By Eva Laporte
While researching to direct Karen Zacarías’s Native Gardens this April, I came across the term “cues to care,” and I’ve been ruminating on it since. In native landscaping, these are the visible signals that tell neighbors a space is intentional, tended, and part of a shared community fabric. While a native garden may be ecologically vibrant, it can sometimes be misread by those used to clipped lawns and tidy borders.
Through her research, landscape architect Joan Iverson Nassauer helped name the bridge between those worlds: the small, recognizable gestures that communicate stewardship.
As this article in the Wild Ones Journal explains, “Neatness is interpreted as a sign of sociable human intention… It means a place is under the care of a person.” Those cues might look like crisp edges, a mown border, a painted fence, flowering plants by the sidewalk, or pathways that invite the eye. They frame biodiversity in a language the neighborhood already understands: someone is paying attention here.
That idea extends far beyond the garden gate.
What are the cues to care in a community? What tells our neighbors that a block, a gathering, or a shared civic space is healthy, safe, and vibrant?
Sometimes it’s literal: swept sidewalks, porch lights, benches in good repair, fresh paint, well-loved public spaces, and front yards that make room for beauty rather than barriers. But often the most powerful cues are human. A neighbor who waves. A meal dropped off after surgery. Kids playing safely outside. People lingering in conversation after an event. A community bulletin board full of invitations instead of warnings. These are the social equivalents of clean borders and tended paths—they signal intention, welcome, and repeated return.
Just as native gardens need visible structures to help others understand their purpose, communities need shared rituals and outward signs of belonging. Care becomes legible through repetition: showing up, maintaining relationships, making room, repairing what frays, and leaving evidence that people matter here.
The lesson from native landscapes is not that everything must look polished. It’s that care should be visible. In a world that often mistakes complexity for disorder, cues to care remind us that thriving systems—whether gardens or neighborhoods—need both wildness and witness.
They need signs that say: this place is loved on purpose.