Tiny, But Mighty, Pollinators

It's Pollinator Week, so it seems like a perfect time to write about pollinators.  Little pollinators, to be more specific.

The first spring after we moved into The Land of the Giant Trees, small white flowers with yellow centers appeared in relative abundance around the yard.  Although I was pretty sure these were some sort of fleabane (Erigeron sp.), I wasn't sure which one.

"Are they useful for pollinators?" Prairie Boy kept asking, "Because they look rather weedy."  The question amused and irritated me.  We have all been brainwashed to think that almost any plant that grows without being purchased from somewhere is a "weed".  I'm trying hard to uproot this attitude from my own psyche, but it's well established and deeply rooted, even for me.  

Despite my amusement about Prairie Boy's question, I had trouble answering it.  My instinct was to say yes, the fleabane was useful for pollinators since these plants were native, but I honestly wasn't seeing much action on the flowers.  No honey bees.  No bumble bees.  No butterflies.  (Although that last observation wasn't really fair, since we weren't seeing any butterflies anywhere.)

Surely SOMETHING was using the fleabane!

It seemed like a good idea to identify which fleabane we had.  It turned out to be Philadelphia Fleabane (Erigeron philadelphicus), a biennual. Now I could learn more about the plant and know what to expect from it in future years.

I started watching the blooms more closely...and I started noticing quite a bit of activity on the them.  However, almost all the visitors were tiny little insects that I literally couldn't see from very far away.  No wonder it didn't look like there was much activity on the fleabane until I started looking closely!  

The aster-like flowers of Philadelphia Fleabane are relatively small, about 3/4-1" in diameter, and most of the insects were MUCH smaller than the flowers.  In fact, many were so small that I had trouble identifying them much beyond "flying insect" with just my eyes.  As the days and weeks went by, though, it was obvious these tiny animals were, in fact, pollinators - and they were excellent pollinators at that.  The flowers developed into healthy seed heads in short order.

Eventually I started using my camera to focus on the tiny pollinators of Philadelphia Fleabane and other small flowers, trying to learn the identify of these minuscule creatures.  It's an amazing world that exists literally right alongside us - and yet most of us are completely unaware of these important little creatures who live inches from us.

As I explored this minute world further, I found a varied cast of characters.  Not only were there pollinators, but there were predators and parasitoids and even passers-by, who just seemed to be stopping in the neighborhood for a rest and a quiet "think".

For example, in the photo above, there is a Georgia Mason Bee (Osmia georgica) in the middle of the photo.  There is also a Club-horned Wasp (Sapyga centrata) in the upper left, a Harvestman (a.k.a. Daddy Longlegs) below that, a Crab Spider on the bloom just below and to the right of the mason bee, a tiny wasp about to land on that same bloom, and some other insect hiding on the other side of that blossom that I can't quite make out.  Any of these insects can be acting as pollinators as they move across the flowers, although the mason bee and the wasp are the ones we would traditionally categorize that way.  

Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) is another native plant that I didn't see pollinators using until I started looking more closely - and with a camera.  This member of the iris family has beautiful blue, but tiny, flowers.  They average about 1/2" in diameter.

In the photo above, a small Blue-eyed Grass flower is being pollinated by a tiny sweat bee (Lasioglossum sp.).....

and, in this second photo, another small Blue-eyed Grass flower is being pollinated by a tiny Thin-lined Calligrapher (Toxomerus boscii), a syrphid fly which is not only a pollinator as an adult, but a fierce aphid predator in its larval stage.

One of our native spireas, Meadowsweet (Spiraea alba), is another plant whose small flowers often attract small pollinators to them.  Each individual Meadowsweet flower is less than 1/4" across, although these small flowers are clustered in much larger, showy panicles.

It's easy for us to see the Emerald Flower Scarab (Trichiotinus lunulatus) pollinating the Meadowsweet flowers above, but the tiny, black Tumbling Flower Beetle (Mordella sp.) just beside it is also a potent pollinator, despite the fact that this little creature measures only about 1/4", just like each individual Meadowsweet flower it visits.

Goldenrods are yet another example of plants with showy, gorgeous blooms...that actually consist of tiny individual flowers.  They often attract tiny pollinators, too.

Here is a cloud of tiny sweat bees (Lasioglossum sp.) pollinating the flowers on Wreath Goldenrod (Solidago caesia) last October. Lasioglossum bees are fairly common tiny, but mighty, pollinators.

I was taught about the role of insects in pollination by learning about the Western Honey Bee, (Apis mellifera) which is actually a fairly large bee.  I'm not a gambler, but I'd be willing to place a good-sized bet that you learned about pollination as a function of the European honey bee, too.  Did you realize that honey bees are not native in North America, and that many folks consider them an invasive species?!  

