Category Archives: Wildlife Gardening

Gardening for the Birds

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At this point in a Toronto winter, with loads of snow remaining on the ground and most days still well below freezing, it is such a joy to watch the bird life in my garden. There isn’t the chirpy avian soundtrack of spring, not yet, but the flash of cardinals zooming at full speed right into their nest in the big cedar hedge, the busy foraging of juncos, the darting to and fro of chickadees – it’s all a pleasure. Over the years, I’ve observed the birds here in my garden through my large kitchen windows; at the cottage on Lake Muskoka; in various public gardens; and in the nearby cemetery where I photograph trees and shrubs. In doing so, I’ve compiled a visual record of how gardens can attract birds without using bird feeders. Here are some ideas.

Conifers for Shelter and Food

Birds need places to nest and take shelter in winter, if they’re not migrating. My garden has two eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) at the back of the garden that I planted in the 1990s. They’re not beautiful, they developed multiple trunks and lost limbs and look a little ragged, but the birds do love them, like the male cardinal below.

Between my next-door neighbour’s property and mine is a large white cedar or arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) hedge. This might be the very best garden habitat for birds. We keep it sheared so its growth is dense, helping to protect its inhabitants from the weather and predatory raptors. I’m always amazed that the birds know exactly where their home is inside this long leafy condominium, and fly at very fast speed right at it, disappearing into the lacy branches.  (That purple birdhouse is more for looks – the birds haven’t taken up residence

In autumn, I see birds eating the arborvitae seeds, too, like the house sparrow below.

At our cottage in Muskoka just a few hours north of Toronto, chickadees, below, pine siskins and loads of other birds forage in the white pine trees (Pinus strobus).

Song sparrows with their wacky, beautiful melodies use the pine trees too….

…. as does the occasional ruffed grouse.

Fruit 

There is nothing that attracts more birds to a garden than the fleshy fruit of trees and shrubs.  Of course, that can be a negative if you’re trying to harvest your own grapes or cherries and need to net the fruit to deter birds as it ripens. But in my garden I have a few excellent woody plants whose fruit is dedicated to the birds. The first is crabapple – in my case, a weeping Malus ‘Red Jade’ over my pond (that sadly has likely lived its last summer, with increasingly intractable viral blight).  Its small fruit and proximity to the water has always made it an extra-special treat, for robins….

…. and northern cardinals.

I have a pair of large, native serviceberry shrubs (Amelancher canadensis) that are a cloud of white blossoms in early spring followed by summer fruit that ripens from red to blue. It’s quite delicious, but I rarely get to pick a handful before the fruit has been eaten by robins….

…… or sparrows….

….. or cardinals, like this one tucking into a fruit on my deck railing.

My Washington hawthorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum) is a favourite tree. Though its late spring flowering is not exactly an olfactory treat, its mottled autumn colour and abundant clusters of red fruit (haws) make up for it.  The fruit seems to need some cold weather to reduce the astringency, but I love watching the robins on it….

….. and the cedar waxwings, below. However, it’s usually my garden’s intrepid squirrels that finally strip the tree clean.

Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is one of the most abundant native shrubs in the northeast, but it can be problematic in a garden. In short, it suckers far and wide. Though I grow a select cultivar called Tiger Eyes (‘Bailtiger’) featuring chartreuse foliage followed by lovely, apricot fall colour, it has the same tendency to pop up in surprising places quite removed from the main plant. That’s it below with another bird-dining favourite, white flowered, alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternatifolia) behind it.  It is my favourite shrub of all; I cannot recommend it highly enough where it is native, i.e. throughout much of eastern North America. Interestingly, my neighbour’s pale-pink beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) on the far right, an Asian native, has seeds that feed many birds in winter

Cornus alternifolia produces clusters of dark-blue fruit that are consumed quickly in early summer. 

As for the Tiger Eyes sumac, lots of birds enjoy rooting for the seeds in the fuzzy red fruits, including blue jays….

…. and the cardinal family that lives in the hedge adjacent to it.

I made a little video of the male cardinal foraging on my sumac.  (It’s not easy to hold my little, old Canon SX50 zoom camera steady from my kitchen window, which is 40-50 feet away from the sumac, so I’m always happy when I can capture a scene like this).

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At the cottage on Lake Muskoka, the sumacs are all wild and their suckering doesn’t bother me, except when they try to creep into my meadows. They are not only a favourite browse for white-tailed deer but a valuable autumn-winter food for birds, including black-capped chickadees, below.

