How to Design a Pollinator Garden with Native Plants

By: Lee Park

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of BEEKeeping Your First Three Years

The western honey bee is the perfect guest in any American backyard. A honey bee is not a picky eater and will settle on any one of hundreds of plants. But there are a lot of pollinators that aren’t as easy to attract.

Local pollinators love native plants, and that makes planning a landscape easier.

Here are some tips on how to design a pollinator garden with native plants — a garden that will bring these sweet guests returning all season long.

No Weed Killers or Insecticides
Glyphosate’s deadly impact on apis mellifera continues to make headlines. That’s only one of the reasons you should stop using weed killers in your yard ¹ . By allowing the clover and dandelions to sprout, you give pollinators native plants that grow naturally.

This is a great way to supplement a meadow or alternate lawn landscape² , where long grasses and native flowers are very much a part of the aesthetic. This style of landscape lends itself to big patches of flowers, which are ideal foraging for pollinators.

Keep in mind: The poisons that kill garden pests will also kill the beneficial bugs including bees, butterflies and ladybugs. Chemicals such as diazinon, Imidan, malathion and Sevin³ are especially harmful to bees.

Plan Ahead
From desert sand verbena to swamp milkweed, choose your natives carefully⁴. It’s important to plant a variety, so something is blooming from early Spring until the first hard frost. Think of it as a bee buffet — plan for something to be in full bloom throughout the growing season.

This is a fresh take on a three-season flower bed⁵ , in which you select plants to provide color throughout the Spring, Summer and Fall. But instead of only considering colors, take into account the appetites of bees and butterflies.

Don’t forget to add plants that feed adults and larvae, and provide shelter for transitioning pollinators. Example: Bumblebees love serviceberry plants, while the migrating monarch butterfly lays its eggs on milkweed because that’s what its larvae eat.

Nourish your Soil
Native plants are low maintenance, not no­-maintenance. They’ve evolved in your area and thrive on the amount of sun and rain and soil conditions that occur naturally. lf you want your native plants to produce the kind of blooms that attract pollinators, an organic mulch will help⁶. Think grass trimmings, bark, and leaves.

Not only will a layer of organic mulch keep your soil from drying out, it will return nutrients to the soil. In some leaner conditions, you may not even need that. You may just need a mineral mulch, and your bees and butterflies will be set for the season.

Any landscape planted in poor soil is likely to fail. Keep your native landscape fed, and you’ll also keep the pollinators coming back for more.

Choose Unmodified Flowers
If the label says “hybrid” or “doubled” or anything else that suggests human plant breeding, don’t buy it. The U.S. Forest Service warns plant breeders can end up with flowers that have no pollen or nectar — even if they produce extravagant blooms.
Even worse? Some of those hybrids can end up breeding⁷ with the naturally-occurring native plants and alter plant species in your neighborhood — which can impact bees and other pollinators.

Not sure what to buy? Ask for help at your local nursery or gardening center, and be sure to tell them that you want unaltered, native species.

A pollinator garden made of native plants is a fantastic contribution to your local ecosystem, and you don’t have to limit it to flowers that appeal to honey bees. You can bring in bumblebees, sweat bees, butterflies and even hummingbirds with the right choices.

Lee Park is a botanist who researches eco-friendly pest control. While he enjoys studying the effects of bugs in his gardens, he wastes no time getting rid of rodents.

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¹https://www.beeculture.com/backyards-and-bees/

²https://www.pinterest.com/Katsflowers102/landscape-meadows-and-alternative-lawns/

³https://ag.umass.edu/fruit/ne-small-fruit-management-guide/appendices-resource-material-listings-conversion-ta­bles-0#:-:text=One%20group%20of%20insecticides%20which, %2C%201midan%2C%20malathion%20and%20Sevin.

⁴https://www.wildflower.org/collections/collection.php?start=0&collection=xerces_native&pagecount=10&page­count=100

⁵https://www.almanac.com/content/flower-garden-designs-three-season-flower-bed

⁶https://www.lawnstarter.com/blog/landscaping/mulch-types-tips-guide/

⁷https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/topics/cultivars-native-plants