So how did the plants on this continent get pollinated before Europeans brought honey bees over with them?  Our native pollinators, that's how, and many of these native pollinators are TINY.  Our native pollinators evolved with our native plants to do the job that needed to be done, and they are exceptionally good at doing their job. 

Check your flowers this summer.  Look past the "giant" bumble bees and the "large" honey bees for the smaller pollinators.   Then take a moment to let yourself get lost in wonder at the Lilliputian worlds all around us. It's pretty close to magic for me. 

  

 

 

Color Clash: Where Do I Go From Here?

I'm not normally the sort of gardener who obsesses over clashing colors in my flower beds.  In fact, I'm rather an "anything goes if I like it" sort of person.  However, I find myself being challenged by color clashes in my front yard this spring.

Specifically, I have a couple plants that I absolutely adore:  downy phlox (Phlox pilosa), a beautiful soft purplish pink bloomer that goes from December through June, and Indian pinks (Spigelia marilandica), a graphically spectacular bloom of bright red with yellow highlights.  For better or worse, because I love both of them, I planted both of them in my front flower bed...pretty close to each other.

And they clash.  Even to my eye, they clash.  (The phlox is on the left, the Indian pinks are on the right, and a Darrow's blueberry is in the middle.)

I guess I figured that one of them wouldn't do so well, leaving just one for me to enjoy, but they fooled me!

Now I have a dilemma.  Which should I transplant, if either?

The downy phlox provides great color for months AND it stays low.  It blends well with foliage of the Darrow's blueberry subshrubs (Vaccinium darrowii) that are also doing well in that bed and with the spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) and the blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) that bloom spectacularly in the front gardens during the spring.

The Indian pinks bloom for a much shorter period of time than the downy phlox, but I have a special place in my heart for them.  I've tried them unsuccessfully in both my Mobile and in my Clearwater, Kansas, gardens, so having them do well here is exciting.  Truthfully, I'm a little scared to transplant them and risk watching them wither in a different spot.

The first time I saw Indian pinks was on a garden tour in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they provided a thick, blooming carpet on a shady hillside.  I've never forgotten that spectacular sight.

While the Indian pinks clash with the downy phlox (and truthfully with the Darrow's blueberry too), they look great with the native columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) that seems to have found a happy home in my garden where it has started to seed itself about a bit.

So far the columbine hasn't seeded itself close to the downy phlox, but it would clash, too, if they grew in close proximity.

So, fellow gardeners, any thoughts?  I won't promise to follow your advice, but I value it nonetheless!  Maybe your thoughts will help me clarify my own.....

Acceptable and Unacceptable Changes to the Neighborhood Landscape

At the beginning of June, we will have lived in this house for 3 years, although I didn't start gardening in the yard until the fall of that first year.

This is what the front yard looked like in mid April, 6 weeks before we moved in....

While the yard was neatly trimmed and mowed back then, I found it sterile and boring.  Naturally, when I began gardening, I started adding native plants and removing non-natives.  As usual, I had more of a general idea of what I wanted the garden and yard to be, rather than any firm plan.  Most of all I just wanted my yard to be a small wildlife refuge in the midst of suburbia.  And I wanted it to be pretty, too, if at all possible.

I kept the huge canopy trees, a southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) and a laurel oak (Quercus laurifolia).  They are both native and, while I probably wouldn't have chosen either species to put in their spots, they add gravitas and presence to the yard.  Besides 3 dwarf yaupons (Ilex vomitoria) and a few of the lawn weeds, they were also the only native plants growing in the front.

Since those first days, I've added a laundry list of natives to the front gardens, including shrubs (oakleaf hydrangeas, Virginia sweetspire, sweet pepperbush, dwarf Florida dogwood, wax myrtle, Darrow's blueberry, and a deciduous holly), ferns (southern shield fern, leatherleaf fern, and southern woodfern), perennials (columbine, blue eyed grass, golden ragwort, little brown jug, lyreleaf sage, Indian pinks, Walter's violets, woodland phlox, downy phlox, garden phlox, green and gold, Louisiana iris, mouse-ear coreopsis one, mouse ear coreopsis two, spiderwort, Gaillardia, Florida scrub skullcap, golden zizia, bluestem goldenrod, showy goldenrod, regal catchfly, powderpuff mimosa, dense blazingstar, native lantana, white Baptisia, butterfly milkweed, and fogfruit), and even a grass (Elliott's lovegrass).  I'll spare you all the scientific names - this time!

Here's a recent photo of the front yard....