This autumn, I was surprised to see a pair of northern flickers on my old fence where the native Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) grows in a tangle. Likely on their migration route, they took turns keeping watch while their mate nibbled on the fruit.  Though it won’t win any awards, I was delighted with this photo showing the male’s yellow tail feathers. 

There are other good native shrubs and trees to attract birds, including Northern spicebush (Lindera benzoin), below, nannyberry (Viburnum lentago), American mountain ash (Sorbus americana),  elderberry (Sambucus pubens, S. canadensis), hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), black cherry (Prunus serotina), winterberry (Ilex verticillata) and various other dogwoods (Cornus racemosa, C. sericea).

And though it cannot be recommended, don’t be surprised to see birds eating mulberries (Morus alba) in older neighbourhoods where these European trees were planted long ago. It’s estimated that more than 60 bird species eat the fruit of mulberry trees– much to the chagrin of those who have to clean the purple stains off their outdoor furniture!  

Flower Seeds and Weeds

Without a doubt, in my experience the best garden plant for providing nutritious seeds for birds is purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). I caught these goldfinches foraging in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden one autumn.

When I posted the video below on Facebook back in 2015, it was eventually shared almost 2 thousand times. My message?  Don’t deadhead your echinaceas!

Here is a flock of goldfinches on my own pollinator garden echinaceas in October 2021.

Goldfinches also love coreopsis seeds, like those of C. lanceolata.

Rudbeckias also offer seed for birds. These goldfinches are on cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata).

In fact, my photo of a goldfinch on that native perennial was featured on a recent cover of The American Gardener magazine.

Canada or creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense), below, may be a pesky, invasive European weed, but there’s no doubt that goldfinches enjoy it – and help to spread it far and wide!

My meadows on Lake Muskoka attract many different birds to feed on flower and grass seeds in late summer and autumn. Wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), my most abundant perennial, attracts goldfinches, below, and chipping sparrows frequent the paths to eat fallen seeds, including those of my big prairie grasses: big bluestem, switch grass and Indian grass.

Ornamental grasses offer seeds for birds, provided they have a place to perch. The sparrow below stood on leadplant (Amorpha canescens) while eating seeds of switch grass (Panicum virgatum).

At the Montreal Botanical Garden, I enjoyed watching house sparrows foraging on the dark seeds of the ornamental millet Pennisetum glaucum ‘Purple Baron’.

Other good choices for seed include oaks for acorns and beech and hickory trees for nuts.

Needless to say, many trees also offer a variety of insects for birds, especially important for springtime feeding of nestlings. Oaks are recommended as a top genus by entomologist/ecologist Douglas Tallamy because of the huge number of insects that feed on them, up to three hundred.

Nectar for Hummingbirds

I’ve already written a blog on good plants for hummingbirds but I made this little video to add some nectar sweetness to this post. It features the ruby-throated hummingbird, which is the only native Canadian hummingbird east of the Rocky Mountains.

Water

Everything needs to drink, and birds are no exception.  So while I don’t have a bird feeder, I do offer water in the form of my old pond. When I dug it in 1987 I had dreams of aquatic plants with gorgeous flowers, and I did grow waterlilies and floating plants for a while. But marauding raccoons were a constant irritant and eventually it was too difficult to lift out heavy pots to store for winter, since the pond is just a few feet deep. So today it’s a giant birdbath and water fountain (must fix the pump!) surrounded by too many weeds and prone to algae in summer, but it is so popular with the birds I cannot imagine my garden without it.  Here it is with a pair of juvenile robins drinking and bathing.

Cardinals love the pond, too.  This is a male and female pair in spring.

And here are cardinals bathing – such fun to watch (from a distance).

I have seen some sweet birdbaths in gardens, like the one below, but a pond fulfils that objective very nicely.

Dead trees and Snags

If you enjoy watching woodpeckers, you’ll know that they often frequent trees that are diseased or damaged, like the red maple below being visited by the hairy woodpecker.

Some are even dead – like my poor ash tree (Fraxinus pensylvanica), a victim of emerald ash borer a few years ago.  But I left the base of the trunk in place, mainly because it would have cost a fortune (more) to cut it to ground level, grind the roots and repair the fence.  It has become a stop on the foraging route of the woodpecker in the video, below.

