You may want to keep your grass and simply add native plants and flowers to attract pollinators. (Here are 5 things you’re doing every day that hurt honeybees.) You can remove plants that don’t belong and reshape your garden to reflect a commitment to native species.
You could also rip out most of the grass and use Vogt’s method of making a grass border as a good compromise between your goals and keeping the neighbors happy. “For the conservation-minded homeowner, this might be a desirable landscaping goal,” says Wendi Mulvey, an environmental educator at the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum in Short Hills, NJ. “Not everyone has neighbors who will appreciate a huge feral meadow right next door.”
The Arboretum planted their entire front garden with “native plant species that offer food and shelter to a huge variety of birds, butterflies, and other living things,” says Mulvey. “We attempt to maintain the Arboretum as a haven for wildlife, and continuously edit out invasive and non-native species.” That’s a difficult balance to strike, but careful planning makes the goal attainable.