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Native Plants Bee-long Here: How to Create a Pollinator Garden
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Every backyard has a unique variety of flowers, trees, and the occasional persistent weed. The importance of our yard vegetation often falls under the radar, especially in grass lawn-dominated suburbia and a society that prizes outdoor aesthetics with little thought to the ecological value a landscape can provide. Casual and dedicated gardeners alike frequently purchase plants for how pretty their flowers look or because their leaves are evergreen. Emphasizing these qualities, while not insignificant, often means we overlook whether or not a plant will contribute to the health of the surrounding ecosystem—for example, will it support pollinators and the critical ecological role they play? Answering this question will help us understand how to combat the grass lawn standard and instead, create pollinator gardens that provide vital habitat for local pollination systems and improve the ecological health of the surrounding landscape. 48
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2022
BY REBECCA CARRILLO
Grow Native Massachusetts is a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring people to action on behalf of native plants and the diversity of life they support including pollinators. Grow Native explains that pollinators are “bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, and even a few bats … that move pollen between flowers,” and are essential to the reproductive system of plants across global ecosystems. According to the U.S. Forest Service, without them, the world would not have 80% of its flowering plants—a loss that would be catastrophic. The populations of many species of valuable insect pollinators, such as bumblebees, have been in significant decline in Massachusetts (and across the country) for decades. The decline of pollinators underpins the need to provide vital habitat for native pollinators and to strengthen the local pollination systems. Understanding the important role native plants play is a key factor in creating a
pollinator garden. Grow Native describes native plants as “in a word, local. They are plants that have been growing in a particular habitat and region, typically for thousands of years or much longer. Also called indigenous, they are well adapted to the climate, light, and soil conditions that characterize their ecosystem. Within this system, they have evolved tremendously important coevolutionary relationships with the other plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria present, and these very complex relationships keep that particular ecosystem stable.” These types of plants form the foundation for a healthy pollinator garden due to the co-evolutionary relationships they have with native pollinators and other insects. Some native bees and wasps, for example, have specialized relationships with certain plant families, and need the pollen or nectar from those plants in order to reproduce. Specialization is also common among other valuable insects like caterpillars. As a result,