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Without foliage on the trees, winter is a good time to observe birds in the garden.  On days when the local Cooper’s hawk, below, is searching for a tasty feathered meal, I am usually alerted by the persistent warning squawks of blue jays. It was a thrill to see this raptor perched in my crabapple tree.

This week, I watched chickadees, cardinals and dark-eyed juncos, below, eating the seeds of my next-door neighbour’s beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis).  A big, beautiful, old-fashioned Asian shrub, it also attracts lots of pollinators in June.

But spring will be here before we know it, and the robins will be searching for worms among my flowering bulbs….

… and in the lawn.

And Madame Cardinalis cardinalis will find a flowery forsythia in which to dry off and groom her feathers after a spring dip in my pond, while being serenaded by Monsieur Cardinalis cardinalis  high up in my black walnut tree.  I cannot wait!

Janet’s Daily Pollinators for March

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My long Covid Winter project has come to an end. Spring has sprung and I am ready to be outdoors! I began on November 1st with an entry every day, except for a few days off at Christmas. Altogether, I logged 144 #janetsdailypollinator posts over the months of November, December, January, February and now March. In going through my photo library, I have enough pollinator photos for 4 more months of daily posts, but it’s time to be in the garden. Here are my posts for March, and one GIANT family portrait at the end!

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March came in like a lion… or was it a lamb? I can’t really remember, because March is March: still winter, the odd warm caress of spring, snow flurries, driving rain and the faithful return of the cardinal’s song. On March 1st, I celebrated stiff-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rigida/Oligoneuron rigidum) with honey bees, below, and recalled the way it grew in my beekeeper friend Tom Morrisey’s tallgrass prairie at his farm in Orillia, Ontario. I wrote a blog about Tom & Tina’s wonderful property and his honey harvest there.

On March 2nd I remembered all the honey bees I found feverishly gathering pollen on a southern magnolia (M. grandiflora) while I was wandering around a beach park in New Zealand. And I looked at various other magnolia species and the latest research on their ancestral pollinators.

We love preparing dishes with the leaves of culinary herbs – and bees love herb flowers! March 3rd saw me recounting the many bees I’ve seen on basil, below, as well as oregano, thyme, rosemary and sage.

Many species clematis attract bees and on March 4th I featured several, including Clematis pitcheri (below), C. koreana, C. recta ‘Purpurea’, C. jouiniana ‘Praecox’, C. virginiana and C. heracleifolia.

A favourite native wildflower – and one I grow in part shade at the cottage in Muskoka – was featured on March 5th. Golden alexanders (Zizia aurea) attracts solitary bees, especially Andrena mining bees like the one foraging below.

March 6th was my tribute to the popular European woodland or meadow sages (Salvia nemorosa) like ‘Amethyst’, below, that attract all kinds of bees during their early summer flowering.

“Seven-son flower” always reminds me of martial arts but it’s all about the Chinese translation of the seven flower clusters on the branches. Heptacodium miconioides from China was my March 7th pollinator plant because the bees adore it, especially since it flowers in late summer or early autumn when there isn’t a lot of nectar on offer.

The native subshrub lead plant (Amorpha canescens) starred on March 8th and I featured photos of plants in the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden. That’s a common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) foraging on the flowers, below.

March 9th saw me honouring ‘Jeana’ summer phlox (Phlox paniculata), a much-in-demand cultivar of an old-fashioned North American native that is absolutely irresistible to butterflies and bees. I photographed ‘Jeana’ with her insect admirers at New York Botanical Garden back on August 18, 2016. I also wrote a blog about NYBG you might enjoy reading!

I donned my rubber boots on March 10th and went into the Muskoka wetlands to check out bumble bees and dragonflies on pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata).

On March 11th, I featured hardy border sedums or stonecrops (Sedum spectabile/Hylotelphium telephium) like ‘Autumn Joy’ with pink flowers and succulent leaves.  They are among the best late summer perennials for attracting butterflies and all kinds of bees.

Old-fashioned veronicas or speedwells were my pollinator choice for March 12th.  Bees and wasps love them, whether the common thread-waisted wasp (Ammophila procera) on Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’ in my cottage gardens, below, or bumble bees and honey bees on several other veronicas I featured that day.

On March 13th, I recalled my Victoria, BC childhood and the pungent fragrance of calendulas or pot marigolds (Calendula officinalis) in my mother’s garden. It was an etymology lesson that day, for “Calendar” derives from the Latin ‘calendae’, i.e. first day of the month and also gave its name to calendula,  i.e. the “flower of the calends”. Because the plant flowers every month of the year in the Mediterranean ,where it is native, the ancient Romans named it for the tax assessed on the first day of each month – the calend. 

