Shopping to add pops of color to your yard and garden this summer? Native pollinators benefit when you pick native plants that are more likely to come from local greenhouses or your neighbor’s backyard instead of big box stores. For starting native plants from seed, it’s best to start later in the year, between November and March, allowing seeds a cold period for stratification.
Useful garden information and a convenient way to find curated wildflower seeds is available from the Tennessee Environmental Council. See examples of demonstration gardens in bloom in this TEC video.
Why plant your garden with pollinators in mind? TEC’s Staff Biologist & Director of Pollinator Initiative, Monika Pretz, PhD, explained, “Pollinators are responsible for pollinating more than 75% of flowering plants and 1200 food crops. Every third bite we eat, we can thank pollinators. To have a healthy, sustainable ecosystem, we need to provide native plant habitats for our pollinators.”
Dr. Pretz gives these examples of the creatures we should be attracting to our yards: native bees (over 4,000 species in North America and 350 in Tennessee), butterflies, moths, beetles, hoverflies, hummingbirds, and many more. She explained that insects cannot recognize plant varieties that are not native, even if the cultivars look familiar to us in the store.
“The most important message is that native plants of North America evolved together with native pollinator species,” said Dr. Pretz. “Great examples: monarch butterflies lay eggs on milkweed species as their caterpillars are host plant specialists and can only eat milkweed leaves. Our state butterfly, the zebra swallowtail, lays its eggs on Pawpaw trees as it is a host plant specialist, and the caterpillars can only feed on pawpaw tree leaves.”
TEC recommends checking out these East Tennessee nurseries for native plants that pollinators love:
Columnist Anne Brock-Rankin is Marketing Coordinator for Knoxville-based renewable energy company Solar Alliance. You can reach her at abrock@solaralliance.com.
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