Navajo St. Meadow

A brief story of our work

After we started doing work at Buttercup Cottage, we found another unused strip of land at the edge of the Cresheim Woods section of Wissahickon Valley Park. The half-acre triangle of mostly unused lawn grass and invasive vines at the interesction of Cresheim Valley Drive and Navajo St. would be a prime spot to install a native pocket meadow. In fall 2023 we reached out to Friends of Wissahickon and drafted a restoration management plan for what we would do in the coming years at the site.

In November 2023, we took out our first area of grass at the site and seeded it with a diverse variety of native meadow wildflowers and grasses. The following spring, we supplemented the germinating seeds with planted plugs and nursery-bought plants. Over the next two years, we gradually expanded our planted area by taking out more grass each season and doing a mixture of direct seeding and plug planting. By summer of 2025, our meadow was flowering gloriously with wild bergamot, swamp milkweed, black-eyed susan, joe-pye weed, butterfly weed, and lanceleaf coreopsis blooms and a similar diversity of native grasses, including little bluestem, big bluestem, and wild rye. We have had incredible success at attracting pollinators, supporting every stage of the monarch butterfly’s life cycle and providing food and habitat for many species of solitary bees.

In addition to the meadow, we have expanded our work by restoring the wooded lowland habitat at the back of the site. We are currently in the process of removing invasive privet, Japanese honeysuckle, and oriental bittersweet and replanting with native ferns, irises, and other wet-tolerant native understory plants.