I went for a ‘confusing nomenclature’ lesson on March 14th with Russian sage, Perovskia atriplicifolia. You see, it’s not really Russian but native to western China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey. And it’s no longer called Perovskia, but Salvia yangii. Revisions to familiar old names based on genetic sequencing tend to irritate gardeners (not taxonomists), but bees don’t care at all. For them, it’s just the same nectar-filled flowers with a different name.

“Beware the Ides of March”. Every high school English student remembers that warning from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. For my March 15th post, I chose to go with “bee ware” for the Ides of March and picked bee-friendly, native red maple (Acer rubrum) with its abundant, early spring pollen and nectar for bees like the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis), below. This date also initiated my final 16 days of the series, each of which will focus on a pollinator relationship for spring.

March 16th celebrated winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis), the earliest spring bulb and a great source of pollen for bees. I also explained how this plant exhibits a temperature-mediated plant movement called thermonasty, the yellow flowers closing in cold, cloudy weather and opening wide in warm sunshine.

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Willows (Salix spp.) were my focus on March 17th, being that they’re such important early-flowering sources of pollen for bees provisioning their nests, like the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) on pussy willow below.

On March 18th Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) from Europe was my spring star, its clusters of tiny, yellow flowers a welcome sight for bees and hover flies. I also offered a little lesson in ancient botanical nomenclature, from Theophrastus to Gerard.

The first crocuses emerged just in time for my March 19th post honouring them as abundant early pollen sources for honey bees. I also gave a little visual lesson on the #1 threat to honey bee colonies: varroa mites.

On the first day of spring, March 20th, I honoured a sweet-scented, very early-blooming shrub that’s been in my garden for decades, Farrer’s viburnum (V. farreri), named for explorer Reginald Farrer.  There are always butterflies and bees searching out nectar on the pale-pink blossoms. I wrote a blog on this plant, too.

On March 21st I posted about the little blue-flowered bulbs called Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) that appear briefly in my front garden in the 2-month parade of spring bulbs. Their bright-blue pollen and nectar is collected by bees (including native spring bees Colletes and Andrena) and butterflies. Curiosity about the interaction between native spring bees and this non-native bulb prompted me to write a 2017 blog called The Siberian Squill and the Cellophane Bee.

Bee-friendly early spring Lungworts (Pulmonaria spp.) starred on March 22nd, along with an etymology on their common and Latin names, rooted way back in the day when the white spots on the leaves of the herbalist’s P. officinalis  suggested lung disease. Fortunately, medicine has become a little more evidence-based today.

“I was born in Amelanchier alnifolia”. That was my opening line for my March 23rd post, and of course it referenced my birth in the city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, or what the Cree called Kaminasaskwatominaskwak, “the place where many saskatoon berry bushes grow”.  I also explored why so many serviceberries seem to bear abundant summer fruit – without ever having had pollinators visit. That’s because (unlike the one below, A. humilis, at our cottage on Lake Muskoka) some Amelanchier species are ‘apomicts’, producing fruit asexually.  If you want to read more about my visit to Wanuskewin Heritage Park outside Saskatoon, ‘where many saskatoon berry bushes grow’, this is my blog from 2018.

Bees love grape hyacinths (Muscari spp.) and so do I. On March 24th I featured the fragrant blue-flowered bulbs and all the butterflies, bees and flies that forage in the bell-shaped flowers.

On March 25th I paid tribute to crabapples (Malus), especially my little weeping ‘Red Jade’ that grows beside my lily pond. It has its problems, but on those odd-numbered years when it flowers (2017, 2019, 2021!) – being an alternate-bearer like some of its biennial-bearing wild crabapple ancestors of eastern Europe – bees and butterflies enjoy foraging on its white blossoms. Later, birds and squirrels and even raccoons enjoy the tiny red fruits.

Despite having previously posted four different alliums (onion family) for pollinators in my series, on March 26th  I featured several more possibilities, beginning with Allium giganteum hosting a carpenter bee, below, but also A. cristophii, A. ‘Purple Sensation’, A. obliquum, A. nigrum, A. ‘Millenium’ and, from the veggie garden, chives, A.schoenoprasum and regular onions, A. cepa.

