If you’re looking for a themed garden, or staring at some empty pots you bought at a yard sale or a plot of ground that you’ve been meaning to till and plant, why not start with pollinator-friendly native plants?
First off, they have great names like Joe Pye weed, Mexican hat, spiderwort, butterfly milkweed, sundial wild lupine, three-lobed coneflower and oxeye daisy. They sound kind of like a group of swamp-dwelling bandits running moonshine through a meadow in the middle of the night, don’t they?
Not only do pollinator-friendly plants have interesting names, but they also support honey bees, native bees, humming birds, bats, and butterflies, the species we need to keep our food supply abundant and our ecosystem healthy. And because pollinators are looking to forage and gather nectar and pollen three-quarters of the year, they need a steady supply of brightly-colored blooms that impart a Monet flare to any garden, with a Mozart symphony of soloists taking their turns as each plant flowers and hits its peak at different times.
The buzz about Megan Denver
Honeybees in particular need help, but not everyone has the time or inclination to don the beekeeper’s gloves and veil. “Even if you have a small area you can plant a few pots of herbs like Lavender or Rosemary,” said Megan Denver, owner of Hudson Valley Bee Supply in Kingston, and a board member of the National Not-for-profit Pollinator Partnership.
Another thing you can do to get started is to let your lawn grow a little higher. “The bees love the clover in the lawns and the mother bees feed their babies from dandelions,” said Denver. “Dandelions are so beautiful and bright and important source of food. When did they become the enemy?”
Denver says if you have the room, planting in “bunches” is the way to go. “Honey bees are attracted to a larger grouping of the same plant,” she said, pointing the pollinator garden at the Bee Supply, which has a backdrop of tall sunflowers getting ready to bloom as well as butterfly weed, raspberry wine bee balm, red yarrow and dozens of other diverse groupings of plants.
David Keene of Saugerties recently built a large garden when he was furloughed from his job at Metro North because of the pandemic. “I’ve planted blueberry bushes and raspberry bushes and fruit trees, and to make sure that I have a nice diversity of plants that attract bees and butterflies and birds I put in a large patch of coneflower and over 200 sunflowers,” said Keene. “I was told to put in cosmos, which I did, and foxglove, and already my blueberries are swelling and my row of corn is thigh-high.”
A pollinator garden is also a great way to energize area your garden and your neighbors’.
“We have a neighbor who seemed a bit suspect of us when we started keeping bee hives,” said Denver. “But one day she came over with a bushel of blueberries from her 20-year-old blueberry bushes and said, ‘I’ve never had my bushes produce this many berries and I wanted to thank you.’” Denver turned around and gave their neighbor some fresh, homegrown honey. The two became friends.
Another benefit of a pollinator garden is that it can help control unwanted insects. Gardens designed to attract pollinators are very diverse and must have plants of different colors, shapes, and sizes flowering three seasons of the year. Incorporating this biodiversity helps ensure that no single pest takes over. With all of the birds, bugs and bats it attracts, many nuisance insects will be eaten.
Woodland Pond horticulture
Mark Eisenhandler, the horticulturist for Woodland Pond, the New Paltz senior living community, recently planted a “pollinator prairie” that is almost 3500 square feet In size.
“I was looking for some diversity in plantings and a way to strengthen the south slope,” he explained. “I also drew a great amount of inspiration from the High Line in New York City and the Lurie Garden in Chicago.”
Using mostly native plants and American prairie plants, he anchored the slope with various grasses such as big bluestem, feather reedgrass and prairie dropseed. This backbone of grasses are interplanted with over 20 species of strong, sequential blooming plants including bee balm, coneflowers, false indigo, lupine, aster and four species of milkweed.
Eisenhandler selected the plants for their “strong value to pollinators as well as their inherit beauty in and out of flower.” He estimated it will take “at least three years to really hit its full stride but it was designed so that something is always in bloom and even in the winter there will be grasses and plants that offer great textural appeal.”
Native bees like smaller gardens, but honey bees really thrive off large groupings of plants. ‘I was conscious of creating a habitat that was diverse, beautiful, helped stabilize the soil, and could support the foraging of our local bee population,” he said.
He’s received good feedback. “We have a garden committee, a landscape committee, a conservation committee, so the people that live at Woodland Pond are very interested in local ecosystems and biodiversity.”
At Denver’s store is a bag of seeds that include more than a dozen flowers that are pollinator-friendly. You can buy a bag for $15, till some land, and plant away. “We have a lot of people who come here because they’re interested in backyard beekeeping,’ said Denver, “but once they put those bees in their yards they start to wonder about where their food and water comes from, and that opens up another conversation about plantings.”
There is still time to get your asters in or coneflowers or start to prepare and design a pollinator garden for next year.
Join the family! 
