Connecting Habitat

Imagine you are a tiny pollinator, buzzing around the Greenway. You are a lucky bee, for there are plenty of flowers that bloom there throughout the season, and plenty of other pollinators to meet.

What if your patch were not so big? You would have to buzz off to find other flowers and other bees. You have to cross streets and avoid windshields, and travel over long swaths of green lawn, devoid of any nutritious flowers and perhaps even poisoned regularly to prevent any useful flowers from growing.

But what if instead every block had a yard with a kind owner, who grew a small plot of native prairie plants--perhaps not enough to sustain you for an entire season, but enough for you to stop and refresh yourself before moving on to the next patch?

Instead of having to navigate, say, all the way from the north end of the Greenway to the Terry Trueblood Recreation Area in one long go (impossible for many of our small native bees), you could spend a leisurely few days yard-hopping from one friendly garden to the next.

When you plan your garden for next spring, why not dedicate a part of it to helping the pollinators in return for everything they do for us? Although the ideal would be a completely connected, unbroken corridor between larger habitat areas, imagine if every house in your neighborhood dedicated a small strip of their land to pollinators. Wouldn't that be more attractive, and more interesting, than turf?

Sources/Resources:

• Pollinator Pathways
• Good Neighbor Iowa
• Plant. Grow. Fly. (Blank Park Zoo)
• Pollinator Gardening (Reiman Gardens)

Winter Repose

This time of year is when I reacquaint myself with all my botanical friends in their winter repose. Having cast off their flashy petals and dropped most of their foliage, they can be nearly unrecognizable.

Cup Plant stem and leaves

The easiest to find, for me, is the Gray-headed Coneflower, with its rounded match-heads bobbing gently in the breeze. As winter wears on, the little brown heads are picked over by goldfinches and other birds, leaving narrow, pointed cores.

Cup Plant is another easy one, with their tall stature, sturdy, square stems and large leaves that tend to clasp the stems longer than those of many other plants. The seedheads, similar to other Silphiums, look a bit like dry, brown flowers themselves, until they are emptied of their nutritious cargo by hungry birds.

Stiff Goldenrod

Goldenrods, especially early in winter, have their yellow flowers replaced with fluffy white, and can usually be distinguished by the shape of the inflorescences: Stiff Goldenrod in a tight, flattened clump; Showy Goldenrod in an upright plume, and Canada Goldenrod in a drooping spray.

 

 

Showy Goldenrod

Tall Coreopsis

The delicate stems of Tall Coreopsis may retain their narrow leaves for some time, now dried and curling closely; small rounded clusters of tightly-packed, flattened seeds float airily above, no longer surrounded by bright yellow petals.

Bee Balm

Bee Balm, like the unrelated Cup Plant, also has a square stem but is much less rugged-looking. Its seed-heads are entirely different, looking like rounded clusters of tubes.

And finally, Wild Quinine has the decency to somewhat resemble a negative of its summertime blooms, the white, cotton-ball rounds changing to a dusty grayish-brown. Because it doesn't sport flashy petals in the summer, its shape is largely unchanged in its winter dress.

Wild Quinine

Silphium (Rosinweed) seedhead