Pollinator Pages: Landcaping for Pollinators

When my brother and I were young, he used say that he didn’t want to mow the lawn because he would rather encourage the growth of a Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem instead. At the time, I rejected his idea and considered it to be a disguise for laziness (and an ecological impossibility, given that we lived in New Jersey!!). I actively lobbied to my mom that he continue to mow the grass (which he did).

Decades later, I’ve changed my mind. In fact, I’m encouraged, because his own children are adopting his lawn-less attitude and helping him make his garden grow even bigger!

My brother and I, like many people around the world, are changing our attitudes about yards. When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that emphasized “neat”: large, evenly mowed grass lawns, trimmed hedges, and absolutely NO WEEDS. I believe, in part, it was because many residents didn’t think they had the time. We were all busy suburbanites, leaving our homes to run off to work, school, sports activities and other social fun.

However, my attitude has shifted. Now, I consider my yard to be an integral part of my activities. Its how I relax, how I exercise and how I enjoy my life (as you read my blog, I think you’ll get a sense for that!). I’m now even working to make it a place where I get some of my organic food! As I shift my lifestyle to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, I’ve also come to understand how taking time to garden in my yard helps the planet to flourish. In honor of National Pollinator Week (June 21-27), I’ve decided to share some photos of ways that we’ve landscaped our yard to encourage pollinators.

First - Why?? Why do we want pollinators in our yard?

So many reasons!! In fact, it took me years to get around to writing this blog entry just because I’m overwhelmed with trying to summarize all the ways that pollinators help me and all the reasons why I want to take action to help them…

… I realized I’d just have to start trying to get it all down, bit by bit. My “Pollinator Pages” series will be an ongoing effort to share my answers to this question.

I will start with my most-urgent reason for helping the pollinators >> because the birds, bees, moths, flies, bats, beetles, and all other critters that help plants to get pollinated NEED OUR HELP!!! In part, this is because humans have covered a lot of ground with our buildings, roads, parking lots, and …

… lawns. Yes, lawns. Grass. That stuff I rolled around on as a kid and thought was so harmless.

Grass is nice! Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice spot of greenery to lay down and watch the clouds! An open space for a picnic or a fun sports game is a great thing. However - we humans are beginning to reconsider our level of responsibility to our pollinator friends, and deciding to start giving them back some much-needed space (and flowers). Of course, you don’t need a yard to help pollinators flourish. The Pollinator Partnership has created some recommendations to help protect pollinators.

What are the top elements for a good pollinator-friendly yard? I’ve been looking through a number of links (such as this, this and this), and I think I’ve captured the essential elements: forage, reproduction, shelter and water.

Forage, a.k.a. flowers, are how pollinators eat. Well, mostly! Creating a pollinator-friendly garden takes a little bit of self-education and planning (and here). We plant a variety of flower types: with different sizes, shapes and colors. We also try to landscape so that something will be flowering throughout the year.

I have so many pretty pictures of the different types of flowers and pollinators in our yard, I’m just interspersing them throughout the entire page. It’s the only way I can get them all in here!!

Here’s a photo of fly that looks like a bee, but if you look at its antennae, you will see that it has the short stalks of a fly. This is called a flower fly. 

This photo of the sphinx moth was difficult to take because they come out at dusk, when my camera has trouble getting high resolution shots. This was the best I could get.

How do we landscape our yard to help pollinators shelter and reproduce? We landscape for this simply by planting a mixture of native trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals; and by keeping “rookery sites” open for our native bees. Native plants need fewer input from gardeners, including less water subsidies to keep them alive (which equals lower bills!). In addition, because native plants are adapted to their region, and aren’t as susceptible disease or pests in the area, we don’t need to spray them with unhealthy chemicals (another major no-no for creating a pollinator-friendly yard).

As many of you who follow this blog might know, watching our hummingbirds nest has been great fun! Here’s a photo of a Costa’s hummingbird on a palo verde tree, getting ready to feed her hungry chick.

We help our native bees reproduce by keeping patches of soil and sand bare, so they can develop their rookery sites. Once we notice an area in the yard that the bees use, we let each other know not to dig that section of soil or to cover it with any compost. Can you see the holes in the soil? I count 6 of them. This area has been used by bees every single spring that I’ve lived in this yard (which is now 7 years). Here’s a photo of a bee exiting one of the holes. They are VERY cautious when entering and exiting the holes (this is when predators like lizards can eat them!), so getting a photo had been extremely difficult. I’ve taken about 50 shots of an empty hole. Thank goodness for digital cameras!!!

Bees such as carpenter bees use pieces of dead wood for their nesting sites, so we leave a couple stumps laying around the yard for them. This photo is a male carpenter bee investigating a rookery hole.

We don’t even get upset when the leaf-cutter bees use leaves of the plants in our yard for their nests. Some people might consider that the bee makes their gardens less attractive, but, I feel exactly the opposite - knowing that the tree is there to help the bees raise their offspring…

To me, THAT is a beautiful thing!!

