While winter dormancy for many gardens is a hiatus from beauty and function, Thelma Chapman’s garden loses nothing but a few blooms. In fact, it remains a habitat to wildlife, offering a safe and secure home to many creatures during the cold months.

Almost all the plants in Chapman’s garden are selected to offer food mostly as seeds and berries cover-protection from the elements as well as predators, water and a place for wildlife to raise young. The combination of these elements has earned Chapman’s garden to be designated an official backyard wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Even in the last days of autumn, it is easy to imagine how beautiful her garden has been with purple coneflowers, cosmos, asters, trees, shrubs and ornamental grasses all specifically chosen to offer something for the birds and other wildlife.

A newly planted butterfly garden adds another dimension of beauty and lures one of nature’s more delicate creatures. But the roses growing along the fence at the gate to the back yard and punctuating other flower beds are merely for the beauty of their large blooms.

“My favorite is the rose,” Chapman confessed. “Those I grow for myself.”

A sprawling pyracantha bush, bright with orange berries, offers food and cover. More food lies in the spent seedheads of the purple coneflowers, many of which have been cut down and placed against the fence.

“I usually leave them all winter for the birds to pick seeds out,” Chapman explained. “They’ll pick on them all winter.”

Great bunches of cosmos crowd into one another near the back of the garden.

“The birds usually like the cosmo seeds,” she noted.

There’s no need for Chapman to replant cosmos every year. They just reseed themselves.

Sparrows rest on protective pampas and maiden grasses in Thelma Chapman's backyard wildlife habitat. Most of the grasses and plants Chapman has selected for her yard fulfill the needs of backyard wildlife.

“I’m a free-form gardener,” she said. “I let things grow where they come up.”

Most noticeable are the ornamental grasses at the back of the garden.

Atop the tall plumes of the pampas grass sit hundreds of sparrows.

Every once in a while they swoop down to feed at the flower seeds or at one of several bird feeders and watering dishes in the garden. Then they return to their high perches.

“I water year round. I feed year round,” Chapman said.

She mixes her own recipe of birdseed, combining 50 pounds of cracked corn, 25 pounds of sunflower seeds and 25 pounds of chicken scratch. Those 100 pounds of birdfeed last approximately six weeks.

She said the birds usually dine around 10 in the morning and at 4:30 in the evening.

“They are here and there all day, but the biggest influx is at those times,” she said. “They get pretty tame, really.”

Thelma Chapman refills her birdfeeder with a seed and corn mix. The Eudora resident has created a habitat garden that offers food, water and shelter to backyard wildlife.

Besides sparrows, Chapman has finches and bluebirds. The bluebirds nested in one of the many birdhouses she has in the garden. As for the finches, they were a no-show on the day of my visit.

“They just disappear for weeks. But they’ll be back,” she explained. “The finches can empty their feed in a couple of hours.”

Chapman is faithful to two chores watering daily and cleaning out the feeders, especially if the seed gets wet.

“It gets starchy,” she said. “It is like glue.”

Creating a garden as a habitat for wildlife requires a plan, Chapman advised.

“It doesn’t take that much effort,” she insisted. “You have to plan what you plant.”

The National Wildlife Federation offers help.

After submitting a plot plan to the Federation, a critique will be sent back to you.

“If you don’t have enough, they send information about what to plant,” she said.

Thelma Chapman's garden in Eudora has been certified by the National Wildlife Federation as an official backyard wildlife habitat.

Chapman is a long-time gardener.

“I can’t remember when I didn’t garden,” she said. She recently completed the Master Gardener course.

This is her second go-around at creating a wildlife habitat. Her first garden in the country also was dedicated as a backyard wildlife habitat.

“I probably read about it in a magazine,” she said about learning of the program.

“We build all these new subdivisions and tear everything down,” she lamented. “It’s kind of nice to know that with a little effort, all the birds have come back.”

As if to prove the point of the ease of creating and maintaining a wildlife habitat, Chapman said, “I don’t pamper anything, even my roses. They seem to do all right.”

Then, after a brief moment, she recanted, “I don’t pamper anything, just the birds,” she said, smiling.

Carol Boncella is education coordinator at Lawrence Memorial Hospital and home and garden writer for the Journal-World.