Blackberries! My March 27th post was a bit confessional. The fact is, I fight with my native Allegheny blackberries (Rubus allegheniensis) at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, below with a native Andrena bee, and secretly loved the jam I made as a kid in British Columbia from the highly invasive Himalayan blackberries (R. armeniacum).

Because I loved watching a rain-soaked bumble bee nectaring in the pendulous blossoms of redvein enkianthus (E. campanulatus) in the David Lam Asian garden at Vancouver’s UBC Botanical Garden, my post on March 28th paid tribute to that beautiful Asian shrub.

On March 29th, I featured a beautiful, big Asian shrub that my next-door neighbour grows – appropriately called beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis, recently renamed Linnaea). I always think of it as my “borrowed scenery”, to quote a Japanese  design concept known as ‘shakkei’.  June bees and swallowtail butterflies love the scented flowers.   

Most of my garden ‘weeds’ seem to get on very well without the help of pollinators, at least none that I notice. But Virginia waterleaf (Hydrophyllum virginanum) is a little native perennial that I did not plant – i.e. a ‘weed’ in some people’s estimation – but bumble bees are so happy that it has found little niches here and there in damp, partly shaded soil. It was my pollinator plant for March 30th. 

The final pollinator post of my Covid winter series for March 31st was a bulb I grow and love in my spring garden, as do the bees.  Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’ is a commercial cultivar of great camas, an edible bulb native to the Pacific northwest that is nevertheless hardy in most of the northeast.  In Victoria, B.C. where I grew up, the parent species is part of the Garry Oak ecosystem, along with the smaller Camassia quamash. I wrote a blog about that back in 2014. In my front garden, the tall lavender blue flower spikes look gorgeous with late tulips; in my back garden, it pairs with alliums. If it has a fault, it’s that the flowers are rather fleeting – being so beautiful, you wish they’d last much longer.

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So that’s it. One-hundred-and-forty-four posts later, I can satisfy my love of geometry and photo montages with a BIG display of all my Covid winter pollinators. I hope you enjoyed the ones you read about, and don’t forget, if you ever want to see them again – on Facebook, Instagram or anywhere on the internet – you just have to click on the magical hashtag #janetsdailypollinator, and up they’ll come, buzzing, fluttering, rolling in pollen and probing deep into flowers for sweet nectar.

Janet’s Daily Pollinators for February

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Winter is slowly coming to an end and I’ve completed the fourth full month of my 2020-21 Covid project – 28 more pollinator vignettes on my Facebook and Instagram accounts.  (If you missed the other months, here are the links for November, December and January.  And if you’re on Instagram or Facebook, you can access all of my posts with ALL of the additional photos by typing into the search bar #janetsdailypollinator. It’s hashtag magic!) And this is the February family photo of the plants I mention below!  

I began the unusually snowy month on Feb. 1st with calamint (Calamintha nepeta ssp. nepeta), with its clouds of tiny white flowers always buzzing with bees.  In that post, I also included some photos of a beekeepers’ honey harvest tutorial at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

On Feb. 2nd I honoured redbuds (Cercis spp.), whose magenta or white pea flowers always attract lots of bees and hummingbirds to the trees, including the unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) below.

Native ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) was my star for Feb. 3rd, a big shrub that attracts many native bees and honey bees to the flower clusters, like the andrena bee below.

On Feb. 4th, I showed off a honey bee performing acrobatic maneuvers to gather the bright orange pollen of male asparagus flowers (Asparagus officinalis). On that day, I also included my recipe for a favourite dinner party course, curried creamy of asparagus soup.

Bees love fragrant lavender and so do gardeners. Feb. 5th featured a few species, including English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), below, with a honey bee – as well as ways to design with lavender. 

Feb. 6th paid homage to all kinds of clovers and sweet clovers, beginning with Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens) hosting a honey bee, below.

On Feb. 7th, I took a fast hop to New Zealand to recall my great joy in 2018 at finding a lonely honey bee on manuka (Leptospermum scoparium) at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. That white-flowered shrub is the source of the famed (and very strong) manuka honey! Check out my blog about this part of NZ, titled Bay of Islands – Māoris, Kauris and Kia Ora.

Purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea) was featured on Feb.8th. This gorgeous tallgrass prairie denizen is a favourite with all kinds of native N. American bees, including the bumble bee, below.

Blue mist bush, bluebeard, blue spirea…. call it what you will, but Caryopteris x clandonensis, my pollinator plant for Feb. 9th, is a stunning, late-flowering shrub with blue flowers that bees adore.  The variegated one with a bumble bee, below, is ‘Summer Sorbet’.

