Pollinator-friendly gardens

Gardening Corner by Grace Bubeck – April 2024

On March 12, Lesle-Ann Hines and Kathryn McCully presented a very interesting workshop on Creating Gardens that Support Native Pollinators, organized by the Montérégie West Community Network. To the relatively uninformed like myself, there was a lot of information to take in and digest. But they also suggested some easy action steps in support pollinators in our gardens, as well as some useful links to online resources that I could check out after the presentation.

As any gardener will know, pollinators are needed to fertilize at least some of our plants in order for them to produce fruit and seeds. Pollinators are not just honey bees — a species imported from Europe used mainly for farming purposes – but all sorts of different bees (12 species in our region), as well as butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, hummingbirds, and even bats. In the workshop, though, the focus was on the insect pollinators.

In tandem with the pollinators, the bird population has declined in North America – one of the reasons being that 90% of birds have to feed caterpillars to their offspring, as they cannot yet digest seeds. As for the pollinators, the reasons for their decline are pesticides, habitat loss, plant choice, light pollution, invasive species and climate change. As gardeners, we can address three of these reasons in order to help pollinators.

1. We can stop using pesticides. Farmers may have a more difficult time transitioning away from pesticides, as their livelihoods are on the line. But as hobby gardeners, we can plant more and use other methods to prevent insects from creating too much damage.
2. Plant choice: We can start planting native species of plants that support native pollinators. The reason behind this is that not all pollinators are ‘generalists’ who can feed on the nectar and pollen of any flower. Some are adapted to specific native plants and depend on those in order to survive. The most well-known example is that of the monarch butterfly that can only feed on milkweed plants, but there are many others. So native species, rather than cultivars or ‘nativars’, create the best food sources for pollinators. Also important is to choose a variety of native plants so as to provide food for different pollinators, and to select plants that will flower during different times throughout the growing season. However, many of the aromatic herbs and annual flowers are also good food sources for pollinators, even if not native, according to the very detailed online brochure published by Pollinator Partnership (www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/StLawrence-2017.pdf). Phacelia and sunflowers provide food for almost all of our native bees.
3. Habitat: Pollinators have many different ways of sheltering and buildings nests. Not all live in colonies. Many are solitary, some nest in the soil, but also under leaves, in straw and branches, or in dead trees. A ‘tidy’ garden or landscape typically doesn’t provide enough habitat for pollinators. Over the winter, for example, it is better to leave dead leaves in the garden and to only clear them away once temperatures are consistently above 10 degrees

Water is an essential resource, so providing little ponds or even smaller ‘watering holes’ in your garden, with a slope leading into the water for easy landing and leaving, is beneficial not just for pollinators, but also birds and other wildlife.

These are only some of the information and ideas that I took away from the presentation and from reading up on the resources that were mentioned. There is much to learn, but one thing has become clear to me over the last few years of gardening: it’s so much better to garden in a way that invites all of nature to thrive, rather than to garden just to please us humans. In providing an environment that is friendly and supportive to many creatures, we become part of a greater cycle of life, part of all of Nature.

Lesle-Ann and Kathryn gave us seeds of two native species to plant in our gardens this year, coreopsis and milkweed. They are also involved with the Ormstown Butterflyway Project / L’effect papillon initiated by David Suzuki (check out on facebook), and have planted a native flower garden in the Ormstown municipal garden. We can contribute in our own gardens, and who knows, maybe also in public spaces in Hemmingford?

You can find native plants at the Jardins Ellis in Ormstown.