Tag Archives: pollinators

LEAVE THE LEAVES FOR POLLINATORS—LIVE TALK TONIGHT at 7 p.m!

Mass Pollinator Network and Berkshire Botanical Garden Event

Leave Your Leaves

Love butterflies in your garden? Protect them and their  caterpillars by leaving your leaves in the fall!

The Mass Pollinator Network is excited to be hosting an online “Leave the Leaves” seminar event in partnership with the Berkshire Botanical Garden on Wed Oct 5 at 7 PM with Master Gardener Larri Cochran. You can learn and discuss best practices for protecting overwintering pollinators!

There is a small fee for this event (10$ for BBG members / $12 non-members). Proceeds will directly support the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s programming and the Mass Pollinator Network’s advocacy and education work, including more future events that are free of charge.

You can register here: https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/leave-leaves

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ROCKPORT’S HALIBUT POINT—INSPIRATION FOR NATIVE PLANT DESIGN

Where to start when figuring out what native plants to add to your landscape? How about a visit to Halibut Point State Park in Rockport, MA to visit one of many plant communities there?

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THE WONDER OF PLANT ADAPTATIONS at NATIVE PLANT TRUST

Carol Lundeen with Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust

Carol Lundeen with Native Plant Trust Director of Horticulture Uli Lorimer outside the Trust’s education building after his Plant Adaptations class at the Trust in Framingham, MA. Lorimer demonstrated how every feature of a plant is a result of an adaptation designed to afford reproductive, environmental or cultural success.

The magic of botany. If you love botany, or appreciate nature, you would have loved Uli Lorimer’s Plant Adaptations class at Native Plant Trust. Right down to the molecular level, every feature of a plant is a result of an adaptation designed to afford reproductive, environmental or cultural success. This class explored the myriad ways plants have adapted to different habitats, soil types, pollination and dispersal schemes while co-evolving with other organisms in shared, co-dependent ecosystems.

Some adaptations may make it very difficult for a plant to survive in different environments, cultural and/or ecological conditions than those in which it evolved over time, which is why climate change makes it so difficult for some plants that their populations and distributions have declined, and some are vulnerable to extinction. Other plants are able to thrive and reproduce in a wide variety of situations, and so can overcome and replace vulnerable populations.

Native Plant Trust’s mission is to conserve and promote New England’s native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes, and vision is that through their leadership, New England’s native plants will exist in vigorous populations within healthy, evolving ecosystems, and people across the region will actively promote and protect them in the wild and in their gardens.

As Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust, Lorimer oversees Garden in the Woods, a botanic garden in Framingham, MA, and Nasami Farm in western MA, a nursery focused on propagation of and research about New England native plants.

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DAYLILY DIVING SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY

Female eastern swallowtail butterfly taking nectar from a daylily in Worcester, Vt

An eastern north america native female eastern tiger swallowtail butterrfly, Papilio glaucus, crawls deep into the flower cone of a daylily to drink nectar at a friend’s garden in Worcester, VT.

How fun to watch a swallowtail butterfly dive into a daylily for a drink of sweet nectar. On the way in its wings became streaked with pollen, which the butterfly then took to and pollinated a neighboring daylily in seeking more nectar.

No daylily is native to North America as thus their value to native pollinators is limited to providing food rather than providing food, ideal egg-laying sites and food for their caterpillars that would support this butterfly species’ entire life cycle. Most native butterlies and moths have just one type of plant that is the host plant for their entire life cycle.

Native plants support not just native butterflies, but also all living things in native ecosystems, including humans, which is just one reason to have a diversity of native plants on your property or property that you manage or care for.

While daylilies have good horticultural value as colorful flowers, native plants have both horticultural and ecological value in the landscape. There are many fine native plant substitutes for non-native plants, and I encourage you to explore the possibilities before investing in non-native plants that could take the place of high-performing native plants.

 

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HOW TO DESIGN YOUR GARDEN FOR WINTER INTEREST

Border at The Winter Garden, Bressingham Gardens, Norfolk, UK.

How to design your landscape for winter interest? Here are a few concepts and suggestions. A professional designer can select the best plant materials for your site and especially, your lifestyle.

  • first, consider your outdoor lifestyle and circulation around your property
  • anchor your landscape design with evergreens that contrast one another in shape, size and color (in addition to needled and broadleaf)
  • add deciduous shrubs with striking twig colors
  • add a few grasses and perennials for flavor
  • as always, make sure all your plant selections will thrive in the existing cultural conditions of your particular planting area (sun, soil, water, wind, drainage, etc.).
  • native trees, shrubs, perennials, and grasses often do best in our area, as well as being the best choices for supporting pollinators
Bressingham Gardens' design pop with color in winter.

