people love the test plot when they visit. But it doesn’t come easy. It’s a lot of work.”
Farewell, now a father of three, still frequents Elephant Hill to hand-water the bay laurels and survey the late season blooms—a cluster of California fuchsia (Epilobium canum) here, a fine tissue of sacred datura (Datura wrightii) there. He stares up at a thick grove of oak and walnut trees perched across from a menacing grove of trees of heaven, still in need of abatement. In the hill, he may not be able to see an elephant. But he does see a victory—and an opportunity—worth savoring.
“It’s so easy to be cynical in life and dwell on the many things wrong with the world,’ Farewell says. “You can sit around and mope and post online about those things. Or you can go do something real that is positive and meaningful and supportive of your community. To me, cutting down some mustard and planting some trees in the right place at the right time is such a great way to address those feelings and fight that negativity and make a little bit of good.” He shrugs. “Who’s to say that you can’t start a native plant woodland in your backyard?”
