Pollinator art

November 12, 2021 8:20 AM

If pollinators designed gardens, what would humans see? "Pollinators see colours differently from us, forage in different ways, and emerge in different seasons to each other. As a result, a garden designed for them may look quite different from a garden designed for us."
posted by dhruva (15 comments total)

Arrrgh. This is exactly the kind of tool I need as I plan out my pollinator garden, but it doesn't cover North American plants.

Still, really cool!
posted by Zargon X at 10:34 AM on November 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

Oooh, my partner would love a version that covers native NA plants as well, anyone have any suggestions?
posted by Kelrichen at 10:37 AM on November 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thank you for this catnip! Her designs look very much like the California native meadows I have sown around my house.

For California-specific resources, my go-to is always the amazing Las Pilitas Nursery site. The life's work of the late master gardener Bert Wilson, it's a graduate degree in ecosystem restoration in the voice and form of an old-school Web honeypot. Start here with his recommendations for encouraging wildlife.

Less exquisitely charming but also essential references for my biome are the California Native Plant Society and its database Calscape. The speaker series from the Yerba Buena chapter of CNPS has been a pandemic inspiration, and I am hopeful that the East Bay's excellent Bringing Back the Natives garden tour will resume in 2022.

I've sourced most of my beloved oak meadow plants from my extraordinary local nurseries, Bay Natives, Mission Blue and Yerba Buena nursery. Larner Seeds' Hills of California mix is a superbloom in a paper bag. I still have to make it out to East Bay Wilds and Watershed Nursery, but I hear great things.

My garden is still a baby but it has its moments.
posted by rdc at 11:02 AM on November 12, 2021 [17 favorites]

rdc, that is a fantastic comment and FPP material itself.
posted by ZaphodB at 11:40 AM on November 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

National Wildlife Federation has a good tool for choosing U.S. plants but it's nothing like coolness of the original post
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 11:46 AM on November 12, 2021

For Rocky Mountain desert areas (Utah and similar zones), there are some great plant databases at the Conservancy Garden and Localscapes.
posted by msbutah at 11:55 AM on November 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is lovely!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:07 PM on November 12, 2021

Holy crap, yeah, we need simple, straightforward tools like this for all of North America. I'm relatively new to gardening and got into it because of the pandemic. 1/3rd of my backyard is now a seeded native garden (2nd year in this photo; the short lived rudbeckia hirta dominate year 2 before the longer lived perennials start to dominate in year 3) and I'm in the middle of converting my front yard to a full native garden. Trying to thread the needle with respect to a fully filled in midwest prairie garden but having it still look "cared for" (despite how much social class, command of labor, and ugly history are involved with what we find aesthetically pleasing in that respect).

Anyway to share my front lawn garden plans -

image of the schematic design

image of the front yard covered in lawn/weed suppression mats (holes are cut into the mat to plant through; the mat is supposed to last 3 seasons before biodegrading but I will probably remove it late in year 2. The mats are made out of wood pulp and are about 1/4" thick).

Google doc with plant list

I'm probably 100 hours into studying to do this over the past few years - weirdly none of the books I've read are specifically about native midwest plantings as I've never really found one, and they all feature large commercial installations or big rich-people-yard installations, because that is who can hire the pros who go on to write said books. I had a lot of help from the people over at r/nativeplantgardening, actually. But as such a lot of this project is self-designed, there is not much to cookie-cut from out there, which would be nice if it were possible to find!
posted by MillMan at 1:26 PM on November 12, 2021 [6 favorites]

Oh, it's up! I interviewed Daisy last year about a different project, and she mentioned the pollininator art project at the time. I'd been looking for it earlier in the year and then forgot about it. Now to figure out my own garden :)
posted by easternblot at 3:50 PM on November 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

So many people in the USA freak out about the plight of the honeybees here. But honeybees are not even native to the Americas. A huge amount of bees are indeed native to the States, but not honeybees.
posted by SoberHighland at 3:59 PM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I LOVE NATIVE BUGS!! Green bee drones sleep inside flowers. Flies that look like wasps. Bees that make little cotton balls. Wasps that look like Superheros. Green bees are the best, and I'm thinking of getting a tattoo of green bees, if I can figure out how to make it look good.

@ MillMan - did you use an app to make that design?

Regarding the FPP, the app is fantastic. I'm also interested in how the PDF of planting instructions makes it very clear that the document is an original work of the artist, and the garden render is a "digital painting." Kind of a derail, but an interesting case study.
posted by rebent at 6:05 PM on November 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

The Xerces Society has region-specific plant lists and advice for pollinators across the US. Not *all* the regions yet, but it's someplace to start.
posted by clew at 7:23 PM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thanks for that link, rebent.

An all metallic green bee in a rhododendron flower in my front yard was one of the two most beautiful insects I’ve ever seen (the other was a golden beetle on a morning glory leaf in the side yard near sunset — which went a long way toward reconciling me to the enduring presence of that extremely stubborn and resilient weed when I found out that the beetle eats it).
posted by jamjam at 8:41 PM on November 12, 2021

Rebent, software is from punchsoftware.com. Decent although not great, in my opinion. In theory I could have also turned the plan into a 3d image, but they don't have models of many native plants.
posted by MillMan at 10:38 PM on November 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

That is a lovely project, and a timely FPP. It's Wild Pollinator Count week in Australia. The spring 2021 count runs from the 14th to the 21st of November. "Take 10 minutes to watch flowers in your garden or local park and take note of what you see! Then enter what you’ve seen into our database."

Lately I've been looking at what plants on my block support native pollinators, and what plants local to the region I could add. There are some fine trees here already, but there are vacancies in the shrub and groundcover departments.

A coupla bee links:
Aussie Bee has loads of info.
Bee Friendly Guide (PDF) from the federal government Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation includes a selection of species for planting urban open sites, streetscapes, domestic gardens and farms in various climate zones.
posted by valetta at 3:54 AM on November 15, 2021