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Messy Garden is OK and It Can Lead to Good Things

Sept 2015

I caught an eye and earful while sitting in my backyard seeking inspiration for this month’s column.

Honeybees, still abuzz, frantically gathered pollen from preferred pollinator plants such as raspberries, late summer blooming sedums, white flowering garlic chives and the edible blue flowers of borage. Do they sense something about the upcoming winter that we don’t?

Basil, oregano and winter savory which should have been harvested before going to flower now serve a number of native fly and bee species.

The circles cut in my hybrid tea rose foliage by leafcutter bees were easier to accept after learning leafcutters pollinate alfalfa and blueberry plants. The leaf fragments are used to form nest cells in soft, rotted wood or in the large stems of pithy plants such as roses. While I don’t personally grow either of those crops, I certainly eat them, and it was easy to see that we rarely know the good most insects do or the extent that many plants serve as hosts to pollinators in the environment. Tolerance was the lesson.

While I was alarmed by dry, cracked soil within my raised beds, I know that sweat, digger and andrenid bees all nest underground in compacted soils or within leaf litter, hence the latter’s value as garden mulch. Messy is okay. And since wildlife in general uses dead wood for habitat, we have a wonderful excuse for leaving some plants less pruned than we might otherwise.

A lone, luminescent blue dragonfly erratically sliced the air jetting here and there. I hoped that it, along with the large swarms we saw in June skies, were helping by snatching mosquitoes.  

Earlier in the week, I noticed smaller pollinators dipping into the container of water I had put out and wondered if it was also visited by the dragonfly. Thereafter, additional water bowls were added throughout the yard to encourage and support this need of pollinators.

With flowers front yard to back, hummingbirds were sipping nectar from orange flowering zauschneria, lingering red pineleaf penstemon and five different cultivars of agastache. Seeing these tiny, high energy birds also take time to rest upon tree branches remind me to rest between dips into life’s sweet nectar.

Although past their prime, I refrained from pulling sunflowers and orach, AKA Russian spinach from the vegetable garden when I noted birds gathering seeds from the spent plants. The winged ones would then dart to shrubs and small sized trees for safety and to perhaps plan their next swoop downward for food and nourishment. Bluejays took cover in the neighbor’s large, old apple tree. This all spoke to the importance of having a diverse, multi-layered assortment of plants in the landscape for wildlife.

As daylight diminishes, I feel an urgency to spend as much time outside as possible. The evening garden features trumpet shaped blooms of evening primrose and desert four o’clock with hummingbird-like sphinx moths visiting morning glory and honeysuckle vine flowers.

Derry MacBride of the Garden Club of America expresses it well “A garden is only as rich and beautiful as the integral health of the system; pollinators are essential to the system – make your home their home”.