Planting at scale: A digital experience that turns advocacy into action
In just three years, Pollinator PowerWorks has planted 1,500 square feet of native gardens and meadows, transforming underused spaces into thriving habitats for bees, butterflies, and other essential pollinators. Our digital toolkit scales this action-oriented approach, making it easy for individuals and communities to plan and plant their own native gardens.
The challenge
With insect biomass declining by an estimated 2.5% each year, the urgency to augment the pollinator pathway is real. As a small group, we can't plant enough plants to solve the problem, but we can spread our knowledge to individuals and communities. Our mission was to make planning and planting easier.
My role
The Pollinator Toolkit was developed by our collaborative team of designers, developers, and content curators. We developed the visual identity and UX, including the logo, color palette, and artistic direction. The site was implemented in Webflow.
Team
Creative direction / design
Ellie V, Susan MacPhee
Development
Susan MacPhee, Chris Barfod
Content Curation
Nicolas Forestell
Content curation
Nicolas Forestell
Illustration
Katie Adams
This satellite image, taken around 2022, shows our progress converting ~13,000 square feet of a local hay field into a pollinator meadow, in collaboration with the city's conservation commission. Parcel 1 is in its fourth year of growth. Parcel 2, shown under tarps in 2022, is now in its third year of growth. Parcel 3 was seeded this past winter and Parcel 4 is now tarped.
Design strategy
Content curation
The first step was to create our content library and structure. We identified key metrics users would look for when selecting plants and planning a garden. We curated a list of ~100 native plants, along with data on color, height, bloom time, moisture levels, soil type, sun exposure, and pollinator preferences. Photos of each plant, sourced from Wiki Commons, were added to the database.
Brand kit
We developed a nature-inspired logo and color palette for a cohesive and engaging experience. We curated beautiful 19th-century natural history illustrations from the public domain.
Designed to be shared
From the start, we designed the toolkit to scale—across neighborhoods, schools, and municipalities. Its modular structure allows for customization by region or use case, and we’re working toward an open source version that can be adapted nationally. Whether printed as a brochure or embedded in a local government site, the toolkit is built to travel—just like the pollinators it protects.
Impact
From paralysis to planting
The flood of gloomy information about ecosystem decline can make people feel paralyzed. We are providing a springboard for action, the best antidote to big-world-problem paralysis.
Positive user feedback
Users are excited when they open up the toolkit and see how easy it is to start planning a pollinator garden. They express relief that they don’t have to do the deep dive on scores of native plants.
Open source, built for scale
Looking ahead, we're exploring partnerships to identify native species across every region of the US — and eventually expand the toolkit to support pollinator pathways around the world.
Vision for the future: scaling the toolkit
The vision
We love to give this open source resource away. But it only lists plants native to the the US Northeast. We have technical resources at our fingertips so why not scale this to the rest of the US, the world?
The plan
The map above identifies the native growing regions for the entire US. We will collaborate with an AI engineer to pull data on all native plants and their characteristics and organize the data into the same structure as the original dataset for our region. We then have the data vetted by pollinator groups in each region and deploy the data to a copy of our toolkit. We retool our UX to include a way to search your zone by zip code and bring up the plant list that's relevant to each user.