Colorful Garden for Pollinators
We can choose a barren landscape or a fruitful one. The effort is minimal compared with the rewards.
I could lie to you and say that a pollinator garden is quick and easy. It’s not. But the effort is worth it for those of us who want to be engaged with the natural world and provide food and refuge for our pollinators.
Pictured here is an arrangement from last year’s pollinator garden.
On the left in yellow is Canada goldenrod. On top is Maximilian sunflower. The white on the right is white snakeroot. The pink flower is purple coneflower. The purple flowers with the yellow center are New England aster.
It was my first real garden of my adult life, and it exceeded my expectations.
Here’s how it happened …
Starting with a traditional lawn in May, I covered it with 3-5” of free wood chips from chipdrop.com. Then in May and June, I came home with multiple trunk loads of plants (asters, sunflowers, goldenrod, white snakeroot, purple coneflower) that I had obtained for free from friends in my local network of native plant gardeners.
I dug holes amid the wood chips and plopped the plants in the ground. Easy. I watered my new wildflowers for a week or two and then not at all thereafter.
It was a very dry summer, but the wood chips held in the moisture. You could put your finger down under the wood chips and feel wet soil, though it had not rained for weeks at a time. And then when it dumped 4” of rain at the end of July, my plants, mulch and soil soaked it all in and held onto it.
By August, it seemed like an ocean of color including yellow, white, pink, blue and purple.
So, this garden took some effort, but there was not much weeding or watering. Most of the effort was from carrying wood chips from the pile to the garden.
The reward was in seeing the bees and butterflies ravage the blooms.
At least three of these plants, the goldenrod, sunflowers and asters rank among the most valuable for “specialist pollinators,” which will be the subject of another post.
Thanks for reading.