Tweak Garden Mainte nance to Make Happy Bees and Butterflies

Tweaks to Garden Maintenance Make Happy Bees and Butterflies

It’s often the simple things in life that are realistically within reach and make a meaningful difference: A modest reduction in sweets to cut calories. Slowing down on the highway to save gas. Buying coffee out one less time to save some hardearned income. Minor changes in habits like these examples can result in big returns in the long run.

It’s also true in the garden, where small tweaks in maintenance practices can result in significant gains for the diversity of visitors that fly, crawl, burrow, and walk into our yards. Here are a few practices that I’ve learned over the years.

In November, keep fallen leaves on the ground in garden beds where possible. This will reduce mulch use, and help protect butterflies and moths, because great spangled fritillary, wooly bear, and many other caterpillars survive the freezing winter under a bed of leaves. It’s also where clearwing and luna moth cocoons lay on the ground, protected by leaf litter. Dr. Gerardo Camilo, a bee biologist at St. Louis University, tells us that reducing mulch use is good for certain bee species that need bare, exposed soil to nest in. Native plants installed 16-18 inches apart quickly grow together, reducing or eliminating the need for brown mulch (this technique is called green mulching).

Camilo also tells us that weeds in our lawns are good for the bees. He recommends cutting the grass higher and less frequently to give weeds more of a chance to flower between mows. Dandelions, clover, and violets provide excellent nectar for foraging bees. If we continue using tall fescue lawns (they are currently the best plants we have to walk on), then we should do so in a way that is as environmentally friendly as possible—no more weed-and-feed.

Keep a few large fallen branches (or trees), because that’s where morning cloak, question mark and comma butterflies overwinter as adults. They also take refuge from the cold in the scaly bark of shagbark hickory and white oak trees, and make appearances on warm, sunny winter days. Fallen, dead, and rotting branches or trees also provide food and habitat for beetles

During winter, keep perennial and grass stems standing so birds and mice (yes mice, because they make happy hawks!) can eat seeds that become scarce when snow covers the ground. Cut only perennial stems that tip over early and look messy. Also, prune small trees, shrubs, and vines in winter. Some bee species prefer burrowing in the soft pith of woody plants like elderberry, sumac, wild hydrangea, and beautyberry.

In March, when it is time to cut back perennials, cut them high, with 8-24 inches of stubble poking out of the ground. By April, new growth will hide the stubble. Heather Holm, author of Pollinators of Native Plants, tells us that bees will drill into the pith of the cut stems in spring and summer to lay eggs. She’s right, they do, in great numbers!

If you are lucky enough to have a small water garden or rubberlined pond, then you likely have dragon fly larvae and many other amphibian and insect species living in the bottom. Don’t scoop or clean out the mucky bottom until July; this gives the insects an opportunity to crawl out and transform into adults naturally in spring. We clean out our water features every other year, taking the muck (in buckets) to a nearby wetland, just in case there are a few pollywogs or cadis flies still hanging out at the bottom.

Incorporating these simple maintenance practices into your routine can be rewarding to gardeners and the wildlife that will call your native landscape home.

Photos by Scott Woodbury.

Above left: Polyester bees in spring; Above right: Junco on Blazing Star Below: Great Spangled Fritillary on purple Coneflower

SCOTT WOODBURY Horticulturist

Horticulturist Scott Woodbury is the Curator of the Whitmore Wildflower Garden at Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit, Missouri, where he has worked with native plant propagation, design, and education for 30 years. He also is an advisor to the Missouri Prairie Foundation’s Grow Native! program. Find suppliers of native plants and seeds at www.grownative.org, Resource Guide and find the Grow Native! Native Landscape Care Calendar at the website’s “Learn” page.