Four Easy Steps to Encourage Pollinators

Native bee on purple coneflower (Donna Legare)

Last week was National Pollinator Week; summer is a time to celebrate and encourage pollinators in our yards and gardens. Insect pollinators – bees, butterflies, moths, flies, and beetles do not need a lot of space. They can live in a suburban yard, downtown park, or school yard.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation (Xerces.com) recommends four simple steps to make it easier on pollinators in our yards. First, grow pollinator-friendly flowers such as native sunflowers, asters, goldenrods, ironweed, salt and pepper bush, purple coneflower and other wildflowers, African blue basil, anise hyssop, zinnias, and salvias. Secondly, provide nesting sites by creating proper habitat. Third, avoid pesticides. And finally, spread the word about pollinators.

Native bee on salt and pepper bush (Donna Legare)

Before writing this article, I went outside to my pollinator patch/butterfly garden to seek inspiration. Many shiny green sweat bees and other small bees were diligently working the purple coneflowers. Bumblebees were nectaring on the blue salvia. Even the waning flowers of Greek oregano were abuzz. The pollen sacs on the legs of some tiny yellow/brown bees were bursting with pollen collected from the small brown-eyed Susan flowers of Rudbeckia triloba. If you plant them, they will come is an apt phrase in describing the pollinator garden. I am always amazed at the numbers of bees and other insects that show up in our yard when these plants are in bloom. The key is to have things blooming throughout the season. This includes native trees and shrubs in your yard as well – the early blooming redbuds and blueberries are ideal as are the later blooming woods hydrangea and American beautyberry that always surprise me with pollinators.

The second piece of advice (provide nesting sites) from Xerces is perhaps the hardest to implement for most of us because we have always been taught to neaten up our yards.  Most of the insect pollinators are solitary bees that nest or overwinter underground or in vegetative stems that have died back. These gentle solitary bees are not to be confused with aggressive yellow jacket wasps and hornets. It is a good thing to allow areas of weak lawn in the sun that might become habitat for miner bees. It is a good thing to let some of the old stalks of wildflowers like goldenrod persist. It is a good thing to not cut back last year’s pokeweeds, which have hollow stems that provide habitat for pollinators. I am the first to want to trim up the elderberry branches, removing dead wood, but I remind myself to relax a bit because a solitary bee may nest or overwinter in its hollow stem.

You can help spread the word by sharing plants, enthusiasm, and information with neighbors. You can even order an attractive Pollinator Habitat yard sign from Xerces.com. I have watched many walkers in my neighborhood stop to read this sign in our yard.

Patriotic Gardening: American plants feed American Critters

You may expect this article to be about planting red, white, and blue flowers for the Fourth of July. For me, patriotic gardening is using American plants in your home landscape to provide food for American wildlife. The term American plants is synonymous with native plants.

The important difference between native plants and plants that originate in other parts of the world is their chemistry and how a plant’s chemistry relates to American insects. The massive number of insects is the key to transferring the sun’s energy from plants through the food web to higher forms of animals.

An Eastern Bluebird catches a caterpillar to feed its young.

These insects are a major source of protein for wildlife from chickadees to grizzly bears. Parent chickadees do not feed their babies berries or sunflower seeds. They must find 400 to 575 caterpillars a day to feed their nestlings. These caterpillars are found primarily on native plants.

Over millions of years, our American plants and insects have worked out chemical relationships. Plants develop toxins such as latexes, alkaloids, terpenes, and tannins to make their tissues unpalatable. Over time, insects develop enzymes capable of breaking down these chemicals.

After mating, the female luna moth will lay 150 eggs, which provides future caterpillars for baby chickadees and other wildlife. Photo by Lilly Anderson-Messec

Plants from other continents have chemicals that most American insects cannot break down and thus cannot sustain them. A well-known example is the monarch butterfly. Its caterpillar stage of life can eat only milkweed, tolerating the toxins in the leaves and actually incorporating them into its body to make it safe from predation by birds.

Landscape plants from other parts of the world such as azalea, camellia, boxwood, crape myrtle, and ligustrum serve very little function for American insects and thus wildlife farther up the food web. They may provide nectar for a hummingbird or butterfly or berries for birds, but for the most part native insects cannot utilize these landscape plants.

One documented example is the Chinese tallow tree. In China, it is a great native tree where approximately 400 species of insects utilize it for some part of their life cycle. In the southeastern United States, where Chinese tallow is rapidly invading thousands of acres of natural forest, only three species of American insects can feed on the tree. For every alien plant like this that takes up space in our forests or yards, it displaces a valuable American tree or shrub.

Invasive alien plants such as mimosa, kudzu, Japanese privet, Japanese honeysuckle, coral ardisia, Chinese elm, and Chinese camphor that invade our wild lands and park lands is another threat to our native wildlife. In this case, I would posit that to be a patriotic American, we should strive to rid our yards of these stealthy invaders. They occupy space where natives could grow.

The timing is perfect for this early spring blooming native phlox and a newly emerged spicebush swallowtail. Photo by Donna Legare

Since we have destroyed 95 percent of natural America with agriculture, cities, and suburban sprawl, we can improve what we have control over – our own yards. As Craig Huegel notes in his book, Native Plant Landscaping for Florida Wildlife, “Do you want your landscaping to be mere window dressing or part of a functioning ecosystem?”

In my own yard, the previous owner landscaped it very nicely, all with traditional non-natives such as boxwood, azaleas, camellias, and podocarpus. Over the past 20 years, we have replaced overgrown, sick, or dead plants with American plants such as wild azaleas, highbush blueberry, Elliott’s blueberry, needle palm, and oakleaf hydrangea.

My yard is not 100 percent “American.” I have kept beautiful large camellias and a sasanqua hedge for privacy. We have a large Japanese magnolia that we work around. I also use some non-native perennials in the hummingbird and butterfly garden, though natives are very important here as well.

The advantage of native perennials or wildflowers is that they bloom when spring begins while most non-natives are still underground in their winter dormancy. When hummingbirds return or butterflies emerge they need flowers and the timing of this is where natives shine.

In our nation’s current divisive political environment, this is one issue we can all come together on. Add a new dimension to your patriotism by adding American plants to your yard. You can increase the percentage of native plants in your yard by just adding one native plant per year!

In his book "Bringing Nature Home," Doug Tallamy calls for creating Suburbia National Park. He states, “Like it or not, gardeners have become important players in the management of our nation’s wildlife… We have not shared space very well with our fellow earthlings.”

Let your yard become a part of Suburbia National Park. Replace some non-native plants with American plants whenever you have the opportunity, and help every type of wildlife from insects to songbirds to mammals. Let’s make America native again.

Garden to Table: Norma's Orange Mint Blondie Recipe

ORANGE MINT

An intensely fragrant mint hybrid also known as Bergamot mint or Eud de Cologne, orange mint is just fantastic in fruit salads, beverages and cookies.

It is one of the prettiest mints with round smooth leaves and an upright habit. Like all mint it likes to be trimmed regularly, so do use it! It is great in a hanging basket or container which will help keep it under control. If let to bloom it attracts beneficial pollinators to the garden.

Ingredients:

• ½ cup butter

• 1 egg

• ½ c brown sugar

• ¾ c flour

• ½ t salt

• 1 t bp

• ½ t vanilla

• ½ c chopped nuts

• good handful of fresh chopped orange mint

Method:

Melt the butter and brown sugar together, stir in the dry ingredients, add the vanilla and nuts. Add a pinch of water if it seems too dry. Bake in 8” pan ( or cast iron skillet) at 350 for 20-25”. Don't over bake.

Really tasty with vanilla chocolate chip ice cream!