Why Native Pollinator Gardens?
What’s All the Buzz About?
Native pollinator gardens are essential to healthy ecosystems, now more than ever. Habitat and biodiversity loss has increased dramatically in urban centers as land development continues to expand. Our neighborhoods have grown into monoculture landscapes filled with turfgrass. These environments not only degrade land, soil, and water, they’ve directly impacted pollinator populations. 75% of bees live in the soil, not turf.
Habitat loss, climate change, and disease are only part of the picture. Pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides have added fuel to the fire. Pollinators are in trouble and have been declining at alarming rates. We have the ability to mend the habitats and food systems we’re a part of. Urban and suburban land has the potential to ignite resilient landscape restoration. Pollinators are essential to regenerating healthy urban centers and we are the key players needed to implement necessary changes to boost our native pollinator populations.
When we build healthy spaces for pollinators, it has a ripple effect on our entire ecosystem.
Pollinators, such as bees, butterflies, birds, and animals are crucial to plant, food, and seed production. Native pollinator gardens provide a way to rebalance habitat destruction and protect the ecosystems pollinators keep alive. Providing resilient habitats for native pollinators can accelerate their continued survival.
Food web in action - Superb Fairy Wren eating a caterpillar
Bees and butterflies support birds and other small animals that are essential to our food web and increasing biodiversity. Perhaps most importantly, we need pollinators for successful food production. These insects and birds are especially critical for regenerative farmers relying on healthy soil, plants, and water to build successful fruit and vegetable farms without the use of toxic chemicals.
According to Fatal Harvest, the Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture,
“More than 30 genera of animals - consisting of hundreds of species of floral visitors - are required to pollinate the 100 or so crops that feed the world. Only 15 percent of these crops are serviced by domestic honeybees; at least 80 percent are pollinated by wild bees and other wildlife. In addition to countless bees (the world contains an estimated 40,000 species of bees), wasps, moths, butterflies, flies, beetles, and other invertebrates, perhaps 1,500 species of vertebrates such as birds and mammals serve as pollinators.”
At the Colorado Pollinator Summit hosted by People and Pollinators. Dr. Stephen Buchmann, author of What a Bee Knows, described how pollinators are experiencing death by a thousand cuts. Climate change, environmental pollution, insecticides, night lighting, deforestation, fire, traffic, and nitrification from fertilizers have all had a hand in declining populations. In our urban and suburban areas we’ve “scraped away paradise to put up a parking lot”.
Dr. Buchmann has counted 3,594 native bee species in the United States. Colorado has 938 native bee species. Protecting our native bee populations is challenging in Denver considering we all live within five hundred feet of a parking lot. What if those parking lots were filled with native vegetation? What if we leverage our laws for pollinators?
In Douglas W. Tallamay’s, Nature’s Best Hope, he asks,
“What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities? Even moderate success could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland.”
Mr. Tallamay has created the Homegrown National Park encouraging a collective effort from landowners to create the “largest cooperative conservation project ever conceived or attempted”, simply by reclaiming our residential landscapes, open spaces, and roadsides with native plant species. When your backyard becomes a native pollinator habitat, it connects to my native pollinator garden, which in turn connects entire neighborhoods, eventually creating a thriving urban ecosystem.
Re-establishing native habitats using regenerative practices in our spaces not only protects our pollinators, it protects us. We improve our water quality, reduce air pollution, create healthy soil, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, and invite nature back into our lives.
Nature is resilient. We can help it along by growing native plants and flowers in our neighborhoods. We can protect pollinators and begin to understand the ecological relationships in our own back yards. We can all thrive together and support the symbiotic cycles of life in a changing environment.
How do we get started?
Creating a native prairie pollinator landscape
Remove all or part of your lawn and grow a native garden using regenerative practices.
Incorporate Keystone species into your garden. Keystone species are plants that offer the most support to native pollinators, especially butterflies. These plants include different varieties of Solidago (goldenrod), Symphyotrichum (aster), Helianthus (sunflower), Rudbeckia (coneflower), and Asclepias (milkweed).
Encourage your HOA to explore regenerative landscaping options such as water wise, native pollinator gardens.
Read the following:
Nature’s Best Hope, Douglas W. Tallamay
Lawns Into Meadows, Owen Wormser
The Forgotten Pollinators, Stephen L. Buchmann
Get involved:
And, if you’re in Colorado, definitely get involved in the HB22-1151 Turf Replacement Program.
Let’s keep the buzz going!
Honeywood Garden Design helps you create and build regenerative landscapes.
