DE PERE, Wis. — A group of volunteers in the Green Bay area have turned a patch of land full of weeds into a pollinator habitat.

Northeaster Wisconsin Master Gardeners, with the blessing of the City of De Pere, started building a garden along the De Pere Riverwalk and Wildlife Pier in 2015.

Claudia Schultz leads the group. She said the project had a serious objective.

“Pollinators are on the decline and it’s serious because they’re on the bottom of the food web and guess who’s on the top of the food web? We are — humans are. If we destroy the bottom of the food web, it’s just going to climb upward,” Schultz said.

Eight years and one major setback later, the garden now serves as a pollinator habitat full of color and insects.

Schultz said she’s proud of what her group has grown.

“It’s a lot of people spending a lot of time doing something we just love to do,” she said. “We don’t mind being out in the hot sun in the dirt doing what we love.”

Annette Weissbach is also a part of the group. She said planting a variety of native plants was a key goal going into the project.

“It’d be nice to spread things out and have a little bit more variety in your garden,” Weissbach said. “That’s what we need in order to have more biodiversity in our world. We’re limiting our flowers so much in our landscaping and we would be much better off if we had a little more variety in our gardens.”

She said the pollinators need variety.

“This is food and shelter and habitat for our insect and pollinator species,” she said.

Weissman said planting native species is a huge deal because pollinators are familiar with them and will show more interest in them.

“It’s their comfort food,” Weissbach said.

Schultz said the Locktender garden should serve as an example of what homeowners can do in their yards.

“Nature isn’t just out at nature centers,” Schultz said. “Nature can be in your yard. You can plant a ten-foot by ten-foot native garden and attract pollinators. If every homeowner planted a native garden, we’d have a whole passage of a whole pollinators corridor for these pollinators to follow from yard to yard to yard, and that’s what they need.”