On Feb. 10th, dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) were celebrated as a pollinator food source, not a weedy scourge.  Oh… and I had to include a photo of my granddaughter that day with her springtime dandelion fairy crown!

Buckwheat  anyone? On Feb. 11th I recalled a visit to an entire field of buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) in Collingwood, Ontario in order to photograph the honey bees from the nearby hives belonging to Curry’s Farm Market. What a sight that was!

Nectar-rich cranesbills or perennial geraniums starred on Feb. 12th when I found every bee on every possible species in my photo library (9 in all), including the mourning widow, Geranium phaeum, below, with its precarious perch for a honey bee.

Tropical lantanas are generally good butterfly and bee plants to grow as annuals in colder regions, but hummingbirds like them too, as I showed on Feb. 13th with trailing lantana (L. montivedensis), below.

For Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14th, I picked one of my favourite pollinator perennials, purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea). I have it growing in my front yard pollinator garden in Toronto where it attracts butterflies and bees for weeks and weeks in midsummer.

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I rarely see a cornflower without a bee, so on Feb. 15th I celebrated annual and perennial cornflowers (Centaurea species), including the four below, counter clockwise from top left:  mountain bluet (C. montana); big-head cornflower (C. macrocephala); annual cornflower (C. cyanus); and Persian cornflower (C. hypoleuca ‘John Coutts’).  

Rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium) is an unusual-looking prairie perennial which makes an architectural addition to a border, where it often attracts wasps and flower flies as well as bees and butterflies. It was my choice for Feb. 16th.

Borage (Borago officinalis) was the daily pollinator for Feb. 17th – an edible annual for herb gardens and much-loved by bees.

On Feb. 18th, I made a little joke about sneezing in Covid times (don’t do it!!) to introduce perennial sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), so-called because the leaves were traditionally crushed and dried to make a snuff.

On Feb. 19th, I chose Agapanthus with a honey bee to lead a photo parade of some of my favourite scenes from gardens in New Zealand, where agapanthus grows like a weed. I focused especially on artist Josie Martin’s spectacular Giant’s House Garden in Akaroa, which I celebrated with a blog called The Giant’s House – A Mosaic Master Class .

Do I have a favourite pollinator plant? It’s a toss-up between the orange-flowered butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) I featured on Nov. 5th and wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa), my star for Feb. 20th. Since I call the west meadow at my cottage “Monarda Meadow” for this easy-going perennial, it’s only natural that I enjoy the tremendous number of pollinators attracted to its shaggy pink flowers, from bumble bees (below) to butterflies to clearwing hummingbird moths to actual hummingbirds. (Oh, I wrote a blog about it, too, called A Balm for the Bees!)

Feb. 21st saw me explaining the unusual nectar guides on a horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) inflorescence, which show yellow when nectar-filled and unpollinated – yellow being a colour bees can see – but turn red (bees can’t see red) after pollination.

Obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana) and a lot of nectar-robbery was on my mind on Feb. 22nd, featuring this northeast native with its moisture-loving, wandering ways.  That’s the eastern Carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), below, stealing a little nectar by piercing the sepals to get at the nectaries at the top of the tubular flowers.

So many gardeners love old-fashioned peonies, but the doubles aren’t accessible to pollinators. So on Feb. 23rd, I celebrated bees on single and semi-double herbaceous and tree peonies (Paeonia spp.). By the way, that’s the appropriately-named brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis), below.

South African honey bush (Melianthus major) is hardy on the west coast and a lot of the garden cognoscenti enjoy growing it for its hummingbird- and bee-friendly flowers. My Feb. 24th pin-up pollinator was an Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna) I found nectaring on this plant at the University of California Botanic Garden at Berkeley.

One of the most popular “filler” plants of the past few decades is also popular with bees and butterflies! I’m referring to my pollinator plant for Feb. 25th, the tender South American perennial Verbena bonariensis.

On Feb. 26th I paid homage to my very best plant for attracting ruby-throated hummingbirds, Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Bloom’, as well as the purple hybrid ‘Amistad’.  By the way, if you want to design a garden for hummingbirds, have a look at my blog called Planting a Hummingbird Menu.

