Pollinators and Native vs. Non-native Plants

A daffodil’s visitor

This bee is not likely to find any nourishment

© Beatriz Moisset

Are native plants important to the plant-pollinator communities? Sometimes I hear somebody say: “When it comes to pollinators, all flowers are the same; after all, nectars are all alike” or “my English ivy must be good for pollinators because it is teeming with insect visitors”. Such comments show a lack of information and understanding, as I mentioned in “Wildlife Food and Non-native Plants”.

I have been photographing and studying pollinators for years, and I learned long ago not to waste time looking for them in the typical suburban gardens that are the pride of many of my neighbors. Nature centers and wildflower preserves are the source of most of my photos. Flying insects rarely visit a daffodil, forsythia or a tulip. Those that do so look rather puzzled, and leave promptly without visiting similar blossoms. Roses, the fancier ones, get no visitors either. The same applies to many of the “naturalized” plants, such as lesser celandine and garlic mustard. Recently, I spent time looking for pollinators on a few non-native flowers (lesser celandines, daffodils and forsythia), knowing what the results would be. I reported some of my observations in “Of Spring Beauties and Lesser Celandines”.

Bring Back the Native Pollinators! Honey bees are not enough

A long-horned bee on sunflower
© Beatriz Moisset

I keep pondering the questions I posed in my previous post (Will We all Die if Honey Bees Disappear?): how did we manage to become so dependent on a single species of pollinators, the domestic honey bee? What happened to the native ones that populated the entire continent and performed the pollination of the native plants? In my search for answers I stumbled upon an old publication of the Department ofAgriculture and finally began to find some answers.

Here is an excerpt from the USDA document prepared by the Division of Bee Culture in 1942: “The Dependence of Agriculture on the Beekeeping Industry—a Review.”

From lawn to woods: a retrospective

Spring 2014: a pinxter azalea in the front meadow.

Then and now…

I posted the above photo of my pinxter azalea (Rhododendron canescens) a while back with the comment that with the exception of the trees next to the pond (behind the top sprout on the right), this area used to be lawn. People were really surprised and asked for more details and more information about how it was transformed, so I thought I’d share the history here. (Update: I also used this photo on the cover of my book, The Art of Maintaining a Florida Native Landscape.)

The magic of the mistletoes

A mistletoe is green all year, even when the
host tree is dormant. This one was living on a 
red maple (Acer rubrum).

Mistletoe played an important role during ancient times in the Old World when people brought evergreens inside so the gods of spring would have safe haven for the winter; and they celebrated the beginning of the return of the sun with various festivals. The European mistletoe (Viscum album) played and important role in these pagan rituals.

You can understand how the ancients must have been mystified by mistletoe. It stays green while the host tree apparently dies over the winter. It never touches the ground, so it must be purer somehow. Some thought that it must be a plant graft from the gods.  See my article, Myths of mistletoe to learn about some of these legends.

It is the synthesis of various legends that led to the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe for good luck, fertility, and/or long marriage. While mistletoe has been used for medicinal purposes over the centuries, both the leaves and berries are toxic to both humans and pets.  Unlike poinsettia, that New World Christmas plant, which despite its reputation, is not poisonous. See my article, Poinsettias are NOT poisonous.

Plan ahead!

Plants don’t a have a choice–they
must do the best they can where they are.

Sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t leave enough growing space for her trees and shrubs. Once the plants start growing out in the wild they have to do the best they can with the space they have.
The trio of trees in this top photo, a cherry (Prunus serotina) and two longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) have a problem. The cherry’s major surface roots have a stranglehold around both of the pines and eventually the pines will become weakened at their bases as they try to expand and the cherry tree’s roots expand as well. Right now the cherry tree trunk is about a foot in diameter, but it and the pines will continue to grow. The pines will become a hazard in this suburban yard and are likely to blow over in a tropical storm. It’s possible that all three of them will come down together during a wind event. (Update: several years later, the cherry died.)

Florida’s roadside meadow program

A Florida roadside meadow on 5/1/14 really “pops” and the adjacent farm is planted with wildflowers, too.

I took the long way home from a meeting with my editor at University Press of Florida in Gainesville and Marjorie Shropshire, my illustrator, last year. Marjorie and I stopped to photograph this amazing meadow in Putnam County. (Located in the south central section of district 2 as shown in the map below.)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Can you spot the rayless sunflowers in this bed? There are about 20 flower heads blooming.

As I discussed in Adventures in Creating a Native Garden back in June 2013, I’d planted some rayless sunflowers (Helianthus radula) as part of the native garden.  Now that they are blooming, I have to say that I’m a bit underwhelmed.  Their beauty is too subtle to enjoy from afar and they do not stand out in this bed.

Adventures in Creating a Native Garden

Stage one: Lawn removal & three bunching grasses

Three Elliot’s love grass bunches glow in the early morning sun.

Last September I began this set of garden adventures with the purchase of some Elliot’s love grass (Eragrostis elliottii) at a native plant sale. I knew I was going to reduce the tongue of lawn out into the front meadow and wanted to have the grasses to set the area off.

A well-managed edge hides or distracts from a weedy interior.

Supporting wildlife beyond your garden gate

Go beyond your garden gate

On this blog most of us focus on our own properties with ideas and success stories of how our mostly native landscapes have attracted wildlife. But anyone who is concerned about the environment can also become an advocate for Mother Nature. It's a pleasant experience to write for people like myself who also believe that creating more wildlife-friendly habitat is a good idea, but isn't one of our goals reaching out to wider audiences who might not have thought that their landscaping decisions are important?

A look back for lessons for the future

A while back, I started scanning the family slides, when I finished my own slides of our kids growing up and various pre-digital life adventures, I started in on my parents' slides. They died in 1995 & 1996, so it was high time to get these images into a digital format. What struck me as I went through my long-ago childhood was how hard they had worked to provide outdoor adventures for us.

I’m looking for birds on a Connecticut beach in the 1950s. Note my leggings and our brand new 51 Ford–we called her the blue flyer.

When we lived in Stamford, I fished in the Rippowam River next to our apartment complex. I’d dig night crawlers from the riverbank for bait and store them in my pockets. While the worms must have been a mess, I was still allowed the freedom to play. Sometimes I even caught something–not sure whether we ate this eel or not. This was 3rd grade–my braids are gone.

The Science Behind our Commitment to Native Plants

Luna moth (© B. Moisset)

Don’t you get tired when you hear words like: “nativistic mania”, “simplistic assumptions”, “nostalgic”, and “sentimental notions”? Not to mention the stronger ones: “native-plant fundamentalist”, “xenophobia”, “native plant Nazi”?

What is native? What is not? When does it matter?

Common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca (© B. Moisset)

Definitions of native plants abound. None is entirely satisfactory in all circumstances but each may serve a specific function. Some strive for scientific accuracy; others serve practical purposes. Moreover, in some instances the nativity of a plant may not matter to the native-plant gardener. None of us is about to give up growing tomatoes regardless of their non-native status.
 
The FederalNative Plant Conservation Committee proposes the following definition: “A native plant species is one that occurs naturally in a particular habitat, ecosystem, or region of the United States and its Territories or Possessions, without direct or indirect human actions.” Such definition may be useful for policy making.