I am endlessly inspired by the symbiotic relationships between plants and animals. It’s fascinating to learn how interdependent our native ecosystems are - the co-evolution of pollinating plants and the insects, birds, and bats that they depend on to reproduce (and who, in turn, depend on their nectar and pollen for food) is a rich tapestry of interconnectedness that we as humans can only begin to comprehend.

As a garden designer, these symbiotic constellations feel imperative to consider, and I love to approach garden making from an ecological lens. If a site seems suited to a particular palette of plants, how can that be taken a step further to consider the insects and birds that those plants also need to survive? How can we design our landscapes not just for ourselves, but for our local creatures - and how can that also benefit us as humans?

This sort of thinking, luckily, has become more common in the garden world. People often express interest in planting native milkweed to support monarch populations, or building hummingbird or pollinator gardens. Charismatic megafauna like monarchs and hummingbirds are a great entry point into the ecological gardening world. And, as an artist, I am equally interested in helping to shed light on our less well-known (though equally important) pollinator and plant friends.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a series of patterns featuring California native plants and the creatures that depend on them, in an attempt to highlight the symbiotic relationships our native flora has with creatures like birds, bats and moths. And this past summer, I painted the detached 3-car garage at my North Oakland house with a mural triptych inspired by nighttime pollinators that I have titled “Night Shift”.

I chose to feature three California native plants and nighttime creatures that have symbiotic relationships with them: the white-lined sphinx moth and Sacred Datura (Datura wrightii), the Pallid bat (our state bat!) and Hooker’s Evening Primrose (Oenothera elata ssp. Hookeri), and the tumbling flower beetle and California Buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum).

For those in the know: the pallid bat is a little bit of an outlier. In Northern California, we don’t have any plant pollinating bats (most pollinating bats are further south), but our bats do depend on insects that frequent our local flora, and the Evening Primrose is often referred to as a ‘bat plant’ for that reason.

I’ve never painted a mural before, so this was a really fun challenge! And luckily, my husband (who is also an artist) offered to be my assistant. After designing the imagery, I converted the illustration to linework with a to-scale grid over top. We snapped chalk lines on the garage in one foot increments, and then using large scale printouts we hand drew the image in graphite on each of the garage doors.

Since the mural is meant to promote local ecology, it made sense to use eco-friendly paint. I was excited to discover Tomorrow’s Artist, a California-based paint company that takes discarded house paint and recycles it into artist-grade acrylic. Using pre-mixed paint meant I couldn’t easily bring swatches to the paint store to have the paint custom mixed, so I had to resort to some art math to figure out paint quantities and mixing formulas to approximate the colors I was going for (luckily, I love spreadsheets!)

It was nerve wracking to begin mixing the paint, but once the first few formulas worked out pretty well, I began feeling more confident. We had to shift a few of the colors as they were mixed, and a few times we ran out of paint and had to re-mix a color, trying our best to get it to match what had already been painted. Overall using the Tomorrow’s Artist paint worked out great and I am really happy with the results. Plus, it’s pretty cool that the mural is eco-friendly!

It took two months to complete the mural painting (mostly because I have a full time job, and could only paint in the early evenings and on the weekends). Every time a new color would go up I would get so excited to see the mural progressing - It was like working on a giant paint-by-number, but one that I had designed myself! And an unexpected delight of this project was all of the super positive neighbor interaction. Folks would stop their cars and compliment the mural as we drove by, and people walking down the street would stop and chat, curious and excited about what we were up to. I hope this piece continues to delight everyone who comes across it, and maybe also inspire them to plant native plants for nighttime pollinators in their own gardens.