Only now are the garden beds beginning to show up and look like gardens.  "A year to sleep, a year to creep, a year to leap."  The old maxim holds true yet again.

Having added such a wide variety and large number of plants, it's odd to me what people notice and comment about in my front gardens.  I had a neighbor tell me how much she liked the "yellow flower", golden ragwort (Packera aurea), shortly after I planted it next to the sidewalk, under the magnolia. 

Ironically, I love the foliage of this plant, which is low, dark green, shiny, and rich looking to my eye...but I don't particularly care for the flowers.  I do love their cheerful presence early in the growing season, though.  Golden ragwort are the first native flowers to bloom in my garden. 

Recently, a woman who came by to pick up wild strawberry plants I was giving away commented how much she liked my columbine and blue eyed grass.  That made my day!  She even knew the names!

Here's one clump of the blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) she was admiring, by the front porch, ...

...and a closeup of blue-eyed grass blossoms in the shade nearby.

Then here's a picture of the other species she was admiring, eastern red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), taken a couple weeks ago when it was first starting to bloom.

As much as I love blue-eyed grass and columbine, I am surprised that no one has ever mentioned my downy phlox (Phlox pilosa), which I think is beautiful.  A tidy mound of cotton candy pink at the front of the flower bed, this classy little plant blooms nonstop from December through to the end of May and even into June.  Perhaps to most eyes it just looks like a standard annual bedding plant?

The spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis), which is spectacular right now, doesn't get much mention either - although another neighbor has started telling me when he sees it popping up in wild areas around the neighborhood, encouraging me to go dig it up and add it to my gardens.  Since he lives 2 doors down from me, I figure he must like it at least a little or he wouldn't be encouraging me to plant more.

In particular, though, one plant has caused unexpected reactions:  powderpuff mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa), a relative of catclaw sensitive briar, for those of my friends who garden in the prairie.  Greg loves groundcovers, so we thought we'd try putting this low growing plant, with its pretty foliage and its blooms that look like sparkling pink pompoms, up front.  We are encouraging it to spread out and fill in the hell strip between the sidewalk and the street.  To our eyes, it's prettier than weedy grass any day! 

Ironically, no one seems to notice the blossoms (which are, in my opinion, very cute and very hard to miss), but the foliage makes people uncomfortable - superficially it looks too similar to chamberbitter (Phyllanthus urinaria), a.k.a. gripeweed, a common lawn weed down here.

Unfortunately, I inadvertently played into this concern by planting the first two powderpuffs at the base of a newly planted wax myrtle.  I didn't take the time to clear a large, carefully delineated "bed" for the powderpuff to spread into.  I've done my best to keep the grass weeded out of the spreading groundcover, and the powderpuffs have filled in marvelously well...but there isn't a defined edge to help people "read" this part of the landscape easily.  That was a mistake on my part.

I'm going to keep working on the powderpuff, but another element I added to our front landscape is slated for removal:  the small brush pile under the big laurel oak - at the base of its trunk in the photo below. 

Living in such a high humidity environment, many woody branches are covered with fascinating, feathery mini-gardens of lichen.  When several small branches ornamented in lichen "lace" fell in the front yard, I couldn't bear to put them out for the city to pick up.  Instead I used them to construct a small brush pile towards the back of the bed.  Here is a photo of a branch covered in lichen that fell in our yard...

...and here is a closeup of that lichen.

Several people have asked why I'm leaving "that pile" there and I've taken the time to tell them about the benefits of brush piles, but I've decided to move the pile around to the backyard where it's nobody's business but ours.  The pile's been growing a little faster than I was planning, anyway, as more branches have fallen out of the oak.  I still can't bring myself to send those gorgeous lichens off with the city dump trucks!

Despite my occasional misstep, the plants I've put in the front gardens are taking hold and growing well, getting taller and broader, blooming more fully.  I'm far from the world's best landscape or garden designer, so my color and form combinations are rather haphazard, but I get a buzz of pleasure now when I drive up to our house or walk outside.  For example, when I left the house this morning, I noticed a towhee foraging among the skullcaps by the sidewalk, and there are almost always at least a few butterflies, native bees, or honeybees diligently working the flowers.  Little brown skinks commonly rustle through the leaf mulch and green anoles prowl the shrubs and perennials, males puffing out their salmon-colored throats in displays of pride and power during these lengthening spring days.

I hope my human neighbors come to enjoy my wilding landscape.  I love that the wildlife is making itself at home outside my house...and it makes this yard home for me now, too. 

Blooms in the Beginning of March

Sometimes a gardener just wants to share some pretties from their garden...and I guess that's where I am tonight.  So here goes....