Designed for color and contrast, Bressingham Gardens pop with vibrancy in winter.

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IS IT TOO LATE TO PLANT…IN THE SNOW?

What am I doing planting in the snow? After a robust season of gardening for others, I’m still catching up with my own home gardening by getting inkberry in the ground before the earth freezes up for good.

Inkberry (Ilex glabra) is a New England native plant that supports pollinators and other wildlife. In the holly family, these particular female Ilex glabra shrubs have nice dark berries that birds love. The red berries? This is a female winterberry, another native shrub in the holly family (Ilex verticillata), especially important to birds migrating in the spring.

Since I’m planting so late here in North Easton, I’ll apply about two gallons of water, delivered in small gulps, then cover the planting area with a thick but fluffy layer of leaves for insulation for the winter. Until the ground freezes, they’ll need about an inch of water every week, so I’ll continue watering as needed.

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September Sunflowers at Easton’s Langwater Farm

Cultivating tractor and sunflower at the Langwater Farm farmstand

Summer has past and sunflowers thrive in early fall at Easton’s Langwater Farm. Not only are sunflowers a top farm stand seller, they’re also a top pollinator host plant and provide food for our native insects, birds and mammals. Look closely and you’ll see raindrops on the sunflower petals. Langwater Farm is always a colorful spot, even on a cloudy rainy day.

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Hardworking Honey Bees in Porter Square

European honey bee harvests nectar from Helenium

European honey bee harvests nectar from Helenium flower in Cambridge, MA garden, while perhaps unwittingly captures pollen and moves it to other flowers for pollination. Image copyright 2017 Carol Lundeen.  All rights reserved.

What a delight to be gardening in Cambridge and have hardworking European honey bees show up in their pollinator hats. Who keeps the bees, what’s the history of the queens, and who most enjoys the honey? I want to meet these people and the hives and learn their story. Ah, I’m so lucky to have clients who appreciate these little wonders of the world.

 

 

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Native plants + native bees = gardening success

Native bee on native bee balm or Monarda in Sharon, MA

A native bee harvests nectar from native bee balm, or Monarda, in a Sharon, MA perennial and pollinator garden.

My general idea of a successful organic garden is to plant the right native plant in the right place in the right plant and soil community and let nature have its way. Native plants thrive in our native soils, support the local ecosystem by helping our birds and bees thrive.

Just today in my backyard I observed a wren arriving at its birdhouse with a caterpillar and heard the choir of baby wrens competing with open mouths for that nutritious meal.

Think about it. Everything we eat was once a plant, and without insects such as caterpillars and bees, we’d have no plants and no food. So plant a native next time, and you’ll be doing yourself and your neighboring ecosystem a big favor.

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Best plants for honey bees include anise hyssop, rosemary, poppy, bee balm, catmint, coneflower, borage, and thyme.

Sharon Garden Club Hosts Beekeeper Barbara MacPhee’s “Gardens for Honeybees”

Best plants for honey bees include anise hyssop, rosemary, poppy, bee balm, catmint, coneflower, borage, and thyme.

Plant These For Bees, a display at the Sharon Garden Club by guest speaker and beekeeper Barbara MacPhee. Suggested flowers for pollinators include anise hyssop, rosemary, poppy, bee balm, catmint, coneflower, borage, and thyme. [Photo by Dixie Buckland]

Beekeeper Barbara MacPhee

Sharon Garden Club presenter and beekeeper Barbara MacPhee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fun honey bee facts from Sharon Garden Club presenter and beekeeper Barbara MacPhee, at our February meeting:

  • Among honey bees, it’s the worker bees (who are all females) that you see (and hear) collecting nectar and pollen. The males, called drones, maintain the hives.
  • It takes 1,152 honey bees flying a distance of 112,000 miles, harvesting from 4.5 million flowers, to produce one pound of honey. Now that is impressive, ladies!
  • In early spring, bees need early-flowering plants like snowdrops, Claytonia and dandelions to support their hives. Forsythia, while a traditional feel-good sign of spring for humans, has zero pollen and zero nectar. Consider replacing one with a pollinator-friendly native shrub like redbud or viburnum.
  • Later in the season, agastache, clover (yes, in your lawn!) and borage, plus winterberry and American holly, are some of the other plants that honey bees favor.

And my two cents: Think about it: just about everything you and I eat was once a plant, most likely a flowering plant. No pollinators, no food. Are you hungry to support pollinators now?

Visit the Sharon Garden Club online

 

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