How To Start A Pollinator Garden

This summer, get your yard buzzed by starting a pollinator garden. Known for attracting butterflies, birds, and, yes, bees, these plots of plants help keep your local ecosystem strong and offer a vivid beauty perfect for any property.

Even better, starting a pollinator garden is easy! So, get started today for your garden to attract pollinators all summer long.

What is a Pollinator Garden?

Pollinator gardens aren’t too different from the typical patch of flowers and plants found in many backyards. The main difference is that pollinator gardens are grown with the specific intent of enticing insects, birds, and small mammals to visit and spread pollen between flowers.

Pollinators visit these gardens filled with many hopes and dreams. Some seek food; others shelter and, in quite a few instances, a mate.

That may sound like pollinators want to party. And, in a way, they do, but as they bounce to a beat that only their little antennas can hear, they unknowingly track sticky pollen from one flower to another.

This dance is vital to local ecosystems. Without pollinators, plants would lay unfertilized, unable to bear fruits or redistribute their seeds.

We’ve already listed a few examples of pollinators. Here’s a more inclusive list:

• Ants
• Bats
• Bees
• Beetles
• Birds
• Butterflies
• Flies
• Moths
• Honey possums
• Reptiles
• Wasps

Some of the entries on this list may be surprising. But if they stick to the garden and out of your home, you’ll quickly find a bountiful bouquet of flowers in your yard.

Why Should You Grow a Pollinator Garden?

We’ve already touched on this a bit, but pollinators are critical to our ecosystems. Their work accounts for one of every three bites of food and more than 75% of all flowering plants on our planet.

Of course, humans aren’t the only animals who rely on pollinators to help sow their sustenance. Animals of all kinds eat the berries, fruits, vegetables, and seeds that pollinators help grow.

We must also remember that wild creatures need plants and flowers for other reasons, like shelter. Put simply, almost all living things need pollinators to continue living. 

This isn’t an exaggeration. According to the U.S. Forest Service, if pollinators were to disappear, the plants they pollinate would be only a single generation away from extinction.

A pollinator garden, then, is just as essential as the pollinators themselves. These patches of plants and flowers allow the pollinator population to thrive.

It would be hard to find a gardener who doesn’t care about their local ecosystem even a little bit. That would be like finding a chef who doesn’t care if their kitchen was swapped with one of those toys that mold clay into food-shaped objects.

That said, there may be people who care more for the green they see on paper money than the one they see on trees and plants. For those people, keep this fact in mind: looking solely at the United States, honey bee pollinators contribute to “over $19 billion of crop production” each year.

So whether you want food to eat, flowers to grow, or money to spend, you should consider a pollinator garden.

How Do You Attract Pollinators to Your Garden?

Enticing pollinators to your garden bounty means understanding what pollinators are looking for. In short, they’re searching for the same stuff all living creatures need to survive: water, food, and shelter.

So, let’s tackle water first. 

Good ol’ H20 is often overlooked when it comes to designs for pollinator gardens, but it is just as often the main attraction for pollinators. Fortunately, adding water to your garden is a pretty easy endeavor.

If you already have a natural water source, your job is done. Shallow streams or ponds are the perfect resource for pollinators yearning for hydration.

If you lack a natural water source, a bird bath works just as well. Butterfly puddling stations — essentially patches of especially moist or muddy soil — can also provide a place for pollinators to drink.

While adding a water source is fairly easy, we should note that it’s important to keep the receptacle clean and filled with fresh water. Doing so will help keep mosquitoes away.

Next on our list of pollinator attractors is food. We’ll dive more deeply into this in the next section, but pollinators tend to eat nectar and pollen, and deploying native plants in your garden offers the best buffet for bees, birds, and other helpful wildlife.

The final item on our checklist is shelter. If your garden is dangerous to those you’re trying to attract, you may find yourself repelling them more often than not. 

That is, the goal here isn’t merely to turn your pollinator garden into a drive-thru dishing out quick meals. Instead, you want to offer an all-inclusive resort.

Bees being one of the most common pollinators, it’s essential to ensure they have a place to feel safe. Leaving parts of your garden bare and with no mulch allows these buzz-fiends to bumble their way into abandoned beetle tunnels.

Dead wood, fallen leaves, and other forms of natural debris also serve as a source of shelter. Consider leaving parts of your yard, especially areas near your garden, unraked and undisturbed so that pollinators can safely move in.

Finally, many pollinators are cold-blooded. That means they need environmental warmth to help keep them warm.

So, as you start to put together your layout for your pollinator garden design, consider placing native plants in the sunnier spots of your yard. This will allow the helpful wildlife to get a good meal while basking in warmth.

How Do You Start a Pollinator Garden?

Before starting your pollinator garden, it may help to think about what type of pollinators you hope to attract. As we’ve stated, there are a wide variety of insects, birds, and other animals who are happy to partake in the pollination process, but which ones visit your garden will depend on the flowers you plant.

For instance, bees tend to enjoy pussy willows, milkweed, marigolds, mint, and sage. Butterflies also like milkweed (especially to lay their eggs in) but tend to munch on asters, phlox, and black-eyed Susan. 

Ideally, you should pick flowers or plants that are native to your area. Your local pollinators have a generations-old relationship with those flowers, and it’s often better to go with nature than fight against it.

With that in mind, here are some of our favorite pollinator-attracting plants:

• Alstroemeria: often referred to as Peruvian lily. Attracts hummingbirds and honey bees.
• Asters: attracts birds and butterflies.
• Bee balm: attracts hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. 
• Blanket flower: sometimes referred to as Gaillardia.
• Butterfly weed: attracts butterflies.
• Lantana: thrives in extreme heat and humidity. Attracts butterflies and hummingbirds.
• Lavender: attracts bees.
• Sunflowers: attracts birds.
• Zinnias: ideal for beginning gardeners. Attracts butterflies.

When choosing your plants, try to find a nursery or garden center that focuses on plants native to your area. Again, those will have the best chance of attracting nearby pollinators.

Plan Your Pollinator Garden Today!

Pollination is a wonderful thing. And with a thriving pollinator garden in your yard, you can do your part to keep your local ecosystem healthy and thriving!

So, start planning your pollinator garden today, and with a little patience, you should begin to see lots of helpful visitors buzzing around in your yard.