Who was “Joe Pye”? A native American herbalist, it’s believed. We don’t really know but on Feb. 27th, I celebrated a few native N. American species and cultivars of Joe Pye weed and the genus Eutrochium (formerly Eupatorium). Below, a monarch butterfly enjoys E. maculatum ‘Gateway’.

My last plant for February was the black locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia), with its fragrant, bee-friendly June blossoms.

Janet’s Daily Pollinators for January

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I’ve just completed the third month of my 2020-21 Covid winter project – another thirty of my favourite pollinators posted in photo stories on my Facebook and Instagram accounts.  Here’s their #janetsdailypollinator family photo!

I began on January 2nd (I took New Year’s Day off) with a continuation from December of the “damned yellow composites” or “DYCs” (yellow daisies that look frustratingly similar) that grow in my meadows at the cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto.  It was cup plant’s turn (Silphium perfoliatum), complete with bumble bees and, yes, seed-stealing chipmunks.

On January 3rd, I profiled a steadfast old favourite: biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta) with a pearl crescent butterfly. It was the first wildflower I sowed at the cottage to hold the soil on the slope That first year, way back in 2004, I had thousands of yellow daisies. What a joyful summer that was. I celebrated it last winter in my musical Van Morrison blog, ‘Brown Eyed Girl(s)’.

The late summer native sweet blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) was my yellow daisy for January 4th, with a tiny hoverfly aboard. Such an elegant perennial – my favourite of the entire clan.

Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ was my DYC for January 5th, featuring a honey bee.  I grow this tall hybrid in my front yard pollinator garden in Toronto and in my meadows on Lake Muskoka

Bumble bee queens love native blue false indigo (Baptisia australis), my pollinator plant for January 6th, aka Epiphany, or in the Greek Orthodox church, Theophany.  In fact, Baptisia comes from the same root as baptism or ‘bapto’ meaning to change by immersion – since Baptisia is a dye plant.   

Continuing in the same vein, January 7th is the Greek Feast Day of the Synaxis of Agios Ioannis, John the Baptist’s birthday, so I celebrated several species of St. John’s wort (Hypericum spp.) beginning with Bombus auricomis, the black-and-gold bumble bee on Hypericum frondosum.   I had never seen that bumble bee before, but that made sense because I photographed it in the amazing Mary Livingston Ripley garden in the Smithsonian gardens in Washington D.C.

Recognizing that January is a cold month, I hopped a virtual flight to Kenya and Los Angeles on January 8th, where I found lots of beautiful aloes with sunbirds (below), hummingbirds, mockingbirds and honey bees.  By the way, I wrote a long blog on my trip to the Los Angeles County Arboretum featuring so many aloes! Have a look.

January 9th saw me reporting on robberies – honey bees and carpenter bees carrying out nectar theft on the slender corollas of hostas in my garden.

On January 10th, I recalled a hike I took near Tucson where I found a cactus turret bee (Diadasia australis) rolling in the pollen of Engelmann’s prickly-pear cactus (Opuntia engelmannii).

Bird vetch, cow vetch or tufted vetch (Vicia cracca) may be a common weed, but bees love it, as I illustrated, below, on January 11th.  

You can grow roses and still host bees – but you have to choose species and cultivars that have exposed stamens so bees can gather pollen. That means forgoing the doubles that bees can’t use. On January 12th, I gave some examples, including the dog rose (R. canina), below.

On January 13th I celebrated the wonderful nectar-rich Sicilian honey lily (Allium siculum), also known as Nectaroscordum. Even rain-soaked red-belted bumble bees (Bombus rufocinctus) are unable to resist its charms!

Colourful zinnias, include Z. elegans ‘Zowie Yellow Flame’, below, hosting a monarch butterfly, were my pollinator choice for January 14th.

On January 15th, I recalled finding loads of honey bees foraging on the well-named “bee bee tree” or Korean evodia (Tetradium daniellii) at Burlington’s Royal Botanical Garden one August.

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) is well-known for its role hosting monarch butterfly caterpillars through their metamorphosis. I celebrated this native plant on January 16th. And if you didn’t read my summer 2019 saga of our little Monarch chrysalids Bella and Bianca, you can find it here. But be warned, it’s sad.

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January 17th saw me showing off the most beautiful pollen ever in the pollen sacs or “corbiculae” of my little honey bee foraging on crimson-pink Knautia macedonica.