In early spring, it's always fun to see the bare branches of red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) transform from sticks to feathery fans, highlighted with big, blowsy, red bloom spikes.  Hummingbirds apparently love red buckeye blooms, which are rumored to open just as hummingbird migration begins, but I rarely seem to plant mine where I have an opportunity to watch that interaction.  I've got my hopes up this year, though, as I just found out today that hummers have been spotted along the Gulf Coast in the last few days.

I have no idea which violet (Viola sp.) this next little guy is, but I really enjoy its plucky blooms.  A small group of these came in as "stowaways" in a pot with the white baptisia that is towering over it.  They've done very well.  The diminutive size and long, narrow, arrow-shaped leaves are quite different from most violets I am familiar with.

Not far from the plucky violet is an Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis), whose richly serene, blue blooms are being regularly visited by the little southeastern blueberry bees (Habropoda laboriosa) these days.

How about a perennial that blooms for 2 1/2 months and counting?  The downy phlox (Phlox pilosa) have been blooming since before Christmas and they show no signs of slowing down.  In fact, I'd say they are prettier now than ever. 

I have 4 of these beauties right now - and I'd really like at least another 3 or 4.  In Kansas this plant ran through the beds quite a bit for me and it didn't last very long.  It seems to be acting quite differently here, staying in place and getting stronger, not weaker, as time goes on.  The foliage is nice, too, even when the plant isn't blooming.

Under the large southern magnolia tree out front, next to the sidewalk, was a bare spot that makes the term "dry shade" seem optimistic.  The magnolia roots are so thick in the area that finding pockets of actual soil was a challenge.  I knew the root competition would be fierce, but still I was hoping to find a plant that would give this garden bed a little more "sidewalk appeal".   The golden ragwort (Packera aurea) has really performed like an ace here. 

The flowers aren't, to be truthful, my favorite, but I love the rounded, shiny, dark green leaves that look good throughout the year.  I'm guessing that within 2-3 years, the 6 individual plants will start growing together, giving a more cohesive feel to this patch.

Azaleas are in full blush and the camellias are just finishing up, but the ones in my yard are rather ordinary, to tell the truth, so I'm not going to share them.  Typical foundation plants, the majority of them are placed - literally - about 18" from the foundation and have, in the not too distant past, been pruned into ungraceful, flat-topped boxes.  I haven't decided what to do about them yet, but will probably begin by giving them a "rejuvenating prune" as soon as they're done blooming this spring.  The azaleas, that is.  I don't think camellias can be chopped back like that and survive.

We put in daffodils last fall;  the early ones bloomed nicely, but they're still at the individual bloom stage, so I think I'll pass on sharing those as well.

There is a blue-eyed grass that has been springing up unbidden in the lawn area and I've been leaving the individual clumps to see what they look like.  They've suddenly spread out and started to bloom, allowing me to identify them as annual blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium rosulatum), a distinctly not-blue flower. 

Although the dainty little blooms are rather attractive, the plants have started developing yellowing, spotted leaves, so I've decided to root them all up and just dispose of them.  This is not a native species, so it's only causing me a little bit of angst to be so ruthless.

Many gardeners get upset about wildflowers springing up in their lawns, but I'm not one of them.  I actually enjoy seeing what gifts nature provides.  For example, I've been enjoying this little pink blooming oxalis that appeared, as if by magic, under the magnolia in the back yard. 

I'm not sure whether this is the native violet woodsorrel (Oxalis violacea) or the non-native pink woodsorrel (Oxalis debilis);  I haven't figured out how to tell the difference between the two yet - but I'd always prefer to have the native, of course.

With perennials, it's always nice to have some great foliage for visual interest so that you don't have to rely on just blooms throughout the year.  While I was initially attracted to the light blue flower spikes that lyreleaf sage (Salvia lyrata) has, now that I've grown this plant in my yard, it's the red-veined, hairy leaves with their purplish undersides that I'm finding appeal to me most. 

I'm beginning to think of this plant as a hosta replacement, with the twist that it's native and it grows well down here.  In my mind, the occasional seedlings that spring up in the grass are a perk as they transplant readily and allow me to establish new plants elsewhere in the garden beds, giving some cohesion to my newly evolving plantings.  If I ever get tired of them, they uproot easily and will be no problem to simply weed out.

For now I'll leave you with some blueberry blooms (Vaccinium sp.).

I love the rotund, lacy, little pearls that are blueberry blossoms.  Although it doesn't seem like I have very many on my 7 blueberry bushes, I am seeing a pleasing number of blueberries beginning to swell, so I must have more blooms than I realize.  The blueberry bees are keeping busy, for sure!