We’re now in the new year and I can look back on December, my second social-media-month (Facebook and Instagram) of posting plants with bees, butterflies, moths or birds as #janetsdailypollinator entries to while away the months until spring.  I took a few days off for Christmas, but managed to find 25 pollination partnerships to celebrate.

And here they are:

On December 1^st snow was falling outside my Toronto office this morning, so I thought it was be a good day to celebrate sunflowers.  as #janetsdailypollinator.  Bees love the big compound flowers of annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus), as you see with the trio of common Eastern bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) in my photo.   

December 2^nd had me thinking about gaura with its long wiry stems and its new name Oenother lindheimeri aka Lindheimer’s beeblossom.  It was named after the German-born botanist Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer (1801-1879), a political refugee who fled to the U.S. in 1834 and settled in New Braunfels, Texas on the banks of the Comal River where he collected plants and tried to start a botanical garden. Bees and wasps love gaura, like the potter wasp (Ancistrocerus) below.

Although I’ve never grown them (those big fleshy roots are very particular as to handling), I photograph hardy foxtail lilies (Eremurus) whenever I see them, my pollinator for December 3^rd. And whenever I see them, there are always honey bees, below, or bumble bees working the masses of tiny flowers on the big spikes. Economy of scale works!

On December 4^th,I honoured a lovely northeast native: winecups or purple prairie mallow (Callirhoe involucrata). I grew this from seed one year but it did not thrive, perhaps because of my acidic soil. I must try again – look at that happy honey bee!

The northeast native perennial anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) is a superb pollinator plant, attracting myriad butterflies and bees including the orange-belted bumble bees (Bombus ternarius), below. I celebrated it and related hybrids A. ‘Blue Fortune’ and A. ‘Blue Boa’ on December 5^th.

On December 6^th I featured the Virginia native whiteleaf leather flower(Clematis glaucophylla) with a big bumble bee foraging in its pretty flowers. That day, I also related the history of the hashtag # and how it works to aggregate posts on the internet.

My bird pollinators wanted equal time, so on December 7^th I invited a female ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) foraging on the beautiful deep pink Salvia WENDY’S WISH (Salvia hybrid) to be my pollinator pin-up girl.

Of the big milkweed clan, the one that grows on Lake Muskoka’s shores is swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). On December 8^th, I included it and the white-flowered selection ‘Ice Ballet’ with photos of butterflies, like the monarch below, and myriad bees foraging on the small flowers.

On December 9^th I shared a bumble bee foraging on sacred tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) in the Useful Plants Garden at the Montreal Botanical Garden.

Even though they have a new and tongue-trippy botanical name, asters are wonderful pollinator plants. On December 10^th native New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) was my daily selection, hosting the tiny pure green gold sweat bee (Augochlora pura)

Even if you love those big, blowsy double dahlias, be sure to plant some single dahlias (Dahlia spp.) for the bees. They adore them, as you can see from my photo of the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis) on Dahlia ‘Bishop of Oxford’ on December 11th!

My December 12^th post recalled a lovely moment during my 2019 botanical tour of Greece, a visit to a heather-spangled hillside on the Mani peninsula where autumn heather (Erica manipuliflora) was attracting bees.  I came home with a jar of autumn heather honey!  Did you read my trip journal blog about this wonderful Greek tour with the Greek plantsman Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis)?

Very few perennials are as attractive to bees as the native mountain mints. My December 13^th star was Virginia mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum), photographed at the Legacy Prairie at Niagara Parks Botanical Garden.  I wrote a blog about this fabulous garden.

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On December 14^th I honoured the European perennial masterwort (Astrantia spp.), which always has bees buzzing around it in early summer.

There are so many catmints – all wonderful pollinator lures. Thus my December 15^th post featured several photos of low-maintenance catmints (Nepeta spp.), all hosting bumble bees, like the one below on Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’, or honey bees.

Blanket flowers (Gaillardia spp.) derive their common name from their similarity to red and yellow Navajo blankets in the southwest regions where they are native perennials and annuals. All kinds of bees adore my December 16^th pollinator plant, like the bumble bee and hoverfly foraging on Gaillardia x grandiflora, below.

You know there will always be loads of bees around garlic chives (Allium tuberosum), my December 17^th entry. A little weedy, yes, but you can always cut the leaves to use in cooking, like the Chinese do!

I grow my December 18^th  pollinator plant Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, where there are always butterflies or bees on the small flowers up the spike. I especially love the light-purple cultivar ‘Lavendelturm’, but the native species itself is a superb plant, below with bumble bee.

Whether in the garden or a spiky cut flower that dries well, blue sea holly (Eryngium spp.) is a distinctive perennial that also attracts bees, like the carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) in my photo, which was my post for December 19^th.

If you live in the northeast, you are familiar with the fuzzy red fruit clusters of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), my December 20^th  pollinator plant. But that fruit – so nourishing for birds and wildlife in winter – would not be produced on the female shrubs without the bees and butterflies of summer foraging on the greenish-yellow flowers, like the white admiral butterfly (Limenitis arthemis) below.

As Christmas week dawned on December 21^st, I celebrated the history of the poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima). Alas, all I had in my photo files was a lonely little ant foraging on the yellow nectar glands, not the butterflies and bees that evolved with this holiday shrub in its native Mexico.

As the big day got a little closer, my mind was on the cranberries I like to buy from our local bogs in Muskoka. Thus on December 22^nd my pollinator plant was cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) with a honey bee. Oh! And I included my recipe for my annual Christmas dessert, apple-cranberry cheesecake tart.

With the Christmas fuss behind me, on December 29^th I began a week-long series focusing on “DYCs” or “damned yellow composites” – yellow daisies that are confusing alike to those unfamiliar with variations among the hundreds out there, and all of which I grow in my meadows and naturalistic beds at the cottage. My first entry was heliopsis or false oxeye daisy (Heliopsis helianthoides), a rather aggressive native that I like, even though it always hosts red aphids. Fortunately, it attracts lots of pollinators as well, like the feather-legged scoliid wasp Campsomeris plumipes, below.

My second “DYC” on December 30^th was a favourite yellow daisy for early summer, lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), shown with a hoverfly and friend below. Easy, low-maintenance and a good seed provider for hungry birds too.

On New Year’s Eve, I finished my pollinators for the month with the willowy-stemmed grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata)

As a special treat to my nerdiest plant friends on Facebook during Christmas week, I created a special ‘botanagram’ puzzle, a word I coined back in 2014 for some particularly challenging online guessing-game fun. I even wrote a blog about my botanagrams. As for this one, I will save you the trouble of puzzling out the 2-word anagram based on the first letter of the genus name of the numbered plants, and provide the solution below the photo montage, which was solved on ‘the night before Christmas’ by Facebook pals in Seattle WA, Raleigh NC, London UK and Athens.

And that was a wrap for December!  Click here to read November’s pollinator posts.