The big, beautiful chalices of tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), being pollinated by a big Eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), below, was the subject of my January 18th post

The European woolcarder bee (Anthidium manicatum) is not my favourite insect. Males police their flower territories aggressively, chasing away native bees from the blossoms it likes, especially rusty foxglove (Digitalis ferruginea) below. That was my January 19th post.

On January 20th, I took a little trip to South Africa to enjoy native Cape honey bees (Apis mellifera capensis) on native calla lilies (Zantadeschia aethiopica), below. And I included a blog I wrote on Johannesburg artist William Kentridge’s fabulous garden.

The next day, January 21st, I travelled all the way to New Zealand to find non-native bumble bees (imported from the UK) on native hebes. One of my hebes, white-flowered H. salicifolia, was growing on the hillside overlooking the dock for our fantastic overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound in Fiordland, one of my best travel experiences ever.

Peaches! Who doesn’t love juicy peaches? On January 22nd I paid tribute to a hardy variety of this luscious fruit (Prunus persica ‘Reliance’), being pollinated by a honey bee, below. I even included my recipe for spicy peach-and-pepper relish.

I recalled a divine hike to the top of a North Carolina Blue Ridge mountain called Craggy Gardens on January 23rd. There I was lucky to find bumble bees and butterflies on the beautiful Catawba rhododendron or mountain rosebay (R. catawbiense).

Nectar-rich lindens, aka lime trees or basswoods (Tilia spp.), were my focus on January 24th. I also included the latest research on bumble bee death below these magnificent trees.

On January 25th I celebrated the beautiful, butterfly-friendly, annual Mexican daisy (Tithonia rotundifolia).

Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firedance’ with a bumble bee was my pin-up pollinator plant for January 26th.

It was a blue day on January 27th – blue for California lilac or Ceanothus, that is! And I told a little beekeeping story about hives on a hotel’s roof

Who doesn’t love old-fashioned hollyhocks (Alcea rosea)?  Bees love gathering pollen from those big, silky blossoms, as I demonstrated on January 28th.

Since he did a lot of experimentation with them, I cued up Charles Darwin on January 29th for my post on toadflax (Linaria vulgaris).  And I recalled a peek into the hives at baby bees at the University of Guelph Honey Bee Research Centre.

Luscious lupines – both wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), below, and Russell hybrid lupine (L. polyphyllus) starred in my post for January 30th – along with bumble bees, of course. And I couldn’t mention lupines without my blog about Miss Rumphius, the lupine lady.

In researching my post for January 31st, I finally learned the meaning of the common name of the tall prairie perennial Silphium laciniatum, i.e. “compass plant”. Yes, it’s the leaves. And because the finest compass plants I’ve ever seen were at Chicago’s Lurie Garden, I linked to my blog about that spectacular, Piet Oudolf-designed garden in Millennium Park.

And that’s it for January! Three months of my Covid winter project down, only two to go!

Janet’s Pollinators for December

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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 1st 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 2nd 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 3rd. 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 4th,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 5th.

On December 6th 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 7th 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 8th, 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 9th 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 10th 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 12th 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 13th 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 14th 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 15th 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 16th 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 17th entry. A little weedy, yes, but you can always cut the leaves to use in cooking, like the Chinese do!

I grow my December 18th  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 19th.

If you live in the northeast, you are familiar with the fuzzy red fruit clusters of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), my December 20th  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 21st, 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 22nd 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 29th 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 30th 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.

1 – Salix caprea with unequal cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis)
2 – Echium wildprettii with honey bee (Apis mellifera)
3 – Aesculus parviflora with black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)
4 – Enkianthus campanulatus with red-belted bumble bee (Bombus rufocinctus)
5 – Helenium autumnale with honey bee (Apis mellifera)
6 – Cercis occidentalis with Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna)
7 – Verbena bonariensis with monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus)
8 – Scabiosa caucasica with brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis)
9 – Rhododendron saluense with bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii)
10 – Iris fulva with honey bee (Apis mellifera)
11 – Magnolia macrophylla var. ashei with megachilid bee (Megachile)
12 – Tilia x euchlora with (Toxomerus marginatus)
 
SEAEHCVSRIMT  = CHRISTMAS EVE
 
6-Cercis occidentalis
5-Helenium autumnale
9-Rhododendron saluense
10-Iris fulva
8-Scabiosa caucasica
12-Tilia x euchlora
11-Magnolia macrophylla var. ashei
3-Aesculus parviflora
1-Salix caprea
 
4-Enkianthus campanulatus
7-Verbena bonariensis
2-Echium wildprettii

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