Defining the pollinator garden: is conceptual flexibility a feature or a bug?

Ecologists often aim to reduce conceptual ambiguity by attempting to create rigid shared lexicons. These efforts imply that ambiguity is undesirable. In some contexts, however, conceptual flexibility comes with under‐discussed benefits. Here, we use the lens of pollinator gardening to explore how conceptual flexibility is built into participatory conservation practices, and how this flexibility is central to the effectiveness of these practices. Grassroots conservation movements like pollinator gardening often have diffuse, bottom‐up origins, producing a cloud of heterogeneous practices under an umbrella definition. We posit that conceptual flexibility provides key benefits in participatory conservation by attracting a larger, more diverse set of voluntary participants and experts, each of whom takes small actions that scale‐up to large impacts in a process of conservation coproduction. We also suggest a flexible operational framework for ecologists studying participatory conservation, with the aim of enabling rigorous research without the need for rigid global definitions.