In 2020, Rebecca Ness decided to use her time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic to work in her garden.
She installed plants throughout the entire garden space beside her home, but she didn’t feel satisfied.
“I planted my whole garden. I’m like, ‘Well, this isn’t quite enough,’” she says.
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So, she expanded into the alley behind her home and launched a biodiversity arm of the volunteer-run group she joined in 2018, Green Bexley. Today, she serves as its vice chair.
Ness revived a program called “Love Your Alley” with help from grants made by the Bexley Community Foundation, Franklin Soil and Water Conservation District and others to bring gardens filled with native plants and murals to Bexley alleyways.
Since 2021, Green Bexley has distributed or installed 8,000 native plants, trees and shrubs in the city across 110 gardens, according to Ness. It also has completed 22 murals through grants for artists through the Greater Columbus Arts Council, she says.
Like the native plants, the project kept growing. The group began educating Bexley residents with classes on plants native to the Columbus area in collaboration with the Bexley Public Library.
Ness applied for a grant from Village and Wilderness in early 2024, and the organization gave her every penny she requested. The project is now using the $47,235 grant to plant natives at private residences throughout a stretch of Bexley from Astor Avenue to East Livingston Avenue and Pleasant Ridge Avenue to College Avenue. Ness calls the area the Bexley Habitat Triangle. On a snowy morning in February 2024, she knocked on doors to ask if neighborhood residents would be interested in participating. “It was a resounding yes,” she says.
The project has transformed yards into native habitat, eliminating invasive species of plants and adding natives to create an unbroken habitat for birds, bees and butterflies. In the spring of 2025, the team transformed 30 yards. It will use the remainder of the grant funding to transform five more in 2026. “The original plan was to do it over a two-year period, but the landscaper was just so skilled and so incredibly organized and worked so hard that we ended up getting 30 yards done this past April and May,” Ness says. “A lot of the yards butt up against each other, and it just creates one large unbroken habitat. We ended up installing about 2,000 plants, including trees and shrubs, in this one condensed area.”
The team surveyed the community to tailor the habitat restoration to exactly what its residents wanted. Then the landscaper, Josh Zingg of Edge Effect, went to each resident to talk about specific plans for each yard. Beyond getting to lead the project and transform the Bexley habitat, Zingg enjoyed connecting with the residents and facilitating collaboration and community-building between them. Neighbors went from strangers to volunteers in each other’s yards. “A lot of these people actually met each other for the first time, even though they lived two, three, five houses down,” he says. “Seeing those growing interactions between people who had lived down the street from each other for years, that was the best part for me. … And then, the fact that everyone was excited about native plants.”
This article was made possible by the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation, which partners with Columbus Monthly to showcase kindness in the community. Help us by suggesting kindness profiles to Reporter Sophia Veneziano at sveneziano@dispatch.com. Learn more at ColumbusMonthly.com/Kindness.
This story appears in the February 2026 issue of Columbus Monthly. Subscribe here.
This article originally appeared on Columbus Monthly: Rebecca Ness Is Transforming ‘The Triangle’ With Green Bexley
Reporting by Sophia Veneziano, Columbus Monthly / Columbus Monthly
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