Providing water is another extremely important subsidy that benefits the pollinators in our yard. A bird-bath helps the birds, but we also provide a separate source for our insect friends - see, bees are actually very shy, because, as it turns out, lots of animals want to eat them. For example, many birds are ‘insectivores’, which means they eat bees. In the photo to the right, you can see two honey bees drinking water from our pond. Upon a bit of searching, I finally found where the honey bees drink water - they sneak down between the reedy vegetation, where few predators can see them. In fact, it was tough to get my point-and-shoot camera to focus on the bees, what with all the vegetation surrounding them!

Yes, people have fears of being stung, but, with a little awareness, we can easily live together peacefully!

Pickin' Peas, Southwest Style

We've been enjoying some delicious yard-grown food - peas from the native blue palo verde trees (Parkinsonia floridum). 'Palo verde' means 'green stick' in Spanish, which refers to the fact that the young trunks and branches of palo verde trees are green with chlorophyll. This is a desert specialization amongst many plants to save water. In the desert, the theme is: If you can live without much water (and without losing water), you too, can have a go at it!

Many plants achieve this by downsizing and/or eliminating their leaves (leaves are the location of the most water loss - transpiration - in plants). The photo on the right is a Mexican palo verde (Parkinsonia aculeata), which has highly-reduced leaves. I can only see a couple in this picture. The long green parts are the leaf stalks, NOT leaves. This adaptation creates a problem - leaves are usually where the woody plants house their chlorophyll, the "energy factory" of plants (and why we eat them, too). To solve this energy issue, plants which minimize their leaves (like palo verdes) retain chlorophyll in their branches and trunks (like 'herbaceous' plants, which usually live only a year or two). Palo verdes do not create trunks with dark, corky bark as quickly as other trees. They do, eventually, form non-chlorophyllous bark; but after several years of growth.

In California, we can't grow as many palo verde species as our Arizona friends, and, as native endemics, they only occur in the Sonoran Desert, in the southeast corner of the state. The trees in our yard were nursery purchases and we water them (infrequently).

The palo verde has evolved in the lineage of the Legume family, a group of plants renowned for their edibility and nutritional content. A near relative of the palo verde, the mesquite, is famous for its many uses.

Although I found this listing of the uses of the blue palo verde by native tribes (fyi, the peas of the Mexican palo verde do NOT taste very good... too bitter), the common-knowledge of their edibility amongst naturalists is not widespread. I did find a nice blog entry about palo verde peas here. We believe this is because the seeds are mostly (easily) edible only during the very short time period when they are green on the tree, like the picture to the left. In my experience, this lasts a couple weeks during early/mid June. Pods that are getting to be too old are shown in the picture to the right. If you aren't poking around the desert during the specific weeks the peas are ripe - and its HOT at that time! - then you'll miss them...

... unless, like us, you've planted them in your yard (and water them)!

Legumes are also well know for being a popular host plant for bees. We have many different
natives, of varying sizes, who flock to our palo verdes during the several weeks (in May) that they are in bloom.


In the end, I'd say I harvested over 10 cups (~2500 ml) of peas from the 10 trees in our yard! That's post-shucking! The picture to the right is the post-picking, pre-shucking shot of many of the pods I gathered. The next step was removing the peas from the pods (the pods are bitter and fibrous. Not tasty at all). Most of the peas have been frozen. I'll add a few to different dishes - beans, eggs, soup, veggie steams, etc. We've got some that are fresh in the fridge, and I'm adding them to salads, or just snacking on them raw. Yum!!!

San Gabriel Mountains

We're working up in the Angeles National Forest these days. ANF is comprised of the San Gabriel Mountains, a fault-lifted zone just north of the San Fernando Valley (the Valley Girls valley just north of Las Angeles). Being in the mountains is nice this time of year... but don't be too jealous. These mountains are steep, covered mostly with chaparral, and rather hot and dry.

There are still some nice critters and plants to be found, however, and we're doing our best to discover them.

This is a sagebrush lizard, which is uncommon. The male has the bright red under his chin, either to attract females or to threaten other males (or maybe me?). Who knows?

The plants aren't doing so well this year, as I've mentioned (drought year), but we've found one particular species that's just booming: the Mt. Gleason paintbrush (Castilleja gleasonii). Yes, the paintbrush, everyone's favorite, known for its brilliant red blooms and long-lasting flowering duration. This species is doing particularly well because its getting a little help from its "friends". You see, the paintbrush is a hemiparasite, which means that it derives part of its nutrients from its chlorophyllus leaves, and part of its nutrients from another plant (to which its attaches by the roots). This plant is a Forest Service Special Status and California Rare plant, which makes it especially exciting to find so many of them.

Here's a view of some of the earliest-bloomers - the chamise shrubs within the chaparral. The white dot in the background (on top of the far ridgeline) is the Wilson's Observatory. Its a landmark for the San Fernando Valley, something they can see on those (occassional) clear days. Speaking of clear skies, we had some clear ones when we were working up there, and got some views of Los Angeles at night. It was strange to be camping, and to have city lights so bright along the horizon. They just went on and on and on...